SKY EAGLE - the story of baby Isaac's journey into the world

Hey!

It's been quite an adventure over the last few months and to help me make sense of it all I've put my thoughts down on paper.

Below is my account of my son Issac's journey into this world. It's broken into three seperate chapters. So, put the kettle on, pull up a chair and have a read if you've got a few spare minutes.

DEATH AND LIFE IN ONE DAY

It’s early February and I’m not long turned 42 years of age. I’ve just shuffled into the chapel of rest with my Mother, Father and Aunt. I’m looking at the body of my Grandmother, the first dead person I have ever seen. She looks peaceful and there’s even a hint of a smile on her face. The formaldehyde and make-up has done its job.
We each lean over the coffin, one at a time and say a few words and our goodbyes, all of us shedding tears, mostly silently; open expression of emotion was never practised much in our family and if it ever was I, and maybe everyone else, feared that the tears would flow for eternity and we'd all have to run to safety, like the animals on Noah’s Ark to save from drowning. They never do, of course. The emotions subside, but the fear has always prevented the type of open wailing you see in other countries. What is it with us British? I was eight when Granddad died and there wasn’t much more than a snuffle when the news was broken to me at the dinner table. It’s been a long, drawn-out process in learning how to feel and express my emotions.

When we’d said what we wanted, or as much as our emotional conditioning allowed us to, someone pulled the veil back over her face and it was time to leave. Only memories and photographs will remind us of her face now. We’ll never get to see it again.

She’d been ill for a few weeks with chest problems and must have suspected that her life was nearing its end. Surely all of us, in our later years will wonder if we will wake up the next morning? Towards the very end my mother told me Nana had whispered, “I’ve got to say goodnight to you all”, to the family members who were there. She must have known she was dying.

The last time I saw her – a few weeks before her death – she was in good spirits and I showed her photos on my laptop. She was always amazed at modern technology, though most of her life she’d taken technophobia to the extreme by having been frightened of all electrical appliances and even plug sockets. Most of our conversations were about the ‘old times’ and she would tell me about the war and the jobs she’d done throughout her life. I always loved to hear her recount these tales and I suspect she loved telling them, over and over and over again! At 97, even though she was no longer able to walk, her mind was as sharp as ever, if only a little forgetful with names at times. She’d spent the second half of her life with just one arm, the right one amputated at the elbow in her early 50’s because of cancer. As a kid I never knew the reasons why she had a metal hook instead of a hand. On Sundays she’d replace this with a plastic hand and glove before she went to chapel. She spent the last 34 years of her life as a widow, always loyal to my Granddad with whom she was now reunited.

What had kept her going for so long, sitting there in that nursing home, spending most of her time alone? I wonder if she wanted to die? Do we all reach an age toward the end when our life’s work is done and we just can’t wait to die and escape the drudgery? Or are some of us lucky enough to live life to the full right up to the end? Do we wonder how it will happen? Do we think of suicide? This must be a time when you hand over complete trust to the will of God. Either you will wake up the next morning or you won’t.

Stepping outside into a light snow shower, as the long winter continued I felt utterly depressed. ‘Is this what it all comes down to then?’ I asked myself, ‘ending up in a wooden box? What’s the point to any of it? If we’re all going to die and end up in a hole in the ground or incinerated, why bother living at all? What’s the purpose to life? What’s the reason for me being alive?’

As I reached my car my phone rang; it was Keziah. She told me the midwife had just left and she’d heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time! And that was reason enough to be alive. This news managed to lift my gloom somewhat. Maybe there is a point to life after all? I pondered endings and beginnings, fantasized that somehow Nana’s spirit was in contact with the baby and that she knew about the first hearing of the heartbeat. Such thoughts gave me solace and helped me through the next few days and the funeral.

