ElementalMom

Over the last extremely stressful year, I’ve been exploring my personal spirituality a lot. There are no atheists in foxholes, the saying goes, and I kinda roll with that. Frankly, I almost have to believe that, because of some of the things that I’ve seen happen to other moms, and that have happened to me.

Almost a year ago, the marvelous Dana gave me a mala bracelet made of bodhi seeds. It’s fabulous and I love how it feels in my hands, but it’s too big to wear and the elastic gave up pretty rapidly. So Dana bought me another bracelet, and brought it to me right before Aurora’s birth. At first I thought it was just a nice pattern on the beads, but on closer reflection, discovered that the carvings are tiny Madonnas.

As I’ve posted before, I’m not a Catholic. Not even close. I resent the idea that an institution thinks they can come between me and my personal relationship with the Divine. So la.

My aunt Marla, before she died, surrounded herself with latin images of the Madonna. I miss Marla hugely; I think we might have had a lot to talk about once we were both mothers. Sadly, she did not live to see my children. But I think of her all the time; when I see the film Dune, when I hear David Bowie, when I see Madonnas.

I refer to Mary a lot in my birth advocacy work. If you point out that Christ was born unassisted in a horse barn, suddenly modern home birthing looks pretty slick. And also classical. I’ve seen a lot of devout Christians do a 180 on their ideas about homebirth once this fact is mentioned. Mary is therefore my own personal patron of why homebirth works. When I see her, I think of women’s power in birthing.

To some degree, all mothers touch the Divine. You can’t be this much a part of the dance of birth, death, and everything in between and not be in touch with something bigger than yourself. Sometimes, it’s just because it’s all so overwhelming you have to have someone to hand it over to; the responsibility for it all is just too crushing otherwise. In that way, all mothers are to some degree the Madonna. I do recognize that some women reject that role entirely. But I also see women all around me who step up to the plate and embrace the sort of growth that motherhood can bestow upon you if you let it.

So on days where it’s too big, it’s too crazy, it’s too amazing, it’s too humbling, I wear my Mama Mala, I thumb through the beads, and I think of all the Madonnas I know.

http://consciouswoman.org/2008/08/04/conscious-woman-of-the-month-august-2008/

Want to have your blood pressure raised? Want to realize yet again how incredibly lucky you are to have been born as you were? Read this month’s Conscious Woman article, about Dalit activist Manjula Pradeep.

Tags: Conscious-Woman, Dalit, Pradeep

I was extremely honored to be asked to provide a guest post on Rixa’s wonderful “True Face of Birth” blog recently. The post was a response to a comment-storm, generated by some people who were not prepared to see some pretty typical homebirther stuff online (although what they thought they’d see on a blog subtitled “Raw, Powerful, Ecstatic” is beyond me…)

Anyway, here’s my contribution to the fray, “Judgment, Fear, and Focus“.

This is a guest post. I’ve been stockpiling ideas for a while, and in a fit of inbox-cleaning, have been unearthing gems lost in the clutter. I was going to riff on this idea myself, and then decided that Dawn’s words were so perfect, I’d just be messing with it. So here we go… Dawn Radcliffe-Snell, on Vampires and Unschooling.

Ah, I always want to post about something I’m reading on this list, and so rarely can manage the time and focus (even as I type my 3 yr old is trying to climb on my lap and put his had down my shirt! LOL!). It’s interesting, to really be present with my children, even as I try to squeak in writing. I do my best, and sometimes things slide into gear…

But this one I gotta respond to - I know pedophiles! Not a great claim to fame, but it is very true. Yes, I was molested as a child (like so so many), had three different pedophiles in my life, and at 19 put myself in therapy and then eventually went to the DA and prosecuted my dad. He was/is one of those sneaky pedophiles - not the kind that drags you off into the bushes, but the kind that gets into your head first. These are the dangerous ones. I’m not saying the drag-you-off-into-the-bushes guys aren’t to be avoided (wry grin), just that they are not the norm (most molesters know their victims) and they are more easily avoided.

The answer is not to make children afraid of strangers - in effect you are teaching them to be afraid of people, which ironically is at the root of a pedophile’s sickness. Pedophiles are afraid, feel completely alone (even if they’re not), and they are in pain you and I cannot imagine. They have become disconnected from their souls (it would take me a book to explain that probably), and yet are so hungry to feel better that they turn into, basically, vampires (I’m speaking metaphorically of course).

This is very much why I have chosen this path of unschooling, of radical parenting. Not because I am afraid for my children to be around other adults, around other “potential molesters”, but because I want my children strong, connected to their spirits. Children that maintain that connection to their inner knowing, to their instincts (I could use a lot of different nouns here, but basically I’m saying when they are happy and vibrant and soul-full) they KNOW themselves, they KNOW their world, they’re tuned in! Happy children with their voices and spirits intact do not make pedophile prey! My abusers did not molest me and then I was de-spirited, I was already mentally molested, I had already been emotionally severed, they just came in for the kill like any predator would.

Yeah, we could talk about my dad and how much of that de-spiriting came from him, but he was not the only one. It is all around, our society in many very well-meaning ways tells us as children to not hear our own voices, to ignore our selves. That is the root of it. (I cannot tell you how many well-meaning people have tried to tell my children to listen to them simply by virtue of the fact they are “adults”! Luckily my kids just look at them like they’re crazy! LOL!). Children are set up by our “control-based” society. You can try to avoid all the molesters you want to, but if a child is crippled and crushed, it’s a losing battle. Lift the child up, allow them to be who they came to be, happy and strong and loved. And as they are these things, they will naturally be protected (there’s another book to write of explaining…), they will be strong, loving, open, giving, which is why I say “Yes, honey, talk to those happy, nice people!” ‘Cause I know without a doubt that they won’t want to talk to the “unhappy nice ones”. Children get it better than we do IF WE LET THEM.

