I used to be Carla. “free man/woman. or in other realms, justice..”

My tale is long and full of intrigue. something not for the light hearted… nor for the trigger happy or sensitive. My life wasnt for the bubble wrapped nor the woke culture.. I’m sure both will take extreme offense and make a circus out of this factual tail.. and claim they were traumatise by the experiences I lived. so for the faint hearted.. close the book, go get your refund.. I dont give you permission to make this experience in the telling a soap box for you to stand on and make a mokery of because you want attention…

for those who have a thicker skin.. who are willing to face the truth of the western world… read on.. but grab some scotch.. you’ll need it.

Lets start with my re birth. through the birth of my son: Lucas

“Derived from: Lucious: The bringer of light”, funnily enough.

Chapter 1: “Lucas the light bringer, the light beyond the door: The First Door”

A short story from The Doors’ Closer

They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die.
But at fifteen, I hadn’t lived yet. not by any means or any meaning ful time.. but a life time… yes.. at least one… and many more were to come.

There I lay — after a 46-hour labour — a child, giving birth to a child. My body wasn’t ready. My mind wasn’t ready. But it was happening anyway. It should have ben terrigying but There was no thought of fear.. it was only on the little one, defensless and tiny about to breach the boun dary of the ether of my womb, into the realm of men.

so many hours… looking into the eyes of my daddy, sitting by my bed… so many hours… exhausted all of us.. but bustled into the hall way of a country towns main hospital… I slept. my daddy held my hand…

I slept, an uneasy sleep. epidural.. the world turned on its asix and an anxious nurse later…. My tiny babys heart rate dropped… I became cold… and too tired..

every thing blured.. urgent voices, dismissals, and an inststance…

Fetaol heart rate dropping,

too long in labour

And then —

Bloody. Purple. Screaming.

He came into the world swinging by his left foot, grasped in the shaking hand of the “should-have-retired-a-decade-ago” doctor.

Balls blue as his face and swinging in the breeze.

Lucas.

My son. My heart had been ripped from my flesh and was hanging high between my knees. squarking his protest of the cold counterfiet air.. too chilly to be natural.

From the moment his squawking began, filling the dark operating room, and I locked eyes onto his tiny, squished, and grimacing beautiful face — a knowing flowed and awoke from somewhere deep inside me. SOmething I knew my Birth mother was bereft of…

From a primal place. A raw place.
A place that was birthed with his first breath.

I promise you, boy. I willed at him with every ounce of me.
I will die before anyone lays a hand on you.
I will decimate every monster that gets a whiff of you.
I will die to protect you.
My son.

My love.

My heart.

My hand was being squeezed — hard.

I turned to his father, Suane (pronounced “Suane” — his mother insisted). The squeezer of hands.

I looked deep into his beautiful blue eyes, framed by the proudest and most amazed of faces.

“It’s a boy,” I assured and boasted all at once.
“A boy.” From the moment of cenception I knew.. It was a boy.

He nodded, and I saw the tears welling up. His tender beautiful smile stretched wider than I’d ever seen it.
The first son of this generation in this mans lineage.

“yes” he said

And then they laid Lucas on my chest.

This mess of a child — slippery, covered in blood, muck, and goo.

“Yours is the heart he knows,” the nurse said gently, almost reverently. “He needs to connect with you.”

I held him to me. Kissed his perfect, tiny, screaming face.

A love I’d never known continued to course through me. with every beat of my heart, through every cell, every breath, every part of my broken and burning body.

Every part of me ached at the sound of him — this tiny, helpless creature that I already loved with a fury I didn’t know I had.

My son.

My Boy.

My gaze drifted to this screaming babe, oblivious to just how very big the world would get for him in later life, and so in love with everything about him, I pressed my lips against his thick black hair and kissed him.

I could feel the warmth of Lucas against my chest as he squirmed and shuddered, each of his warbling bleats echoing between the theatre walls — strange, guttural little cries, even his inhale (Yeeehaaaa) made a protesting sound, the kind that only a newborn can make. The very sound that would break every maternal womans’ heart and spring forth that yearning only a mother knows. 

I supposed, absently, that it was the shock — the sheer force of being born so suddenly. Somewhere deep inside, I mused that he was protesting (whey! whey! whey! whey!) with every fibre of his tiny body about the way he’d been ripped into the world.

