Dawn Leaf – Excerpt from Call to My Soul – Dancing the Path to True Love –A Flamenco Romance Memoir

The first, so sudden, so early, after a prophetic dream –baby carriage tipped and Angelo fell out. Down the hill. 

And after I woke, the water broke, then, the first time, and we walked through the forest to the commune’s main house, and I on a flat and dirty bed in a room not my own. Deborah is not around. Someone drives out to find her, on her hike with a neighbor love. Finally here, “You have to get it together. This is it.” 

And so I stopped worrying and found I could easily pull it together. This is it. This is it. Oh, now I have to function. That thought abruptly pulled me from my ineffectual reverie. And at dawn she came, beautiful tiny Dawn Leaf, she came but not her placenta. Blood flowed from my womb, following Dawn Leaf, and the oxytocin couldn’t stop it. Into an old van, down the bumpy dirt road, three hours of bumps and blood to the hospital in Yreka, hot dusty. Unclothed. Knowing if I passed out I would not awaken, never, don’t let the blood escape, breathe to keep it in. No contact lenses. Blindness. Out of the forest, the small town felt like a city, grey and flat. On the stretcher they took baby Dawn Leaf. Then an afterthought, felt my pressure and started the IV. Blood for me. Once, twice, three times.

The acrid smell of antiseptic, the vibrations of people in white rushing back and forth with worried faces. The doctors had been called from the phone booth in Sawyer’s Bar. They were expecting us. At night the doctor assured me, “The baby is doing fine. You can sleep.” 

Just before dawn the doctor came back into my room. I was already awake. “Your baby is not doing well,” he told me kindly and then left. I tried to imagine telling everyone that she was healthy, but kept finding myself telling people that she had died. Consciously I had to switch my thoughts to the positive. But they kept switching again to her death. 

Twenty-four hours after Dawn Leaf was born, at dawn as the sun started to come out, I felt a spark of electricity go through my body, just like the spark that had shot through me when she was born. A few minutes later the doctor came in to inform me that she had died. I was not surprised. I already knew inside myself. Sadness numbed me as I lay there, the unthinkable confirmed.

I waited, without my child, my purpose, … I was empty and burials not mentioned, babies not mentioned. 

Finally, Marc is there … they put me in the truck, and back to Black Bear commune, over rutted bumpy dirt roads winding down into the valley. Alone. No mention of Dawn Leaf, as if she didn’t exist. Where is she buried? I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell. She no longer existed, a phantom, a thing past, and I empty and a failure. Failed –not a mother but milk in my breasts. Milk with no outlet. Swollen. Empty, Empty, Empty. No baby. No mention. They brought me back and it was forgotten. Buried. Failure buried. The creeks ran, and I continued my life, the grief buried where I knew not, like my first-born child.

©2023  Marianna Mejia