Nana knew before she died that I was to have a child. At 42 I never thought it would happen and didn’t really want it to; I was enjoying my care-free life. I’d been told by a doctor three years previously that I was highly unlikely to ever father a child. Me and my partner at the time had been trying on and off for about six months but nothing was happening. I sent a sperm sample off to hospital and the results came back as low...very low! I’d saved myself all week, wanting to give a good, manly, porno-star load only to find out later that this ‘saving myself’ could well have caused the low count. Apparently had I relieved myself the night before then again in the morning and used this second load as the sample, the sperm count would probably have been much higher because of the fresher batch of newly formed sperm. Anyway, a few months later we broke up and I started writing songs about love, loss and hope.

And so it was. I became a statistic; one of the 25% of men in their forties who can’t father a child. Some men, maybe most men, would have been extremely sad to hear this but I just shrugged my shoulders and got on with life. My life – forever free of any responsibilities such as kids, or so I thought.

When I met my next partner I believed I’d found the perfect relationship; she had two kids, a 13 year old boy and 10 year old girl and didn’t want any more. With me firing blanks there was no danger. I soon developed a close bond with her children and they made me the most touching ‘Like a Dad’ card on the only Father’s Day I had with them. They told me they now knew what it was like to have a ‘dad’ and I was getting an idea of what it was like to be a dad. I liked it. I treated them like my own and thought ‘this is it’ and was fully prepared to settle down. But after just seven months we broke up. My high expectations of this being ‘the one’ and it not going to plan devastated me. More songs were written to make sense of it all and help me through it. Then came internet dating sites.

It wasn’t more than a few weeks before I was making contact with new women but my ‘Plenty of Fish’ profile was littered with emotional scars and bitterness, bordering on misogyny. However, one such girl gave me a chance. We chatted on msn and she could see that my profile wasn’t a genuine reflection of myself. That person was Kez and we met for the first time on November 3rd 2008. She too was still in love with her ex. But despite this being a rebound for both of us we hit it off and I liked her 7 year old son and once more I’d stumbled across – or unconsciously created – the perfect scenario. Even though I wasn’t really looking for kids it had happened again. Let’s face it, most women out there in the age range that I was looking for would have kids or would want them in the future so I would have to get used to the fact. But it also seems that I was unconsciously driven to have a relationship that would involve children, if not my own then someone else’s. Maybe I did want kids, or at least be ‘like a dad’ to some child? The experience I’d had taught me that I could do this, that I could be a father-figure, that I had what it took.

However, the issue about kids was a real stumbling block for me and Kez. Apart from the fact that we were both still emotionally attached to our ex’s, she wanted another child at some point. I told her I couldn’t produce one and that I didn’t want one anyway. We nearly broke up a few times because of this rather huge clash of desires. But something kept us together. Maybe we didn’t want any more heartache? Maybe, because I’d built up a strong relationship with her son neither of us wanted to hurt him? He needed a male role model. All kids do, especially boys. I started to really grow into this ‘stepdad’ role. It wasn’t easy and it still has its challenges eighteen months later. I suppose it always will. So, the issue about another child was put aside until the next time. And there were a few more next times over the first year of our relationship.

SKY EAGLE IN THE MOUNTAINS

To celebrate the anniversary of our first date we decided to spend some time in Spain, visiting Kez’s mum in Lorca. Sensibly, we arranged a car-hire so we could escape if need be and do our own thing. We planned a five day drive across the Sierra Nevada and in particular the Alpujarras. We left her son with Kez’s mum and off we went up into the mountains.

In retrospect this was one of the happiest and most memorable times of my life. We visited the spectacular Alhambra Palace in Granada, loved shopping in the little mountain villages and went to a 5000 year-old burial site. But it was being in the mountains and appreciating the scenery that I will remember the most. We hired a cottage near Orgiva and spent our days journeying here and there, stopping to take photos. It took me a while to get used to driving a left-hand-drive car on the wrong side of the road, thousands of feet up, often with no barrier at the side to protect us. One false move and that’s it; you end up pulped in some dry river bed. On one particular drive Kez kept stuffing big Spanish olives in my mouth, the best I’ve ever tasted. Little did I know that olives supposedly make a man more potent. She knew what she was doing!

