A Pair Of Scissors

She was eighty-six years old. She lived in the depths of the Colombian Amazon, near Chiribiquete, in country so remote it barely exists in the modern world. When she walked into our bathroom, the light was dim. My wife was in the bathtub, in a state I can only describe as an altered state of consciousness. The old woman poked my wife’s stomach. Her old, bent index finger dug in just below my wife’s rib cage. “Mmmm, you’re ready,” she said. And that was it. She walked out of the bedroom, leaving me, my wife, and a friend of ours in the middle of the high Andean jungle of Colombia to deliver our second child.

Within an hour, he was here on this earth. I held my wife as our second son came into the world. Our friend received him. I felt, in that moment, that I wasn’t doing my son the same service I’d done for his older brother, whom I had physically received into my own hands at his birth. But the circumstances had put me somewhere else this time. I was the support my wife literally fell into, so that gravity could do most of the work. He was born under low light, in a warm bath, in a small bathroom inside a cabin we had built with our own hands and a chainsaw, in a home where we’d spent most of the pregnancy living in a tent, using a hole as a toilet, living rough in the bush.

I held my son as my wife delivered the placenta, inspected it, and said, “Yep, it’s good,” then stood up and had a shower. Although she is an MD, it was something else to witness her inspect the placenta herself and then casually take a shower.

A few weeks before the birth, I’d asked a good brother of mine, from the Murui people of Colombia, whether he’d be available to help with the birth. Our midwife had fallen through. We’d lost confidence, and we were without anyone to properly assist us.

“My parents can do it,” he said.

They were in their late eighties. Highly trained indigenous traditional doctors and midwives, he told me. His mother had been doing this work for decades, trained by her own mother before her. We agreed.

“What do you need?” I asked him.

He looked at me and simply said, “A pair of scissors.”

That was it. That was the entire list. No monitors, no forms, no hospital bag packed with contingencies. Just a wise old woman who knew, by touch, exactly when a body was ready, and a pair of scissors.

That moment made me question what a father’s role actually is during pregnancy and birth.

As men who walk in our masculinity, we often find peace in being the fixer, the one with the solution, the hero of the story. Bring home the hunted game. Come home as the warrior. Build the business. Buy the house. Do everything in your power for your family. Raise the capital, make the abundance, then give it away. Be the protector. Be in service.

But in that bathroom, I was nothing close to the hero. I had a very important role, but I was not the hero of that story. My wife and the child were the heroes. It was their teamwork, their connection, that let life continue, the same way our connection to Mother Earth, as her children, lets us grow food and harvest what we need to keep living. A pregnancy and a birth depend on the connection between a mother and her child. The father’s role, at times, is one of invisibility. It’s a role lived in the shadows, doing silent work without being seen or heard.

That is exactly what I felt during that birth: holding my wife while she rested her full weight into my arms, so she could let gravity help carry the labor forward.

Becoming a father is a form of initiation, just as motherhood is. In the modern world, we as men have found endless ways to numb ourselves out of our own initiations. When a woman moves through her moon cycle, through menopause, through pregnancy and birth, these are physical alterations of her body, but they carry spiritual, emotional, and mental changes too. Men need our own forms of initiation to prepare us for the next steps in our journey as men. That might be an article for another time. But these passages prepare us to step into whatever comes next.

Out of this understanding came ceremonies and rites of passage. The vision quest, for example, offered to young Lakota men coming of age, sends a boy alone onto a mountain to fast, without food or water, for multiple days. Through initiations like this, a young man becomes more connected to the stage of life he’s entering, and to the responsibility that stage demands of him.

Women have their own rites tied to a different kind of knowledge entirely, one rooted in indigenous teachings that hold the feminine as the closest thing to the Creator: a woman’s ability to purify herself every month through her cycle, her ability to create, foster, and bring life into this world. Men do not have that ability. And so there is a deep reverence for women in these cultures, one that shapes entire societies, not patriarchal, but matriarchal.

