My husband just turned to me and said, "I'm glad we go through these phases, where sometimes I bring her peace, and sometimes you do..." She's now snuggled up against him, wrapped in the baby-pink sling, snoring almost silently.

I've been resistant to writing this one, but I've known I have to. It feels like a duty within my shares, to bring it all. To face it all is part of what I'm here to do. If not here, where?

So... I failed.

Not a pretty, "It's all ok Yana, don't be hard on yourself" fail. I totally fucked up. It broke me. Cracked my heart open, pummeled me to the ground and then reached out a hand to help me back up. I'm still on my way back up now.

Two nights back, I woke from sleep to feed our child. She suckled and my eyes weighed heavy. Once she was full, we lay back down to sleep and her "Sit me up Mama" groans began so I, still laying, sat her up.

That's the last I remember.

I hadn't felt comfortable asking Nyaniso to take her. He was fast asleep and needed every wink he was stealing. I fell into dreams made of memories. Deep in labour again. In the in-between spaces where the spirit realm and this one dance. Where space and time evaporate and there is no sense to be made of anything. I was giving birth to my child. It was mountainous. Volcanic. Intense. No doubt another wave of integration, gently calibrating this new reality as mother in the dream-space.

Nyaniso woke me, worried. Locked his eyes into mine, stern. His face said a million things in a trillion languages. I heard, "Be kind to yourself, she's safe" and "You almost killed our baby."

In my sleep I had pulled her to my shoulder, my hand against her head pressed her face into me. Nyaniso had woken to hear sounds of her struggling to breathe and came to the rescue immediately. (There's a gently irony that this all happened the night he wrote the post about her not breathing.)

I felt her limp sleeping body and wondered if my baby was dead. Had I killed her? What was happening? How was this possible? Tangled into the tentacles of "what ifs" I was obliterated. I cried and sobbed. Heaving into my corner of the bed, my nervous system roared. Holding our daughter, my husband calmly said, "Don't you wanna go shake it out?"

I walked to the front room, dropped to my knees, and wailed as though my baby was no longer with us. I howled as though I had lost her, and lost my husband too. Every part of trust I had gathered internally was washed away by a tsunami of self-loathing and terror. In that place, I was the world's most terrible mother - unworthy of the word mother at all.

I committed to feel it all. To meet every part of sensation in my body. To find my way through. I sent my voice into the depths of me, let myself rupture and fall into nothingness. On all fours, I shook my body and screamed into my hands. I shook and shook. Screamed and screamed. Until a glimmer of peace appeared in the darkest of storms.

I returned to the bedroom, bashful. Paced and breathed deep. My husband asked me what was moving. I bawled words of losing her, and heaved my deep fears of him abandoning us. "What if you weren't there?!" I shared. He assured me he's going nowhere and slowly my emotion began to run out.

"Can I see her?" I asked tentatively. "Of course you can, she's here and she's fine" he soothed. I went and looked into the eyes of our baby and felt every part regret and fear. I hate how intrinsically linked to loss, love is, for me. How it seems the very purpose of love is to wildly break our hearts, all the way open. For us to feel all of what there is to feel in this life - shadow and light.