Moon Drunk

“when you are here. everything is wild.”

— moon, nayyirah waheed

No client has ever asked what the birth felt like for me.

But less than twenty-four hours after becoming parents, this couple did.
It wasn't a question anchored in fact or a play-by-play.
It was an opening—an invitation—to share what it meant to stand beside them in sacred space.

☾

The truth is, I wanted to answer in moon.
To slur celestial musings.
To let words steep the way the Sturgeon Moon had steeped into me that morning,
when the cry of katydids and crickets woke me,
while I was still tangled in that same euphoria hours later, after watching her ride each tide until she pulled her leg up, curled around her moon womb, and brought her son into the evening light of late summer.

☾

I wanted to describe how when his head emerged, his eyes and lips murmured ancient knowings.
How the room poured through me like crystal water stained with blood.
How since that moment I was being caressed not only by Earth but by other worlds.

And in this magical state, I was exactly where I needed to be.

☾

Instead, I chose words they could understand:
Every birth changes me.
Every birth has a way of reshaping my heart and leaving its lesson in love—and this one carved its truth especially deep.
Birth is transformative — sometimes painful, sometimes healing, often both.

That holding many truths at once is its own holy water and I hope she could integrate her truths while bonding with her son.

That a birth outcome is something you live with, breathe with, because it represents a journey, a becoming.

☾

The new mother's words were few, as they often were, but her eyes, oh those eyes, spoke without translation. She held her son to breast, his small weight pressing oxytocin into her, preparing them for the days ahead when her milk and wisdom will ripen — and with a soft, sleepy gaze, she looked into my eyes and said she was glad the birth had done that for me.

And still, I was intoxicated by moonlight.
My breath faltering toward composure,
my words a pearl lodged in my chest.

☾

On the ride home, singing loudly, freely, it felt as if the moon herself was spinning lunar funk through the bass of my bones, a bounce carrying me through the shimmering light and sweet ache of this work.

And as the moon pulls away from full,
I'll let yet another birth settle into my bones.

I'll rest.
I'll sober up.
I'll never be the same.