Cotton-polyester pillowcase, baby hair, birch bark, silk scraps, linen scraps, wool, construction paper, 2024.
I often tell the birthers/ parents I sit with after their babies are born, or many years later, that birth stories are organic things- they are shapeshifters, and teachers. Sometimes they are an albatross, or a safety talisman, an archetype, or a tender green thing that needs tending and shelter.
My own birth stories, all three, live woven into the fabric of me, along with the hundreds of other people’s births I have been present at.
This birth braid was a rare opportunity to make a bit of this physical for me. It’s been almost 21, 16, and 13 respectively years since these births and each child’s birth story has grown and transformed as they have become so utterly more “them.”
The first fabric is a cotton polyester pillowcase that I took from my childhood home and to college and my first apartments and finally became the pillowcase on the pillow I brought to the hospital with me when I gave birth to my first child. I recall, in the ER being admitted in labor, being chastised by the medical assistant for putting the pillow on the floor at my feet. That pillow case is in photographs of me and my new baby at home and on the beds and couches where that baby and I slept during periods of houselessness during the first six months of motherhood. That baby was my home.
The second section of the braid is a tangle of materials from the early lives of my second and third children, born (literally at home)into the chaos of an artist mom’s studio/ house. Birch bark gathered on a daily walk with my children, a bit of silk from a textile project done on stolen time, construction paper from a child’s art piece, baby hair, some linen from sewing from before and after they were born, wool from a sweater- this part of my birth braid is more about the amalgam of birthing/nurturing and mothering - the fallow and rebirth of self that happened in those years of alchemy of the mother self, with a tangle of complex gorgeous neurodivergent children. Years later I see us clearly, shaped by loss, grief, creativity and joy.