One day we discovered the whereabouts of a Buddhist monastery. We were directed up a mountain and the road got more and more narrow, snaking this way and that, eventually turning into a dirt track. Again, with there being nothing to stop us going over the edge, I drove with white knuckles around each bend, being grateful there was nothing coming in the opposite direction and wondering how much higher this road would take us as we were starting to get dizzy! We decided to park up and walk the rest of the way. And it was here we saw our first eagles, flying within yards of us. That’s how high up we were. After a twenty minute walk further up the mountainside we reached the monastery and meditated beside a Buddhist shrine and huge prayer wheel. Om Mani Padme Hum. Apart from a couple of others we were the only people up here.

The eagles put in another appearance the following day as we travelled up another mountain where, once again, the road became dirt and we walked the rest of the way. You really needed a 4x4 to drive up here and I didn’t have much faith in my hired Citroen. Nothing to do with it being French, I just didn’t like it. Only later did I learn that you could actually drive right over the mountain in summer. But with this being November I wasn’t going to chance it, despite there being a heat wave. So, we found a comfortable spot and meditated some more. When I had finished I turned around to look at Kez and saw an eagle flying just ten feet above her as she lay motionless on the grass! We later wondered if the eagle was eyeing her up as its next meal! It was a magical moment and Kez told me that as she lay there with closed eyes she felt the gentle movement of its wings as it flew above her. For sure, eagle spirit was with us. We carried the magic of the moment in our hearts as we made our way back down the mountainside.

It got me wondering. Do we ever really appreciate the moment as it happens or is it always in retrospect that the moment becomes more significant than it felt at the time? If we look back at photos with fondness, happiness and nostalgia and long for such moments again, does it mean we are less happy right now compared to back then? And if so, what can we do about it? Can we recapture the moment? Can we relive it and fully embrace the feelings that we feel now as we reflect nostalgically on a previous special moment? Of course, we can’t live our lives retrospectively. Perhaps that’s my Nana’s influence on me – looking back at the past, telling old stories about the supposed ‘good old days’.

The truth is that us human beings can’t exist solely in the present moment. We are a species who are directed ‘toward-the-future’. It is our goals, hopes, desires and projects that give us purpose and meaning. And all of these are future-based. Take them away and we have no meaning in our lives, no purpose. But even if we took our goals away and had no sense of purpose or meaning we still could not live in the moment. All that we see and do is influenced also by the past. Our previous experiences shape our perceptions, our thoughts, attitudes and feelings. What has gone before will influence how we respond to circumstances that are happening now. We have learning experiences that the brain remembers so that we don’t have to learn again every time we tie our shoe-laces or make a cup of tea. And the ‘big’ learning’s are definitely remembered to help us deal with perceived dangers now or in the future. But it is all based on what we learned in the past. Nothing is completely new. Yes, you might find yourself in new surroundings or in a novel situation but your brain is already looking for memories of previous similar circumstances to help ensure your survival should the need arise. The present moment is influenced by the past. Having a ‘beginner’s mind’, one of the fundamentals of Zen, is impossible to achieve and even more so to maintain.

But I think the essence of Zen – and maybe life itself - is in living each moment with the feeling that retrospection/nostalgia gives you but in fully appreciating the significance of each moment - as it actually happens. It’s about being able to fully appreciate the beauty of the moment as it occurs (from the big events to the small, from the joy to the sorrow) and fully appreciating life right now. If we can master this we won’t have to look back more fondly to the past or hope for a better future because we fully lived the moment as it happened. Maybe only then can we be in the moment and have that ‘beginner’s mind’?

KEZ’S PREGNANCY AND BIRTH EXPERIENCE

Come December and back in England, Kez was unusually late for her period. Shit! We waited and waited and finally decided on buying a pregnancy test...which proved positive!! The doctors were bloody well wrong; I could father a child! Eagle spirit had made it happen, for sure. We were both happy. And we pretty much knew the night of conception back in Spain a few weeks earlier.

