August 31, 2005 - An Open Womb

August 31, 2005 - An Open Womb

Womb is a wonderful place, warm, secure, nourishing, and relatively free of pain. The cord tying you to womb brings sustenance and removes harmful waste. Inside womb, awareness of your surroundings seems to emerge as if you had been dreaming and are slowly aroused from sleep. As you awake, you begin to build a mental picture of the world. The cord is a wonderful thing because through it you have an emotional link to the larger world of womb. Instinctively the fear womb experiences you experience as is true for all the other emotions womb feels: pleasure, pain, anger, hurt, hate, love, lust, longing, etc. By the time you leave womb, you will have come to know the complete spectrum of human emotions.

There is a world outside if the strange sounds and occasional prods are more than self-generated fanciful thoughts. You know the sounds of familiar voices, those that are regularly heard. Instinctive you know that some of the time, the voices you hear are addressing you. At other times you know they are talking to one another, often about you, but just as often about things that affect you and everyone else around you. Besides the voices you also hear noises—the sound of a cock crowing, the bark of a dog, the meow of a cat, the screech of a siren, the roar and rumble of buses, cars, trucks, and trains. You hear human noises—the sound of people talking. You know these are strangers because the words are a confusing disconnected jumble of sounds: disjointed phrases and clauses coming together to produce a din.

You hear street racket too: the sound of doors and windows opening and closing, the footfalls of hundreds of nearby feet. Unidentifiable pops, screeches, whooshes, clatter, ringing; the sound of scraping, dragging, and metal and wood rattling; the sound of radio playing music and spoken commentary.

There is a whole cacophony of other sounds related to the womb: the rumble of gas complaining to be released from the confines of stomach and intestines and the sound of their final expulsion; the sound of swallowing and digestion; the low-frequency growl of solid and liquid waste passing; the rush of air being inhaled and exhaled, the staccato tick of you and womb suffering from hiccups—tick, tick, tick… Above all these noises there is the comforting measured beat of womb’s heart, bump, bump, bump, bump,…

Inside womb there is no concept of time. Days, weeks, and months are a continuum with no beginning and no end. There are no sensory cues of day and night. There are only the riparian rhythms of nourishment coming from the cord tied to womb and waste departing by the same route. You know this rhythm by the affect each has on your body, a sense of satiation from the former, excretion from the latter. You sleep and wake to a cadence opposite that of womb. When womb is active and in motion you sleep. When womb is sedentary and still you are awake.

Chemical triggers you are completely unaware of control the larger function of womb. Over time you become aware that womb is getting more confined and that your degree of freedom is becoming increasingly impaired. Where before you could fully articulate your arms and legs you now have a restricted range of motion represented in your infant brain as sensory feedback of hands and feet meeting the unyielding wall of womb. You are also aware that your head is pointing down and that your legs—bent at the knees, which are close enough to your mouth that you could kiss both were you so inclined—are pointing up toward the top of womb.

At some moment in time, you become aware of a major change in womb. There is a surge of adrenaline in amounts unlike any you have sense heretofore. And there is a constriction that courses through womb that you sense as a intense downward pressure. The first passes quickly followed some time later by another. As each successive constriction occurs, you suddenly grow aware of an ever slightly quickening pace—almost an urgency in womb to expel you from its confines.

To a baby born at the end of World War II in Manila, The Philippines, the strange sounds are a mix of different languages—Tagalog and English among others, combined with the muffled reports of explosions heard at a distance, followed occasionally by a surge of adrenaline coursing through your tiny body as womb begins to move abruptly. It’s a hell of a way to enter the world.