She was on all fours delivering her fourth child. Things were not going smoothly. She quieted her mind and focused on the child inside her. “You can do it baby girl. We can do it baby girl.” Then she felt her mother next to her saying the same thing in her ear, “you can do this baby girl. You can do this.” And suddenly the whole room seemed to be full. Her grandma, on the other side of the veil, whispering to her mom the same thing “we got this baby girl.” And her great grandma behind her. And all the women before her, holding each other and whispering, saying, screaming, or sobbing “we got this baby girl.” All the way back to the great mother, as big as the night sky, holding the whole earth and whispering down, “we got this baby girl.”

Gerda Lerner, one of the worlds most honorable women, says that because women have always been kept from our own history we have to keep learning the same thing over and over and over.

Until now. We are all learning it, we are sharing it, we are waking up to it.

The serpent has long been a symbol of women’s healing, spiritual wisdom and fertility. It has been changed to symbolize temptation, or some sort of evil. Let me bring it back for you:

A snake has no legs or arms or ears, but it senses the world around it through vibrations. These vibrations are an inner knowing. A snake sheds its skin when it is sick or needs to grow, it essentially rebirths itself. A snake doesn’t blink, as if to say, “I’m not going back to sleep. I’m not missing a moment.”

Let the women before you be that inner vibration to follow the truth you seek. Let your body and the bodies of all the birthers since the beginning of time remind you to shed the skin that doesn’t fit you anymore. Let the injustice women have seen since the beginning of time peel your eyes open so you see a future more beautiful than before.

Hear the women in you saying, “you got this baby girl.”

Hear the God in you. She is saying, “we can do this, baby girl.”

birthing story: Demi Frandsen