My mum and dad were overjoyed when we told them. Like me, they never thought I’d have a kid; too free-spirited they suspected. Me and Kez soon decided on baby names; Isaac for a boy and Kadecea for a girl. We wouldn’t know the sex of the baby until birth, not wanting to spoil the biggest surprise of one’s life. I really can’t understand people who want to know what’s in their Christmas presents before they open them. The scans we had didn’t show much, other than what looked like an arm waving at us. Kez had no cravings or morning sickness, only tiredness which was mostly caused by iron deficiency. I busied myself in getting the complete house redecorated and together we bought baby stuff, which seemed totally alien to me. Gav in Mothercare? Surely some mistake there?

For months though, I was flatlining. I just couldn’t get excited about it. When people asked me I just told them I wasn’t really feeling anything. Maybe I’d turned off all my emotions to deal with my fears of loss of freedom? I had no fears of the actual birthing process and trusted completely in natural birthing. Hell, I even teach women hypno-birthing techniques. Women’s bodies have been doing it for millennia. And we had eagle-spirit with us, anyway. But with my life going pretty well I guess I was concerned about the impact of a baby and the added responsibilities of parenthood.

The Lullabys tour helped me escape into music for a while but even this was interrupted when I developed tendonitis in my right elbow and had to rest for a few weeks. This was my Nana’s doing, I’m sure. Remember, her right arm was amputated at the elbow. Some kind of psychic message from her? My way of holding onto her memory? A message to let go of the past, to release my grip and the tension in my body and numbness in my heart? Surely I was supposed to be ecstatic about this? This is what you do when you grow up, isn’t it? You get married, get a huge loan from the bank to buy a house and have kids. Having failed with the first two – or succeeded in avoiding them – I’d had no ‘rite of passage’ into adulthood. I was still a boy inside. I hadn’t grown up. I hadn’t done the marriage thing or the house, and kids?! You’re joking. Nothing had prepared me for this.

We knew immediately that we wanted a natural home birth and eventually got all the parts for a tipi. (It took forever to source the poles, searching the internet, but we eventually found some locally from an acquaintance of Kez’s). It was great fun learning how to erect the tipi and it has inspired me to seek out other alternative ways of living. I want to escape this consumerist society that many of us feel trapped in and live in a field somewhere in a tipi, yurt or log cabin. I want to get ‘off the grid’ and live as naturally as possible, free of all the stresses of modern life. As long as I have my friends, family and my guitar, I’ll be fine. Oh, and maybe my laptop with an internet connection!

The nine months passed by in the blink of an eye. I’m sure that’s an age thing, time speeding up. But the last few days of Kez’s pregnancy seemed to drag. Isn’t it extraordinary how time distorts depending on how we feel and what’s going on? The due date came and went.
I was playing a gig when I got the call that her waters had broken. I was home within the hour to see Kez experiencing her first contractions, known as surges in the world of hypno-birthing. I fully expected that tonight would be the night. I made final preps for the garden and tipi and contemplated my final few hours as a ‘free man’. But it was here that my excitement started to build. Suddenly it all started to feel real. I was about to become a daddy!

But nothing happened that Sunday night. Kez’s cervix wasn’t dilating and the surges remained mild enough for her to sleep. Come the morning we endeavoured to get the dilation going, so we walked around the village, did various other things, all in an attempt to ensure the natural home birth that we both wanted. But by 4 PM, some 26 hours after her waters had broken, and with the threat of infection – and because she still wasn’t dilating – the midwife advised us to go to the hospital. Kez would need oxytocin on a drip to get her to dilate. Our natural home birth wasn’t to be and we were both extremely disappointed. We reluctantly packed some things, including all we would need for the baby and set off for Colchester General.

There followed the longest night of my life. Choosing at this point not yet to have the drip, wanting this birth to be as drug-free as possible, Kez’s surges continued all through the night, growing in intensity. She breathed herself through them but I felt utterly helpless. Apart from providing her with food, water and reassurance there was little else I could do. The worse thing was that she still wasn’t opening up. It would seem that, no matter what we did, Kez wasn’t producing her own oxytocin to help her dilate.

