Thank You for Being Born

Amy Fabrikant is an integrated health coach, author, mother, educator, and artist. Over fifty years after she entered the world, the experience of her birth began to be revealed to her, in pieces — until she came to realize she had a near-death experience while literally being born. This story comes from a Story Booth conversation, told in her own words.

I have to just tell you — I'm trying to ignore it, but it's breaking up my story — there is a bird that keeps knocking on my window. It's not flying in, but it's like it keeps jumping up and knocking the window. It just did it again. I hope it's okay. It really wants to come in here. It's like saying, open the window and I'll just sit on your shoulder. I have the chills, because every time I see a lone bird, I think of my mom. So this bird is with us, and I think it's my mom's spirit.

Which is fitting, because this is a story about my mother and me, and about a thing that took more than fifty years to reach me. It came in pieces of memory: I had a near-death experience while literally being born. I was brought into the light of day in the arms of the blessed mother. Everything I want to tell you follows from that.

You always do things the hard way

My mother and father, but especially my mom, would always say to me, Amy, you always need to do things the hard way. That's how you learn. And throughout my childhood I seemed to live up to that — I have lots of old scrapes and bruises, inside and out, that I definitely had to learn from. Maybe it created a pathway I began to choose. You know how we always hear, you get a path and you take the one less traveled? Maybe that was somehow ingrained in me: it's going to be hard, and you can do it.

The story about my birth being really difficult was always there. My mom had an allergy to shellfish, and that's exactly what she ate, and that's how she discovered it — in delivery. There were a lot of complications. So I heard that my life began in this really dramatic way, and I've had lots of dramatic moments through my life, some that I probably amplified, from lack of better skill. I never asked my mom more, because at the time they often would put women under — she had anesthesia, she wasn't awake for the birth. For a whole life, I felt like I was walking a path with a stick and a few belongings, and that was it.

Something big was coming

I have three children I was fortunate to be able to give birth to, and lots of things happened in our family, which they often do. One thing led to another, and my eldest — in her young twenties — said, "I want to go to this retreat. A retreat about death. We celebrate our own deaths in this retreat." I thought, that's interesting, that that's something she's thinking about. So we went.

My mother had been struggling in the last couple of years with a difficult kind of dementia, where the frontal lobe, where all the executive functioning happens, was disappearing very, very quickly. And this weekend retreat happened to fall on Mother's Day. I said, okay, we can go, but we're going to have to leave very early Sunday morning so we can celebrate Mother's Day with my mom.

We made death masks for ourselves. We immersed ourselves in writing and stories about death and dying, and the beauty in that — as a life cycle, understanding the beginning comes after the end comes after the beginning. On Saturday, we walked silently in a labyrinth, and in the labyrinth I got this overwhelming feeling that something big was coming. I looked down, and there was a special stone — I'm attracted to rocks and stones — and I picked it up and held it in my hand.

That night I had a dream, and I seldom remember my dreams. The dream was about a blue baby, in some kind of basket or bin. The person leading the retreat was a Jungian psychologist, who said, that blue baby is significant, and we're going to explore that. And then Sunday morning, as we were packing up, I found out my mom had had a stroke the day before, and had fallen into unconsciousness. The group thought the dream pertained to that — the blue baby and my mom's stroke. To me, honestly, the dream didn't resonate at all. But already, some of her spirit felt like it was visiting me. She was in this liminal space, her body still struggling and working. And then she passed away.

The blue baby was me

After my mom passed, I was working very deeply on ancestral healing, because there had been a lot of difficulties in the family. And a few things started to click into place. It came to me in the car, with two of my daughters with me. I saw it: the blue baby was me. I had come out of this world with my feet first, and the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, so I wasn't breathing.

I was dead. And my mom was, too. At the same time. She was brought back to life, and so was I.

There was chaos in the operating room. Everybody was screaming, it was freezing, it was alarms, alarms, alarms, like crazy. I got the chills just thinking of it — and the bird stopped knocking on the window.

There was my Virgin Mary

All of this happened in 2019, the year before COVID. When COVID hit, many of us from that death group continued to meet online, and we began to call ourselves the Truth Circle. One of the practices the facilitator asked of us was to seek out images of the divine family — we were all looking to heal our childhood wounding, multiple ages, different generations, everybody coming to this work. People were picking all kinds of images of mothers. Now, I did not grow up in the Christian faith. But in this search, all I was really attracted to were images of the Virgin Mary. I didn't really understand it, but I gave myself permission to explore, and I gravitated toward one in particular — the Dark-Skinned Virgin Mary. That, for me, was the image of Divine Mother.

