Sunny 44 Degrees
7:36 a.m.
My son Egan was born at home on September 21, 2004.
I was scared to death. It was the very first child we had at home and I didn’t know what to expect.
The midwife told me to turn the water heater to HIGH to prepare to fill the enormous pool my son would enter the world into.
Being the over achieving sheep I was back then, I listened to her.
But minutes before my son came earth side, we realized the water was hot enough to poach an egg.
So I ran down to the corner store, just about a block from our flat in Chicago, and bought as many bags of ice as I could carry.
Egan made it into the world…he was a little warm…a little groggy at first (sorry!), but he arrived.
It’s probably no coincidence his name means FIRE.
The homebirth wasn’t our initial plan though.
We were too sheeply to think that giving birth outside of the carefully controlled confines of a hospital was anything but a dangerous, reckless and really dumb idea.
But who can afford a hospital?
Back then, I couldn’t. I was still a clueless entrepreneur. (Just about the only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to work for someone else. Everything else was fuzzy.)
At the time, I was trying to get health insurance like good sheep are told to do.
It never occurred to me that a mass market “product” (healthcare) offered in a form that almost no one can afford, has no basis to EXIST in a free and unfettered marketplace.
It can only exist if there is a believable story for how it should exist. You really need a good story. Something to serve as an “antidote” for that imbalance. The story covers the truth about the mechanism. That it’s really designed to leverage the “imbalance” and siphon wealth from the masses into the pockets of the few. From there, you simply need a steady supply of FEAR (what would happen IF?) and the masses will appear. Instant SALE!
But I digress…the ability to process common sense was STILL years away for me.
I tried everything back then to find insurance. As a new entrepreneur, it’s pretty expensive you know.
We tried to get a type of group coverage using my wife’s small business. But after endless days of paper work, that just didn’t pan out either.
So there we were, between a rock and a hard place. And we were running out of time.
My wife wasn’t having such a great experience meeting with the midwives at the local hospital either. It just wasn’t a fit for what she wanted.
We were trying pretty darn hard to fit in.
We were actually fighting to fit in. Into insurance, into the right healthcare situation, into a lot of things, all boxes we thought we needed.
And then…somehow, by the grace of whatever divine entity is responsible for us being here, we asked ourselves WHY.
Why are we working so hard to fulfill a need we were not born with but one we were taught to perceive as real?
Why are we trying to get our choices for our child approved and validated by others?
We just ran out of time really. And in the absence of a better solution, we had to trust ourselves and go our own way.
That was the beginning of the journey on which YOU have joined.
That birth is the one that began the cracking…that started the chain reaction of eroding the LIES that we all have been told to believe.
Following the birth of my son, I realized I had a head full of rules to follow and absolutely NO UNDERSTANDING OF HOW TO LIVE.
And this is the guy I have to thank. I offer up a lot of gratitude for him being willing to be the messenger. Today, he’s sixteen years old and spends most of his time doing what he loves: composing music.
No one taught him, and he doesn’t really want to be taught. He wants to discover and create and do it in his own way.
These are not qualities you teach a human, this is how they ALL show up.
Have you been fighting to get in somewhere you were told was required for you to be?
Do you understand how the ability to make a human want to do that could be used to influence that human into consenting to a long LIST of things that are not good?
Where are you fighting to get in?
School?
The club?
The job?
The customer or client?
Is that really where you want to be?