My belly is huge and rippling with the new
life inside it. Soon, within some weeks, I’ll be facing for the second time the
most transformative and gruelling journey that most women experience, birth. It
is said that the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds is at it’s
thinnest during birth, that it is the closest we’ll get while living to
experiencing another kind of reality through our physical bodies.
I feel so lucky, then, to have been blessed
on my journey.
Sadly, our society usually deems that the
best we can do to prepare our mothers, our future – makers, for the profundity
of this transformation is the sharing of birth stories involving pain and
disempowerment, and the throwing of a baby shower. What the baby is to be
showered in, it seems, is a collection of competitive gifts including plastic
lights – and - sounds toys, tins of artificial baby milk and chemically scented
disposable nappies (perhaps so the child can leave a lasting legacy in the
local rubbish tip before even leaving infanthood). The women collected can
share stories to frighten the gestating mother into anticipating unbearable
pain and invasive medical interventions in her near future, and play inane
games such as competitions as to who can drink the fastest from a baby bottle,
or races to hang clothes on a line with a plastic doll tucked under one arm.
Apparently it’s all about speed.
A perceptive reader will no doubt have
guessed by now that I avoided a baby shower for my first child.
I went it alone.
Last Sunday, though, I really was blessed. The
birth of my daughter nearly three years ago didn’t only make me into a mother,
changing me in the most profound way by bringing me a love that I could never
have imagined previously. It also opened
the door to a community of wiser, more connected people who I feel privileged
to have shared my early parenting journey with. These women introduced me to
the concept of the blessingway, and a thing that originally seemed nice but
kind of quirky and hippie has come to feel like the ideal and most real preparation
for a woman’s birth time.
Blessingways encapsulate the kind of
emotional and practical support and genuine love and community that baby
showers seem to me to be the very antithesis of, with their focus on
distraction by materialism and fear. Perhaps this sort of ceremony has fallen
out of favour for the very same reasons that birth has been relegated to the
masculine realm of western medicine, and women disempowered by this in the most
disturbing way.
I am hoping for a very different experience
this time, for the entry of my second child into the world earthside. This
pregnancy has been very different from my first one, with none of the scans,
needles, tests or invasions that became the focus of that experience. Just a
few visits with the midwife who will walk this journey with me, in the safety
of our own home when our baby is ready. It has put me into a very different
space.
My first pregnancy felt like a series of
waitings from one test or visit to the next to reassure me anew what I could
have felt anytime I’d chosen to; that my body and my baby were doing just fine.
I’m reminded of the book, ‘The Tentative Pregnancy’ by Barbara Katz Rothman,
which begins exploring the idea that the more we give our bodies over to
science to tell us what’s going on inside ourselves, the more disconnected we
become from our own bodies, and the less able we are to be part of the bodily
wisdom, the knowing and loving of our unborn child and our own nurturing body that
is supposed to be one of pregnancy’s most profound gifts. Perhaps our
willingness to give ourselves over to medicine like this is only a reflection
of what society expects from us anyway, that we should find meaning through
things, and safety in authorities outside of and intrinsically alien to
ourselves.
I’d love to think that blessingways are
part of the way back.
Blessingways are full of ritual, symbolism,
genuine warmth of feeling, and the absolute certainty that pregnancy and birth
are part of each woman, part of our life, our selves, and not owned by the AMA,
or the local hospital, or even the midwife who walks with us. These experiences
are ours, part of our physical and spiritual inheritance, and birth is something
that almost everyone can do with just the right kind of loving support and
gentle wise guidance. ‘Trust your body’ someone has written on one of a string
of little flags that hang in my birth room, and ‘don’t push the river, it flows
by itself’. Not only was I princess for a day, pampered, decorated and loved,
possessor of two birthing necklaces strung with beads symbolising my birthing
wisdom and power and the women who’s spirits will walk with me on the journey,
my blessingway also left me feeling that I am walking a path well trodden by
countless millions of women before and after me. And so it is.
Ina May Gaskin, mother of a deeper kind of
feminist movement that reclaims all of our femininity by reclaiming our right
to good births, to empowered and even ecstatic births and the transformations
they bring, makes the point that we wouldn’t be here if our foremothers weren’t
successful birthers, and that we have inherited this ability to birth our
babies safely. Ninety six percent of the many thousands of women who have
birthed at her community, ‘The Farm’, over many years have done so without any
kind of medical intervention, and the c-section rate there is 1.4%. Not only is
this cheering, but her books are filled with normal birth stories, those of
many ordinary women who have had the extraordinary experience of what used to
be just normal; birthing their children without medical interventions and with
the support of wise and experienced women supporters.
Now it would be silly to as it were, throw
the baby out with the bathwater and suggest that western medicine has no place
in birth. Of course it does, at times, and in the appropriate context. But we
live in a reality where medicine has no respect for women or for babies. Where
c-section rates in hospitals vary from 25% to 40%, where about a fifth of
births are induced and many more augmented with artificial hormones and
artificial rupture of membranes. Where it is more normal to have your baby
pulled from you with a plastic vacuum cup or steel forceps clasping her head than
to push her out yourself, and where the most common and deeply held association
is that birth is a horrifying and agonising experience that only the most
powerful drugs, injected into the birthing woman’s spine or bloodstream, can prevent
us from feeling.
Something has scared us into believing that
birth is something we need to be saved from, not something that we can do,
something that can be healing and beautiful and profound. Something has scared
us into beginning our parenting journey steeped in fear, and imbuing our
children with the notion that only adhering to strict rules about separation
from nature and nurture will protect them. Only having our children endlessly
weighed and measured and fed from bottles and separated from us when they most
need us and forced into routines will save them, save us, from whatever horrors
await us when we just let go a little.
The history of how a male centred medical
system has come to have dominance over birth and other things essential to women
(once the keepers of health) is the subject of another blog, but I feel that
the return of ceremonies like the blessingway, which unite women in love and
positivity and allow us to reclaim the experience of birth, are a step on the
path back to some vital knowings that we have lost in the race to
industrialise, to materialise our existence. Blessingways aren’t about stuff,
they aren’t about fear, and they leave an imprint of strength and nurture that
is rare, certainly in my experience. Mine has helped me gain confidence that I
can do this, I can touch spirit and join it with my body, my senses, my animal
self to bring my baby into the world in the way that women have always brought
babies into the world, and in the safest place; at home.
Am I being unrealistic, sentimental,
endangering myself and my child with all this lovey dovey hippie nonsense? No,
not when so many huge well structured research studies show that not only is
home birth and natural birth as safe as hospital birth, but in several important
ways it is actually much safer for mothers and babies. Not with a willingness
to trust that I know my body and trust my midwife, that I will know if there is
a reason to use western medicine’s particular kinds of knowings, and that I
will know when it is not required. For that’s the key. Not dogmatically
sticking to a preset approach, but knowing, trusting that I am almost certain
to birth normally given the right support and an environment that I feel safe
in. That I can birth with joy, even ecstasy, as well as with physical work and
practical guidance and emotional support when the going gets tough.
I’m glad, so glad (and so is my lovely
partner who respected the female importance of it all and supports me in his
ways), that I am setting out on the journey this time with the strength of a
blessingway behind me, not the fear and vulnerability of going it alone that we
knew last time. Many candles are lighting the way, many beads reminding me of
the blessings that we can bring to each other if just we learn to let go a
little, trust a little, and connect to whatever is real rather than what takes
us as far away from ourselves as we can manage to get.
That isn’t safety, it is fear, and fear is
no sort of thing to steep the start of a new life in.
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