Mija, Our birth was a mountain

We climbed halfway in this world

And finished in another

I never imagined that my birth story would encompass some of my worst nightmares – an unexpected visit to the hospital, someone shoving a tool into my vagina to break my daughters water sack, being tied to a hospital bed and told I couldn't move while I was experiencing contractions, a doctor I’d never met before who whispered into my ear: your hips are not large enough to birth your child, a cold white room, surrounded by cold white uniforms who treated me like a science experiment, much like they treated my mother, my grandmother and all the ancestors before me who were doing a great job at birthing before someone came from the sky to tell them they actually didn’t know what they were doing. Maybe that memory was still in my body. That fear. That tiny whisper of a foreign voice saying, you can’t do this. You can not birth.

Before my birth, my friend recounted a story told to her by her daughter about how birth is an ancient pilgrimage of a mother going to retrieve her child from the other world to bring them into this one. This was the experience I was prepared for. Instead, on the way to get my baby, a large latex hand disrupted this primordial quest and handed me the greatest gift of my life.

I was overjoyed to meet my daughter.

Heartbroken and defeated by how the story played out. Cut open.

This film is a documented ritual I created with Riley to allow my mind and spirit and therefore my body and my child's body to experience an uninterrupted birth. All the sounds in this piece were recorded from within my womb during visits with my midwife. We filmed this on June 12, 2024, two weeks after my hospital birth, on the land we call Peace Mountain where we had imagined the birth would happen.

It has taken time, but I do not regret the way this story unfolded. The experience molded me into the mother I have become and shifted my focus on how I can help rebuild this broken world. If you are a parent who feels they were robbed of their birth please take the time to create a ritual for yourself to retrieve your child. And trust your birth regardless of how it went. It will take time, maybe even generations, to reclaim birth as it is meant to be; in the hands of the mother.

Created and conceived by Mortal Self

Sound recorded mixed and mastered by Natalita

Filmed and edited by Riley Teahan

Color correction by Seth Mathews

Grass spiral mowed by Jules Washington