Remembering the birth of my son

I was trolling through some old emails tonight and I discovered a note I had written to the OSLIST on the birth of my son five and a half years ago. I thought I’d share it here:

It’s funny thing. The smallest spaces need the most attention.
Sometimes, the smallest are the largest.

On Tuesday (and for all of Monday and most of Sunday) I was opening
space for my second child, a boy named Finn Sinclair Corrigan-Frost, who
entered the world singing before he was fully born — the Elders call it
“bringing greetings from the spirt world” — on Novemer 7.

He was born at home in the company of two midwives, a doula, my
partner’s mother and our 3 year old daughter, Aine, who cut the cord and
officially brought him into our world.

It was a good birth and a long, but good labour. He is healthy and my
partner Caitlin is doing really well. As we were walking around down by
the ocean on Monday, with Caitlin in labour and a long day and night
ahead of us, she turned to me and said “it’s a funny thing being in
labour. The old world has passed away and the new one has yet to
begin. I feel like a spirit, invisible to everyone, dwelling in the
boundary between the two worlds, holding space for what is about to
come.”

Those words have had a profound impact on me, and I recently wrote a song in which I used Caitlin’s line without remembering it at all.

And the boy? Just a beautiful young man, with whom I am currently enjoying hours and hours of playing Pokemon and Dungeons and Dragons.