From a Western frame, we tend to hear “matriarchal” and assume a power swing, feminine over masculine, mirroring the patriarchal structures we already know, just inverted. But that’s not what it means. It means an equal vote, an equal say, an equal respect between men and women, in every sense, spiritual and social alike.

Men and women simply carry different kinds of knowledge, and a functioning community draws on both. Neither is ranked above the other. Learning from the feminine, in these teachings, mirrors how we’re meant to learn from nature herself. We are here to learn.

If there’s an integration point in all of this, it’s helping men understand better what it actually means to go through childbirth, not as the one giving birth, but as the one holding space for it.

I remember one of my elders once saying to me, “You reckon you’ve got it hard? Try carrying a sack of beans around for nine months. See how you go.” He meant it as a nod to the strength women carry, a strength that, most of the time, is a silent one.

The daily grind of pregnancy, the invisible labor of motherhood. Yet in the moment of birth itself, we have to trust their bodies. We have to let their sacred knowledge, their intuition, guide us, rather than trying to dominate or control the process.

It is not our birth. We are not the ones giving birth. At the end of the day, it’s the child who decides how the outcome unfolds. Our job is to let go, to find peace, to surrender, to stay present, understanding that whatever is happening in this moment will pass, and that our task, in the meantime, is simply to hold space.

What does holding space actually mean? It means being there in a protective role. Because when a woman is giving birth, she is at her most vulnerable moment in life. Her guard is completely down. She is, in a very real sense, defenceless. That is where our role as men comes in, to be the silent protector, the energy that holds the space so she knows and trusts that she is being protected, and can therefore do the work she needs to do. We also have to trust that women have been doing this since the beginning of time. The body is designed for this. We have to get out of our own heads and stop trying to control the situation.

One of the things that supported me most in facing birth was my relationship with plant medicine, using it, over time, to train myself to sit inside chaos and still find stillness. To understand, in my body, that I was not in control, and to practice surrender before I ever needed it in that bathroom. It was also sitting with elders, hearing story after story about pregnancy, about life, about how to treat your woman. These are things the modern world doesn’t hold space for anymore, because we’ve lost our elders, and we’ve lost the initiation rites that used to walk men through this, rites that made us more aware, more grounded, more rooted in the responsibility of what’s coming.

Because usually, hearing that your partner is pregnant comes bundled with a quiet, unspoken fear: the old you is dying, and a new you is being born. In a way, during birth, father, mother, and child are all passing through the same portal, death and rebirth at once. The way you used to live closes one door as a new one opens. And that scares people. It scares the part of you that wants the freedom to go on a boy’s weekend, to go where you want, when you want, to answer only to yourself and your partner. Because now there’s a whole new life depending on you, and without the right preparation, the right conditioning, leading up to the birth, that shift can be deeply confronting. If we don’t take the time to notice how we’re feeling, what we’re moving through, and instead just numb it out and keep working, keep doing what we’ve always done without looking honestly at the fact that life is changing, there will be consequences further down the line.

So there I was, in that bathtub, accepting where I was and what I was doing, knowing I was in service to my child, in service to my wife. In the end, it didn’t matter that my children were born in such different circumstances, a home birth in the jungle, a hospital elsewhere. What matters is that they’re healthy and alive.

But if there’s one thing I’d want men to take from this, it’s the reverence and respect we should hold for women, and how much more attuned we could be to their state and their wellbeing through pregnancy and birth. This isn’t written to divide, to argue that men have it harder than women, or women harder than men. Those are the mind prisons of the modern world, the ones that keep pulling humanity apart. This is simply a word from lived experience, for the men out there moving through this themselves, and for their wives too, so they can read it and know that men go through something in pregnancy and birth as well, even if it looks completely different from what she’s carrying.

If we can understand each other a little better, we stand a better chance of actually supporting one another. A better chance of holding families and communities together. A better chance of building something worth handing to the next generation.