Womb Wellbeing i.

Initiation by Water.

I was born in the rainy season on the Island of Jamaica. My mother delivered me naturally in a private hospital. I’m told it was an hours -long process, and I was a very small infant. Though I wasn’t premature, I was only four pounds, came out with the cord wrapped around my neck, and had to be incubated for some days before I went home with my parents. This must have been when I started sucking my two fingers, index and middle, for self-soothing. I kept this practice up until I was well into my pre-teens and fell back into it for a few years in my teenage years.

When I was nine, we flew across the ocean to New York City. What was to be a vacation turned into a migration. My parents told us at the end of our trip that we weren’t going back home but would instead be moving to the United States for good. My mom, sister, and I took a Greyhound bus to South Florida. We would be starting our new lives there, while my father would return to Jamaica to his career as a chemical engineer, enabling him to support us financially from afar.

It wasn’t too much of a culture shock at first. If you know anything about South Florida, then you know it is a vibrant place for Islanders from all over the Caribbean. We were able to get all of our familiar foods, there were lots of people who spoke our dialect, and the American kids in our school all knew where Jamaica was. Jamaican patties were regularly on our school lunch menu.

With all this going for us, it was to be a rather painless transition. But as life would have it, there are always hiccups. My sister and I grew up rather privileged in Jamaica, and this transition put us in a very unfamiliar lifestyle. We lived in a single room with our mother and took the city bus to get around. Though it was different, I found it all very exciting. Afterall we were in America! We grew up watching American television at home and were very excited to see all the things we had only ever experienced on T.V. in real life.

I was particularly excited to try strawberries. When my auntie would come back home from living in the Cayman Islands, she would bring us American snacks and cereals. I really liked cornflakes, but was always heartbroken when I cracked open the box and didn’t see the beautiful red strawberries that glistened on the front cover, nestled in a delectable-looking bowl of cereal. When we first went shopping in the grocery store, I was bursting with anticipation to try this long-coveted fruit for myself. Back then, we didn’t import strawberries in Jamaica, so this was a long-awaited moment.

They were delicious. I was going to love America.

We did many of the same things we did in our home country in this new land. We went to school, watched our shows when we got home, and played games in the house after finishing our homework.

My mother was very nervous about letting us play outside as long as I can remember.

Our greatest interactions with nature came in the summers, when we would visit our great-aunt in the Jamaican countryside. Surrounded by the lush trees, bushes, and red dirt of our ancestral lands, I always felt a great peace permeating my being whenever we were there. I have a very strong memory of one summer when we packed a lunch and hiked up a mountain, where we met a beautiful lake and ate our meals in silence before the still, majestic water.

This feeling was contrasted to our beach visits, which always brought pangs to my tummy as soon as I smelt the salty Ocean air. I think the vastness of the Ocean struck fear into my solar plexus because of its sheer enormity. I always enjoyed my time at the beach, but that didn’t override the feeling that washed over me every time we visited. The feeling went away sometime in my teenage years, but I remember it viscerally today.

I learned to swim as an adult, but to this day, I would say I’m a beginner at the skill.

Navigating the water requires trust and surrender.

When I was about ten years old, I experienced my first menstrual cycle. I was very excited. My mother had preppd me long before so I knew what to expect and how to handle it…well sort of. My first period was very straightforward. The second one is when the drama began. I felt the pangs of pain my little mind could not comprehend. By this time, we had moved into a house in a lovely neighborhood, my mother had gotten her driver's license and a car, and we were quite familiar with our town and all its amenities. I was in middle school at the time. I remember dragging myself from my bedroom upstairs and crawling down to my mother. I could barely find the strength to knock on her door and tell her what was happening to me. She gave me some Tylenol, comforted me, and told me that she also experienced severe menstrual cramps like this whenever her cycle came until she gave birth to me and was liberated from the torture.

It was solidified in my beliefs that I would suffer like this until I, too, had my first baby.

During my high school career, I moved to three different states (Louisiana, New York, and finally California) and another country (Australia). Everywhere I went, I would routinely be picked up from school on the first day of my cycle because the pain made it impossible for me to focus on anything else.

I remember a particularly gruesome time when I was living in New York. My older cousin came to pick me up from school, and I had to take two trains and walk back home with her, going in and out of consciousness and making a dreaded stop in the subway bathroom along the way.

I didn’t know much about my body beyond what I was taught in health class, and given my mother and grandmother's history with these excruciating cramps, I figured it was normal. It would take decades for me to hear what my womb was trying to tell me, the only way she knew how.