Forty-two years ago today, my first son, Dustan Paul Moore, was born. I was seventeen, single and scared beyond belief. Just a few months before, I had graduated from high school, seven months pregnant, without anyone, even my mother, knowing this. Of course I had told the young man who had impregnated me, but he had suggested I have an abortion. This scared me more than giving birth so I stopped talking to him and kept to myself as much as possible.

As a woman who will be sixty next month, I now look back at that scared, lonely seventeen year old and I marvel at her strength, tenacity and fragileness. I also cry because I can see still her, lying in bed at night, praying for help but not knowing who to go to. Praying that she was not pregnant, all the time knowing she was.


Before I gave birth, I had decided to give the baby up for adoption, which seemed the logical thing to do. My mother was against this, but allowed me to make this decision. On the day he was born, when I held him for the first time, I knew I could not let anyone else have him. I felt a love that I had never known existed. I wanted to take him home to my mother’s house and mother him. At the age of eight months, he passed back to Spirit. He had cerebral hemorrhage and didn’t make it through the operation.

I have always felt deep inside that somehow I was responsible for his death.
After all, I kept the pregnancy a secret, I didn’t take prenatal vitamins, and on and on. I didn’t even see a doctor until I was almost eight months pregnant.

I have two good friends who are prenatal nurses and they told me that sometimes the younger mothers, who don’t take good care of themselves, give birth to healthier babies than the older women who are exquisite in taking care during their pregnancies. This helped me but deep inside I know I still carried guilt.

This morning, July 4, I awoke to the realization that it was not my fault.
The doctor, young and inexperienced had taken my baby by force, tearing my vagina in the process and injuring the baby’s head. I know I must have known this all along, but had pushed it so far deep down inside my soul that my guilt covered it totally.

No, I am not blaming anyone for the death of my baby. I am saying that finally I realized that I truly did LOVE him. That I didn’t want him to die and that his death marred my heart and soul in a way that I did not understand until now.

Now I am healing from a rare autoimmune disease that affects my eyes.
They burn and itch from blisters growing on my cornea. My sight is not as it once was. A holistic doctor is treating me and I am changing my diet, etc., doing everything I can to heal my body.

And now that others are praying for me, doing sweats and ceremonies for me, asking for my healing, I am realizing that disease really does mean – dis ease. I have been carrying so much hurt, guilt, pain, disappointment, etc in my soul that my body had to get my attention to make me deal with these. I am healing all on levels. I am feeling love from so many and I am grateful to be loved.

So, gradually, as I work to heal, and others work to help me heal, my soul is also healing. This is a process, but I know, deeply I know, that all of this is part of my path as a seer, as a medium, as a writer, as a mother, as a grandmother.

Life is full of mystery and we are the mystery.