HERE I COME, READY OR NOT

”There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good she was very, very good,
And when she was bad, she was horrid…”

The first time I heard this nursery rhyme I knew it was about my Mother…
My mommy was a good mommy, who without warning could become a bad mommy…

The first time I was rebirthed I was in the bath tub in my home in Connecticut. My mother was in a coma which she had been in for many weeks in a hospital in Miami, Florida. My father had given my sister and me clear orders not to come to Florida to be there. He wanted to save us from the pain of seeing our mother, unconscious, and curling up every day more, and more, becoming like a maturing infant who was growing into a fatal fetal position.

Why my mother was in a coma was not clear to anyone but me. I knew she was actually willing herself to die. The exact cause of her life threatening condition was not known to her physicians. She had originally gone into the Psychiatric wing of that same hospital two days after I had spent three days with her in Miami, four months before, just before Christmas, in 1975.

I had been summoned to Florida by my mother. She wanted me to be there and have a discussion with her about her life or her death. My mother wanted me to actively review with her whether to choose the long path of recovery from a life time of illness and insanity, or to make up her mind to die. At the end of our three days which we had spent in deep conversation together, she had made her own mind up. Because she felt that she had been a failure as a mother and a wife in this life time, she just wanted to give it up, and die to be able to return in order to do it better. She wouldn’t let anything that I had to say, make a difference once she had reached her decision. Our leave taking was very tender and conscious, and sweet; it felt like it was very complete for us both. She knew that I loved her, and I knew that she loved me, and my children, and my sister, and my sister’s husband and children. She told me that she no longer loved my father, and had never even liked my husband. I was in the midst of divorcing him at the time, and hearing this from her was a relief for me, because she had told me before that it would kill her if we were to divorce.

Two days after we parted she then went quite insane at home, and was committed by her psychiatrist. Once again she was enwombed in a ward for madness. Two days later she started running high fevers and then slipped into a coma. She was moved to the regular wing of the hospital. The actual cause of her fevers, was still unknown by her attending physicians. The metaphysical cause of fever according to Louise L. Hay, in her amazing little blue book is, “Anger. Burning up.” Coma is, “Fear. Escaping something or someone”.

Several years before this time, after my mother had suffered a small stroke, she then tried to overdose herself. This was her first unsuccessful suicide attempt. There would be several more. The result of the first attempt was she was diagnosed as being mentally ill with paranoid schizophrenia. My father had her committed to a private mental institution in Smithtown, N.Y. I would make the long drive once a week on Wednesdays when I had housekeeping help, from my home in Connecticut to New York to visit her, leaving my five young children to be cared for by my housekeeper.

My mother would remain mute, not even talking to her psychiatrist, from the time I left her to be locked away on Wednesday, until the following Wednesday when she would see my car drive up. According to her nurses, the first words they would hear from her from the time I would leave her on one Wednesday, to the next time she would see me arriving on the next Wednesday were, “My daughter’s here”, and emerge out of her catatonic state, and stand waiting at the door of the locked ward for me to come through that door. We would then embrace, and she and I would walk to the car and go out for lunch in the pretty little village of Smithtown in up state New York.

My Mother would then tell me what was on her mind. She told me also that her most fond desire was that I would one day write a book about her and me, and our family and our lives together, and that was why she was doing her life the way it was right now. She wanted that book to be able to help other people. She dearly wanted the world to know the truth about life as seen through the pages of my purported book, and I guess these posts are that book at last. It’s only taken me about thirty years or so to write these words. My mother had to be dead for many years before I could bring myself to do this work.

My friend Robert, and his friend Bea, were doing my rebirthing. I had never met Bea before. Robert and I were friends since we both did the est Training together in New York, on January 3, 1973, and we as strangers chose seats next to each other. We were doing this rebirthing as an exchange of services. Bea and Robert had arrived that day with her two difficult young sons. I was at the time an Instructor in the Special Education Department at Central Connecticut State College, and the Director of the Laboratory School there for Emotionally Disturbed Children. They were rebirthing me in exchange for me consulting Bea on the behaviors of her sons.

It was hard for me to settle into the tub. At first I couldn’t get the hang of breathing through the snorkel. Each time I would attempt to relax and just let the tube carry the air to my lungs, I would panic and gag. This was ludicrous for me at the time, I was an experienced and good swimmer, and I was fearful of drowning in my own bath tub…

Then suddenly, I found myself at peace with the process, and after I got used to the sound of my own breathing, I began to hear my mother’s voice inside my head, and found the essence of me, and the essence of her in a deep conversation. We were bargaining with each other. She was arguing with me to give up my determination to be born a boy child and to give in to her desire for me to be born as a girl. She pointed out to me how already when I attempted to arrive as a male, she had spontaneously aborted me two times. She, Cleopatra, was not going to take the risk that her child was going to be either Julius Caesar or Marc Anthony. I really was hearing this conversation inside my head as crazy as it may sound.