I looked up back to Suane’s beaming face. He was saying something, but it seemed someone had turned the volume down. His voice, far away, distant.

The world began to shake.
Violently.

The lights blurred and dimmed. The chatter of the staff and doctors crackled and rattled, then twisted into a rush of static — and suddenly, it was a roaring, furious ocean. My skin prickled, turned cold, and became curiously far far away, like the top of a mountain… a cry of a lone eagle… fading away.

I turned my heavy head to Suane and looked into his eyes.
“It’s a boy,” I whispered, exhausted. So many hours. So many days.

Lucas, as i whipsered, his wailing was growing faint. It was slipping —

Like I was being pulled backward through thick honey.

I couldnt resist.. i was too tired…

---

I was booked into Mullumbimby General Hospital to have him. I knew he was a boy the moment the GP said “Congratulations! You’re pregnant”.

He was due on the 14th of December. But of course, he had other ideas. On the afternoon of the 11th, the contractions started. After eight hours we were taken to the Lismore Base Hospital where I was left for a further 36 hours until the baby began to show signs of distress.

The haph hazard hacking and slashing would commence soon after. An undetected internal bleed. An ancient doctor, armed with scalpel and forceps, slashed me open and dug him out only moments before…

before I faded into the arms of oblivion, into the arms of grandmother, of the Pleroma. Calling me Home.

It was so unexpected. I had only suddenly felt extremely tired.

Heavy.

Dizzy. I felt away… Far..

A little cold — but that was the surgery room, wasn’t it?

Suane stood by me, his beautiful features carved out a deep love inthat moment but it achoes a hidden concern. Holding my hand. Kissing my cheek so sweetly. standing there in his blue operating gown and hat to match. “they made me put it on” he whispered.

“We’ll be okay,” he whispered. “We’ll be okay,” as they led me into theatre, away from him.

But we weren’t.

Blood was forging between my placenta and the wall of my uterus. Blocked by the baby’s head which had become lodged skewiff against my pelvis over 16 hours ago. His heart rate dropped — and so did mine. Too suddenly.

The nurse placed Lucas on my chest — covered in blood, shit, jelly, and hair. Suane proudly declared, “It’s a boy!”

I repeated it softly, “A boy,” holding onto the words like a lifeline.

A looming darkness began to creep into my peripheral vision. The sound of the beach rolled suddenly in, Byron bays main beach. where we once sat.. watching the surf rolling in…

but we weren’t in the car, in the car park, at the b rach..

but there it was.. the ocean distant at first, growing louder with every breath. My body grew heavier. My skin colder.

And then — darkness. Consuming, silent, final.

“Grab that baby!” a nurse screamed.

The room was gone.

And yet — it wasn’t frightening. It was peaceful. Welcoming. There was no pain. Just a feeling of completeness, of quiet empty fullness.

Then a whisper from my heart: “What about the baby? What about the boy?” I’d only known him for a moment but I had fallen ever so deeply, savagely in love with him, my son. 

Another voice — no, it was a calm, knowing: “He is with his father now.”

Blackness again. Total surrender. No fight left.

They said I went into deep shock. That I died on the table, still holding my son, still looking into the eyes of a man who loved me completely in that moment.

light invaded sharp shards of blinding daggers, through the groggy slits of my eyes. Disorientated, cold that was bone deep and confusion a landscape only i stood upon, I was in intensive care belly down. Still bleeding.. but attahced to a bag of blood.. hanging limp, from a glinting steel stand towering above my head.

A nurse appeared beside me, gentle, kind. “We thought we’d lost you for a minute or two,” she said. “What would that baby have done without his mamma?”

The light flickered, and stammered. Deep into darkness again I plunged again.

And then Suanes’ voice, soft and amazed: “What will we name him?”

“Lucas Curt,” I whispered. I had known his name the moment I saw him.

Suane beamed, proud beyond measure. He kissed my forehead and smiled. “He looks like you.”

His joy flooded the room.

The first son of his generation.

My son.

The first door to the unknown I walked through unknowingly, not unwillingly and came back from. This child of light changed my life — the trajectory of me. From the saturation of perverted, greasy old men and a violently sadistic handler of a mother…

Without Lucas, I know down into the depths of my soul, my choices would have been different. Would have led me to a place every sexually trafficked child is funneled toward.

