my birth.

We come spinning out of nothingness,scattering stars like dust.Rumi

when did i first get born?

was it in the instance when finite matter became an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense singularity which in turn inflated, self imploded into the universe we now know?

or when rda molecules bloomed into dna, starting a chain of ancestors who all came together when my parents eyes first met?

or did i get born when i gave birth to you my lovely daughter? when under the knife of the surgeon my heart opened and i loved you from a place where i always before felt alone? the place which previously made me long to return to a place and time before my birth?

and will i now infinitely get born and reborn through your eyes meeting that of another?

for as long as i had memory there was a myth surrounding my birth. my father had to fetch the obstetrician from a new year's party. meanwhile, back at the hospital my mother's screams cut through the bullshit of medical bureaucracy. after being bullied, for a month, by a new doctor, his carefully impenetrable birth calculations, and his faithful nurse to shut up, hold back labor and wait until they said the time is now, she had enough. not another minute would she wait. her birth time was now.

so my father dramatically entered the phalaborwa new years ball, crying out that his wife was in labor and in need of her doctor. in my child's imagination, women in bright silk dresses and men in formal black tuxedos parted, allowing the doctor, holding a martini glass and a thin brown cigar, to step through. then, with my father leading the way, thoroughly embarrassed by the laughter and his simple safari suit, the two men stepped into the very first, very early morning of 1972.

As with most myths, a curtain remained drawn across the more intimate physical and emotional processes of the actual birth, the logistics of who took care of the other children and the political turmoil splitting open the country of birth.