She argued that if I would do this one favor for her, she would promise me that she would be the best of all possible Mothers to me. She would take extraordinary care of me, and would always be there for me. As soon as I found myself making that agreement, suddenly it was as if I were on a giant slide, arching backwards easily, and with grace and great expanding feelings of having the answers for everything, for knowing the purpose and meaning and glory of life, feeling all knowing and all powerful, and from the bathtub now, as before from her womb, I was born!

I looked up from the warm tub and found myself gazing into the adoring eyes of this new woman, Bea. As we looked deeply into each others eyes I could hear my voice saying to her, “You have no right to look at me like that. You are not my real Mother!”…

The next thing I knew, I was being swaddled in big, dry towels. A comfortable nest of towels and blankets, and pillows had been prepared for me on the bathroom floor, and Bea and Robert were soothing and cuddling me, and welcoming me, with great joy, and palpable love and attention. While I was still in their arms, my oldest child BL, walked into the room, and just asked, “Will you do that for me, too?” While I watched, she got into the same tub I had recently been delivered from, and began her own process with the snorkel, lovingly attended by Robert and Bea.

The first doubting thoughts entered my mind as BL began her journey. I, being the cynical New Yorker I was then happy to have been for almost forty years of my life, watched and found myself judging what was unfolding in front of me. I was just deciding that it was all too hokey, when it happened. BL, my first born child whose entire real and actual delivery was etched in my memory, began her birth process exactly as my body and all its cells remembered those particular facts of her own beginnings, to be. She was truly reenacting her own unique birth process, right there in front of my doubting eyes. This was the child that had taken her time coming, and then at the moment of transition, began to move backwards as though to escape the birth canal.

BL had already been a long time in the tub when she suddenly started to backstroke as if to reenter the womb. I remember her actual birth when the labor room nurses began shouting to each other, and two of them began to push her progress back into the direction she was supposed to take. They even, in my clear yet glazed over memory, began to lean on the top of my stomach and try to mechanically push my reluctant baby forward, and down as she fought to go back up! I had never, ever told this story to her. It had remained for me as a weird, and-did-that-really-happen fragment of her delivery that sometimes I convinced myself had been a figment of my imagination. A hard, and freaky, war story, from the twilit sleep, of a laboring and anxious, neophyte mother to be.

Her father, my frightened husband, who had confessed to me during my pregnancy that he was afraid that I was going to die in childbirth, had after depositing me in the hospital, walked from our home (which was across the street from that very hospital) that was in Hackensack, New Jersey, all the way across the George Washington Bridge, into downtown New York City. From 3pm that day into the early morning hours of the next day, until just immediately before our daughter’s birth which was at 5:27 the next morning, he calmed himself by taking a long walk. All day long during my labor and until the next morning, the people at the hospital kept asking the bewildered and feeling abandoned me, where was my husband? They had tried to reach him by phone for hours with no success.

I watched in amazement as my first child’s rebirthing replayed the exact events that happened during her actual birth. I watched as the rebirthers made the decision to interrupt the process which already had gone a long time, and gently turned the struggling BL from her stomach, to her back, in the tub. When asked to describe what was happening for her, she said the reason it was taking so long, and the reason she was struggling to go backwards was because she was waiting for her father to be there…she wanted her father to be there when she was born, not just her mother. Right there on the spot I made the decision to become a rebirther myself!

Two weeks later, on April 14th, 1976 my mother died. My mother’s favorite holy day of the Jewish calendar, and the only days that she ever celebrated, were the days of Passover. She died that year on the first night of Passover, during the time of the first Seder. The Seders of Passover are the rituals which celebrate the deliverance of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. That was the night that my mother, Cleopatra, chose to pass away.

My daughter BL, who was named in the Jewish tradition for my well beloved grandmother, Goody, is now a married woman. She and her husband made the choice to have no children. My great grandmother, for whom I am named, died in childbirth, delivering my grandma Goody. The first time I ever consulted a psychic she told me that in every previous life time I had chosen to come in, Male then Female, and only in this life time had I chosen Female then Female…She thought it was because I cherished the sense of humor of females, I know that it was because whatever else, I was determined to be my mother’s daughter…