Fast forward to a vacation in Paris, France. I was with my partner, walking back very tired to our hotel, a little late, and we passed by — I hope this isn't offensive — a nondescript church. It almost could have been a bank. And I said, I really want to go in there. He could not understand it, but neither did I. He's had enough shenanigans from me to understand these things that come to me, and we do it. So we did it.

We sat in the back row. They were speaking not French but a language I didn't know, a priest up there in white with a big hat, and I'm just looking around because I don't understand what they're saying. And really, to my astonishment — there was my Virgin Mary. On the wall of this church. Which I came to understand, I have chills again, is a Polish church in Paris. And my family hails from Poland.

There was the Divine Mother who saved my life. Because all of a sudden, I could see myself, that little blue baby, in this luminescent light coming out from her. She held me. She warmed me.

She had me so wrapped, firmly, in so much love and light, that it did bring me back to life.

Love on yourself so crazy

I spent so much of my life struggling, so much of my life not feeling worthy. I haven't done enough, I don't have enough, I'm not enough — a message I couldn't shake, no matter how many healing practices I learned, even as I helped other people with them. But after seeing how I was never alone, and that these loving arms are available — I've come to realize it's not just for me. We're all this beautiful, luminescent, loving light. Every being. And if we can feel it, see it, then we can live it.

It changed my relationship with my mother, even though she transitioned before the remembering. For the first part of my life she didn't hold me — maybe because she was also recuperating; she'd had a traumatic experience. She had significant mental health difficulties too, a kind of chronic emotional dysregulation, so there was a lot of chaos in my home, a lot of confusion. So you can have a sense of not being loved by this person. But that isn't true. They can do only the best that they can do. Especially now, raising my own kids, who share with me things I've done that made hurt — I'd run in front of a truck for these people, and yet I still caused harm, even though I never ever would want that. It helped me have so much love and appreciation for someone who felt the exact same way, but could only express it the way she could.

And I think my life prepared me for my own motherhood. I have two transgender children, of my three. When I realized I needed to support my first daughter — to allow and nurture her to be who she is, and not who the world told her she is, because the world gets a lot of things wrong when we name and label people — there was nobody there on that path. I didn't even know if I could discuss it. But I knew I had to lead the path. I knew I needed to say: you are loved, you are cherished, you are worthy, you are amazing. That is the truth. I got into politics only briefly, with a lot of other moms, to get some laws changed — there's now a student bill of rights in many schools because of that work. We don't always get validation from the people in charge, and we have to do it anyway. As John Lewis used to say, you find your beloved community. And my world went from black and white to multicolor in the most beautiful way. I was enriched, in other words.

What does this remembering mean to my family? They thought it was a really cool story, but their life just goes on. It's like, okay, mom, I'm so thrilled. They kind of know — oh, mom knows stuff. She knows it before it happens, or she's got eyes in the back of her head, that kind of thing. My kids will tell you there's almost a before and after with me. The dramas happen a lot less now. Time management, just getting organized — that's still my ongoing practice. One of my oldest works in a New York City school with six hundred middle schoolers, and she's beloved, and I know exactly why. She brings light, and she lets the kids see the light inside themselves.

If you're feeling unloved, unheld, unseen — I say to a lot of my clients, if I can do it, you can do it. There was a wonderful, beautiful soul named Louise Hay, and she had a practice called mirror work. You look yourself in the eyes — everybody can do it somewhere, even a reflection in a window — and you say, I love you. You are cherished. You are loved. Love finds you wherever you go, and you bring love wherever you go.

And if someone has hurt you — a mother, a caregiver — first, love on yourself. Love on yourself so crazy, and know it's true.

As for little Amy, who was told she was difficult — I'd just scoop her up, our little selves, and say thank you.

Thank you for being born. Thank you for this life. Every step you took was an act of courage.

Now I wake up in the morning and ring my bells — I have a Buddhist practice, I chant, and I call in all the wise, well ancestors. They're always ready to help if you ask for it. You gotta ask for it. And my mom is there. Right now, in this country, it's worse than ever for trans people, and trans women, and trans women of color even more so, to feel safe walking this earth the way some other people can. So I ask her: "Please watch over the kids." And she does. I haven't really told this story much, because already people put me in this other place — sometimes they go woo-woo, you know, for me.

I just want you to know something. The bird did not fly into the window. It flew up, and then flew away — it showed its face, and then left. It was a little gray bird with a little yellow near its beak — I wish I knew birds; I rely on the Merlin app, I don't know. At first, I was trying not to pay attention. Then, I said, "What am I doing?" We are definitely always in the presence of great spirit, through all the trees, the animals, every being. We are not alone, and we are loved. Let's remember that. And if a lone bird ever comes knocking at your window, maybe pause — it could be some love that has been holding you all along, asking to be remembered.