Matilda's life and death

The balance of life is in the ripe and ruin

We have just returned from two weeks on the road, a holiday that had been planned but not around the loss of our baby.

The daily ritual of washing my underwear, pouring my bloody red waters into the earth wherever we were staying for the night. Comforted by her presence, still, in my body.

Wherever we were, I left some of her behind.

Matilda, spirit child, star child, now of the earth.

It has been 16 days since we buried her and I am still bleeding.

Around this time I was expecting to announce my pregnancy with our third child / force but instead I am announcing her death.

From April through June of this year I carried new life in my body.

Our journey together began before I left for a life-changing trip to America. We traveled across continents during the most expansive season of my life; taking huge leaps of faith - personally and professionally.

Bradley and I had been discussing bringing another child into the family…a neutralizing 3rd force to our Aries army of revolutionaries. And despite some very real “obstacles”, we said YES to life with open arms and hearts and before we could even begin “trying”, she was here growing inside my body…

Professionally I was crossing a symbolic threshold where my fear of death would come face to face with the grace of God. Leaving my children for this once in a lifetime opportunity unearthed very old wounds and fears around not feeling safe in the unknown. I went anyway and reaped the rewards of leaning into fear and walking through the fire. As I always do. Her conception was a true alignment with this level of expansion.

On June 25th, Matilda Jean’s body left mine and on June 26th we returned her to the earth, our great mother, beneath a new Milkwood tree in our garden. The Milkwood is a protected species in South Africa and known in the isiXhosa tradition as a “tree of ancestors”.

Protection was Matilda’s ultimate purpose in how she catapulted me into the fire of karma where I would relentlessly burn ties with illusion and any distorted relationship in my life that was not in service to the truth and integrity of reciprocity.

You may have noticed a shift in my energy. Maybe not. But Matilda categorically changed my reality in a very literal way. Not only am I a new mother, I am in an entirely new timeline. Something that only the experience of being this intimate with life and death can do.

Her life was short but her impact was quantum.

From the moment I landed back in Cape town from the USA, I was under psychic attack - a literal magnet for unconscious projections. I don’t say that as a victim, I say that as someone who is deeply in tune with the unseen realms. This is my burden and blessing to carry.

People I thought I knew and trusted were exposed. This baby had no problem lifting the veil with all her might. She threw off the masks of the energetic vampires hiding behind me and my “goodness”.

She revealed every crevice of manipulation I wasn’t seeing. She showed me where I was tolerating the intolerable and who was extracting from me and my family.

The level of sight I gained during this pregnancy was alchemical. I could see every single thing hiding in the shadows and had zero tolerance for anything even remotely outside of authenticity and integrity. She was precise.

She knew my role as the energetic lead in my family was to SEE and boy did she clean my lenses. As terrifying as it was, armed with this new knowledge and the wisdom of raging hormones, I had the courage to be disliked, DISAPPOINT PEOPLE, be a villain, as long as it was in service to protecting myself and my family I had no fucks left to give.

By the grace of God, she took all my fucks.

As empowering as this warrior energy was, I felt under threat this entire pregnancy. Very few people and places felt safe. My faith was strong though - not in any particular outcome but in the inherent design of what was unfolding, but I had an instinct from the very beginning that this baby’s journey was volatile and mysterious. I kept thinking this was a trauma imprint from my previous losses but I’d had two children since then?! Why was this fear coming up so strong? Now in hindsight I see my intuition was rooted in the Truth of what was always to be, all along. And no amount of control and bargaining was going to stop fate. That being said, I carried on, dancing with her, wrestling with my own demons, letting more of my old self go. Any part of me that was here to please others, protect others feelings over the integrity of my life force and the dharma of my family system, had to go.

This is not my first rodeo with pregnancy loss either. Those of you who know me will know my entire path has been defined by my previous losses.

My delayed miscarriages between 2015 and 2017 were the greatest awakenings of my life - they shook my foundations and propelled me into a pilgrimage of soul where I would truly meet my body as a woman and begin to know God. More than any ayahuasca ceremony or yoga training ever could.

There is something particularly cruel about losing a baby in the unknown - where the body doesn’t register but rather holds on. And death is only discovered either through the innocence of a regular check-up or as direct a response to intuition.

The fact that my initiation into motherhood was shaped by grief is what makes me the mother I am today.

And even without the experience of loss; to be a mother is to walk hand in hand with grief for life. Because we face the reality of their mortality, every day. When we birth their life, we birth their death. Whether we are alive to be here for it or not. If we don’t surrender to that Truth, we are missing out on the true depths of love available to us through surrendering to grief.

To lose a child, unborn or not, is to live with death. To carry life and death is the closest we can ever come to (being) God.

It’s been a long time since I have shared in this way here but I choose to offer these words as a prayer to the women who need to find them.

Pregnancy loss is gut wrenchingly lonely and isolating. There is nothing more personal than a baby not surviving in your own body. To not take it personally, be victimised, is the ultimate test of faith. Here I am again, humbled by the great mystery. It is nothing short of devastating and holy.

Bradley and I’s love story is intrinsically intertwined with Alt J’s ‘An Awesome Wave’ album. The weekend before Matilda would leave her form, I had been in bed watching Tiny Desk concerts on YouTube, crying for hours being touched by the medicine of their music. Alt J is timeless artistry I can listen to over and over again. Never mind how deeply emotive it will always be because of my love for Bradley and the life we’ve created since years of tortured forbidden love finally culminating in us seeing them live in London in 2016.

When Matilda came on, I knew that was her name and we locked in. Just like we did on Franki and Benji’s names. Before we even got to know them in my womb, they were named.

Little did I know these words “My defeat sleeps top to toe with her success”, would define the accomplishment of her mission co-existing with my grief. They were always going to be side by side. Life and Death. Love and Grief.

Since her burial I have been enveloped in their music again being told cosmic stories of assurance that everything is as it should be.

That she is still the third force and that the life we said yes to, didn’t die with her.

She is one of the “three points where two lines meet”

“Like all good fruit, the balance of life is in the ripe and ruin”

I am not broken or victimized by this loss.

Sure I have met parts of myself riddled with shame and confusion and fear, but above all else I feel privileged to have been blessed by this baby’s obliterating light. To have been chosen by her to be broken open by this level of consciousness.

Please don’t pity me.

If my grief unlocks something in you that wants to be grieved through you, beautiful.

It is a portal after all.

But let it move you, not pity me.

If this pregnancy taught me one thing it is our limitation as humans to be able to hold someone else’s experience without either making it all about us / or use it as an opportunity emotionally masturbate our unconscious projections.

Instead of pitying me, celebrate life and appreciate the marvel that you are here. You made it. And if you have children, so did they.

What a fucking miracle.

And if you have children who didn’t make it, consider yourself lucky to have been chosen to carry life and death, regardless of how long you were touched by their light.

Grief becomes bitterness when it is not felt and used as the portal it is to pure unconditional love.

“Today I declare that this body, my body, and all bodies, the bodies of starlings and stars, were all created within the body of a mother and I declare that every body, my body, this body of this earth, the body of this cosmos, will return to the great dark womb of the dark matter around which we all turn again and again. All of the mothers—hatching, matching, catching, and dispatching—worlds upon worlds upon worlds”

- Perdita Finn

In love and grief,

Amy May