My future was forged in the darkest moments in the night, in the screaming silences, shaped by the very hand meant to shield me. But she—mother by name, not by deed—chose her standing and self-image over truth, burying what she knew to be grotesque, vile beyond the bounds of mere corruption, in layers of denial, so many masks and social pretense.

The high probability of prostitute, porn star, drug addict, thief, liar — a prolonged, spiraling path into the arms of a long drug addled toturous death of an addict desperate to escape the pain and the filth that was placed there by those who knew better but ignored what was happening any way, under their noses..

The “Forgotten ones” pointlessly, desperstely trying to scrub the filth, the grime, that oily stain of the old mens stain from just under the deepest layer of skin. Scrubbing the filth, was all we have.

No offer of cleansing solutions, no baby wipes to swish this shit away. The stain, it runs too deep. Injected into our most tender and private parts. tearing us apart. staining our souls, bones, guts, throats..

With a whisper as a companion… “Don’t tell any one! you will go to jail. police will come and arrest you. this is what mommys and daddys do to show each other that they l;ove each other. It’s a normal thing.”..

But when I fell pregnant, everything changed. Until then, my life had been unanchored — a ship cast adrift with no direction, no purpose, no voice. I had no grasp of what purpose felt like. But the moment I knew he was growing inside me, something ancient and primal clicked into place. Echoing through the ages, to me to this day.

Lucas didn’t just save my life — he gave me one. One with meaning. One with gravity. A life with fierce determination to break every pattern I’d been born into. Because I could have become like her — mother: Pat. I could have inherited the rage, the cruelty, the violence and the poison. But I didn’t. Because of him.

He was the first soul who made me want to be more. Who made me choose light over shadow. To become more than the past. I saw light past shadow and darkness.. beyond the mindless debauchery.

And that is the truest kind of salvation. This child, this innocent little creature, changed my life, the trajectory of me. From the saturation of perverted greasy old men and a violently sadistic handler of a mother..

Without Lucas, My choices would have been different. Would have lead me to a place every child sexually trafficked goes down. The Patyh ahead unknown to me: high probability of Prostitute, porn star, drug addict, thief, liar and a prolonged path way directly into the arms of haunted and tortured death. a forgotten junkie, holed up in an abandoned building foaming at the moith from the final hot shot. .. slipped away and forgotten. A life lost and wasted.

I was born into a family fractured by loss, poverty, and silence. My mother had no qualms about offering me up to my grandfather and any passing truck driver that would take me— and from the ages of four to twelve, I was trafficked in the worst way. trafficked by those i was trafficked to.

Passed between hands that stripped innocence away before I ever knew what it was. Bounced between the terrible illusion of ‘home’: from my mother’s place in Byron Bay, to my father’s in Newcastle, to refuges and temporary shelters. Only one home before Lucas brought normalcy that i would crave ever after. But even there the darkness crept in. with a layer of cackling laughter of some one i believed to be a friend. Georigia. hysterical while the deed was playing out and my screams for help went ignored.

In my naivity I would desperately attempt to rebuild, decade after decade. echoing an aching and longing that ebbed and flowed through my eternal self. An oceans tide, flowing, ebbing rushing and easing. There was no anchor, no safety, no map But pushing forward and moulding a bubble of safety for my children was my only driving force so feirce i could barely contain it.

Then, I met the father of my three children. And for the first time, the ground beneath me began to feel steady — or at least steady enough to dream and in an ignorant coupling sparked life and the seed that would be my true second birthing.. through my son Lucas… the light from beyond the door ajar..

---

Reflection

This isn’t just the story of a birth. It was the first echo of rebirth — mine.

If you’re reading this and you’ve been through pain, through trauma, through moments where the world shook so hard you thought you’d vanish — I want you to know: there is still something waiting for you on the other side.

but the journey doesnt end with your coming out the other side.

like mine. it continued into a universe where my innocense and naivity would be my glory and my downfall…

Read on dear onlooker.. there is more to this story… do you wish to dive in? navigate not only the path of this history… but navigate yourself and weigh up.. Is your life what you really believe it is and was… are you really who you believe you are or simply an accumulation of the programming of your history and your parents history.. of society and life….

Copyright Angelina Nilsson 2016