I was asked to write about heartbreak and where I might be storing it in my body. Immediately I knew it was in the ‘catch’ of my breath as it was leaving the lungs. A place where breath stops so I can keep it in check. Where my grief is abruptly blocked and held at bay by a well constructed dam in my throat.

As I began writing my first story about heartbreak something extraordinary began to happen. My writers pen punctured a tiny pinhole in that dam.

What follows is a collection of stories about my daughter Julia Alexandra, who was born profoundly deaf & with severe multiple heart defects. It is about birthing a child with a broken heart in order to heal my ancestral one.

From my initial Somatic writing March 2021

How can you bear such pain over & over & over. Icing the body to slow your heart. Giving way to the heart lung bypass machine while your heart comes to a stop. Where do you go when your heart stops?

A cut from sternum to belly then cracking your tiny chest open, all done in order to reach your dying heart.

How do you survive a machine pumping oxygen into your blood.. into your lifeless body? Tell me..who is holding you while you lay surrounded by strangers under the flood of lights and sterile instruments?

I want you to know I am there with you, every cut, clamp & sponge. I am with you while your heart is lifted into the room and repaired. My hands hold your heart as it is replaced into your sacred vessel. My heart beats for it and it is the great Mothers heart that pours light into your breathless body.

Before the surgeon begins to stitch your chest together, surely it is me who kisses you and awakens your heart from its stillness….bringing you back to me.

There is nothing more powerful on this earth than the love of our Great Mother moving through me and into you.