Spider babies

You have a snippet from a scene of a memory that sticks with you - you imagine it and the feelings all return;

the touch of the wind a little salty, the soft leaves and dirt under toes... the thought "I will have many children in my life"

I was pregnant with my first in Japan. Midway into the pregnancy and still coming to terms with what it meant to become a mother. I would need to enter the human world a little more..

Before finding out I was pregnant, I was more comfortable with fermentations and compost worms, slime molds and mushrooms and bugs than people. I'd walk down the street with all focus on the trees lining it and dandelions pushing through concrete, little flowers here and there, mugwort growing majestically even in the middle of Fukuoka city. 

Wild berry vinegars- I spent much of my time creating fermented elixirs

And I know that may sound romantic, and I have a tendency to spin things that way because I'm an optimist, but in other words, I was at that time riddled with social anxiety. I didn't believe I could manage my own human relationships so I looked to other less demanding life forms for company. 

I preferred mossy mushroom world to a human world

Becoming unexpectedly pregnant was a shame for me at first... I almost did not keep it. I scheduled an abortion, and the soonest day available for the clinic happened to be my birthday. Which was darkly comical to me, the notion that I would take away my own child’s life on the day my mother brought me forth…

I did not show up for the appointment. I was nauseas and dizzy and I chose to surrender to this proposal for change- to become a mother and learn a lot. There was so much to learn. I knew my evasion of humankind couldn't continue on the way it had. But I hoped my daughter would be a fairy so we could deeply understand each other.

Anyways I'd gone for a walk this particular day in a patch of forest off the road in the seaside town I was living. The ground was soft because the leaves there had fallen off the trees and laid a long time to decompose completely undisturbed. Such a lovely softness.

The seaside forest in Japan

As I walked on the path a ray of light caught a spectacle. There strung on a small bush was a freshly hatched spider's nest. 

A hundred miniscule spider bodies gleamed in the light as they all moved from their source, the nest, outwards on dainty strands. Some were further from the nest than others, already catching the wind and blowing onwards.

What chance to have come across this scene of birth on my walk! I knew that the spiders would be gone in a matter of 30 minutes or so.

I thought of the new life forming inside me. And the pain and anxiety of my current state of being seemed a small blip in time. One day my child too would be whisked away by the wind and jump on a journey of her own. This moment to share as one body with my daughter, so short so sweet. 

Newly pregnant Nicola- 21 years old, nauseas, confused and IN IT.

As a matter of fact, she would begin her own journey the moment she was born... I couldn't hold onto her, but I was grateful for the time we'd had together already and what was to come. And something spoke inside of me that said, "you will have many children" and it shocked me because I had been thinking of this pregnancy as a one-time accident...

But I flipped that belief then and there. My first pregnancy was a perfect happening, and it wasn't a shameful thing to bring children into the world.

(This is a song I made before I became pregnant, but I think it represents this story)