The hours dragged on and I got half an hour of broken sleep on the hard hospital floor at about 4 in the morning. Thankfully, come 9 AM, Kez’s friend, Natasha arrived with her homeopathic remedies and her support. I took a break and wandered down to the main hospital where I found a charity book stall selling books at 25p. There must be something here worth reading, I thought, as I searched through the usual trite romance novels. I found a book called ‘Driving Over Lemons’ and what would appear to be just another book took on synchronistic proportions when I read the back cover; it was about a couple’s experiences in Spain...in the Sierra Nevada...in the Alpujarras!!! The very place this whole baby thing had started and where the baby was conceived! In the book, the couple actually buy a house near Orgiva – the town close to where we rented a cottage for three nights. I took the book back to Kez’s hospital room, along with a copy of The Sun and started reading right away whilst Kez’s surges continued.

By 1.30 PM and still no sign of dilation – stuck at 1.5 cm – we decided on the oxytocin drip. Within half hour her real labour began. We were now at 48 hours since her waters had broken. Fearing the baby getting infected we knew things had to start moving soon, and they did. With Kez’s birth music continuing in the background, me and Natasha weaved our magic (or was it the oxytocin?), giving Kez reiki healing, overtone singing and using Tibetan Bowls as Kez rocked back and forth in a rocking chair, using the deep breathing techniques she had learned as the surges intensified yet further.

At about 4 PM Kez’s cervix had opened to 4 cm. Yes! We were all joyous at this and it spurred us on to continue. Kez went deeper and deeper into her experience and she handed me the ‘tens’ machine she had been using to control the discomfort of her surges. Now I had the responsibility to control it and watch her closely each time she had a surge, at which point I would press a button on the machine to help her ease through it. With Natasha giving remedies (to the both of us!) and with the midwives doing their bit every time they came in, it felt like a real team-effort taking place as we marched onwards toward the goal.

8 PM – 7 cm!!! Time for a breather. I went outside, knowing that the moment was approaching; I was soon to become a dad. By this time I was fully on autopilot. Having had just those 30 minutes of sleep the night before, it was the adrenaline keeping me going now. My legs didn’t feel like my own.
Before I went back into the room I asked a midwife how much longer this was likely to go on for. She predicted that the baby would arrive ‘in the early hours’! No way! That’s far too long, I thought. I went back in to find Kez now standing up, swaying her hips in a circular motion, doing some kind of birth dance. She was deeply hypnotised by now, right in the experience, like some kind of Shamanic initiation ceremony. A rite of passage, indeed.

She looked at me and pulled me to her and we stood there together, swaying gently as her surges intensified even more. It was like the final push to the summit. I encouraged her to ‘keep breathing’ and I breathed with her, our faces touching and lips kissing. The midwives told us the baby’s head was out! A few more breaths and Isaac was born at 9.46 PM, only an hour after I returned to the room. Kez was encouraged to squat down and saw that we had a little boy. Everything became even more surreal and in a dream I cut the umbilical cord before stripping off to my underpants, having been told that babies need skin-to-skin contact. So there we were, me, Kez and baby Isaac, all in bed together, blood and stuff and tears everywhere but I didn’t care. We had done it! I was a daddy! And I was so proud of Kez. Despite us not having the home-birth we both wanted, the birth itself had been as natural as possible. Aside from the oxytocin drip, Kez never needed any pain relief, using her deep breathing to flow with the surges.

After getting cleaned up and weighed (a surprisingly large 9lb 7 oz), Isaac spent the first night in the Special Care Baby Unit as he was a bit croaky, sounding like a little baby eagle. Well, he would, wouldn’t he. Within a couple of days he was up in the ward with mummy, breathing normally and within a week was brought home. The irony is that, although the tipi was bought for the birth, I am the one now using it! Baby Isaac, like all babies cries a lot, especially at night. So, come 10 o’clock I traipse down the garden and settle down to another night out in nature, underneath the stars, with sky eagles watching over me from some faraway mountain.