When I contacted her, struck by the metaphor of the vampire as pedoscele, she elaborated thusly:

And I have to thank you - I see so many connections ‘twix the two and assumed everyone else did too, that I didn’t think of the comparison as “potent”. But it truly fit for me, my joy (my spirit, energy, effervescence, self-belief…) was certainly sucked dry by some-bodies that couldn’t make it for themselves. It is interesting to think about, there are connections like:

• If you want to kill a vampire, put a stake through its heart (because that’s what needs to die, a faulty wretched heart).
• They can’t be seen in mirrors (’cause they’re not really there, they are living in the illusion of soul-lessness).
• They can’t stand garlic (garlic is a healer & blood cleanser).
• They can’t stand sunlight, they do their deeds in the darkness, hiding physically and metaphorically (bring them into the light and they fry!).
• They were bitten by a vampire themselves!
• They are considered damned.
• They are usually shown as suave, sophisticated, clever, slick, alluring, charming…

And I thought it was interesting how one of the producers of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” spoke of how the show was a mirror of the “vampires” teens have to kill to truly grow up, be whole w/themselves. It was why the show was popular he said. Now, I don’t plan on my children having to kill vampires to grow up, I plan that they are, by the nature of their very strongly already “being alive”, naturally avoiding it, but I completely get what the producer was saying - most kids today do have to fight many different kinds of “suckers”!

Thanks Dawn. Even though you wrote this post over a year ago, it still resonates. Vampires, indeed.

Tags: , Guest Post, Pedoscele, vampire

I was chatting with my incredibly wise pal V last night, and we were talking, as we do, about birth and babies and whatnot. The topic of pain-free birth came up.

I‘ve thought about this a lot. I completely bought in to the idea that if you didn’t have fear, you wouldn’t have pain, as espoused by Grantly Dick-Read in "Childbirth Without Fear". And then in the middle of my 30+ insane labor with Kestrel, decided that I was never going to trust the word of someone who’d never birthed for anything ever again.

Steeped as I am in birth circles, I have read a lot of birth stories. There are some that are ecstatic, euphoric, orgasmic… but they’re outnumbered hugely by those that are painful, uncomfortable, awkward, and agonizing. And so there’s a little bit of backlash thinking here, that the ecstatic crowd, those that feel OK with the Gaskin term "sensations" are either crazy, or they’re trying to create a thing into being that currently really doesn’t exist.

Once again, I’m pulled into using sports metaphor for birth. Marathons hurt. Triathlons hurt. All kinds of athletic endeavor hurt. I was telling V about a certain world-class freediver who acknowledges that not breathing hurts, and requires himself to resist 14 urges to breathe before he allows himself up. And how, I ask, is that any different from a birthing woman telling herself that she’ll just get through this contraction… and then just through the next one… and then just through the next one? The freediver is lauded for his athletic accomplishment in not breathing for six or seven minutes by virtue of his amazing ability to control a bodily instinct through willpower. But a woman, taking it one contraction at a time, is somehow lesser, pitiable, a figure to be saved from all that by intervention.

It occurs to me that in the english language, we only have one word for "pain". This is supposed to cover everything from cancer to broken bones to childbirth to heartbreak to headache. Apparently when we were pulling together this polyglot language, we decided to minimize our description of this state, so that you’re either in pain, or you’re not, but perhaps it’s gauche to really get too into the details of "in pain". So someone on chemo and someone in labor are both "in pain". If they’re both in a hospital, they both are trying to use the same dumb "scale of 1 to 10" descriptor to communicate what they’re feeling to an outside person.

No wonder so many mechanisms, processes, theories, and drugs exist to try to save women from labor. I know that were my bones broken, were I enduring dialysis or some other process, I would absolutely want those at my disposal. But what we’re lacking is the linguistic differentiation, in two syllables or less, to say "pain that is the sign of pathology and illness and needs to be obliterated by any means possible" and "pain that is your body’s way of kicking in an endorphin payoff down the road".

Got that? I’m not enduring labor pain. I’m purchasing my endorphin rush, one sensation at a time.

Whoot! I am so excited!

My first ever podcast interview is live on Carla’s Miss Adventuring show. You can also access it directly from iTunes, if you’re so inclined.

Carla is going to be turning her guests’s “Tips for Misadventurous Living” into a book somewhere along the line, and you can see my (and the other guests’s) contributions to that list here.

I had a lovely time chatting with Carla, telling stories, and figuring out why it is we do the things we do. Enjoy, and please come on back here and let me know what you thought! I’m really curious to hear your feedback on this one, since I’ve never done anything like this before.

Thanks!

Tags: Carla King, living aboard, Miss Adventuring, podcast

Through a strange set of circumstances, I find myself today thinking a lot about Christy Brown’s mother.

The tenth of her 22 births, Christy was born with cerebral palsy, in the crushingly poor Dublin of 1932. Despite being told he was a vegetable, he was not human, Mrs. Brown persisted.
“It is his body that is shattered and not his mind, I’m sure of it”.

Famously, at the age of five, Christy snatched a piece of chalk from his sister’s hand with his left foot, the only piece of his body under his control, and wrote on the floor. The first word he wrote, two years later, after dilligent coaching? M-O-T-H-E-R.

In my younger years, as a passionate reader of Irish literature, I was enthralled by Christy’s writings. Like a younger, harder, more bitter James Joyce, he illustrated for me the land of my ancestry. Listening to the Pogues, reading Christy’ intensely descriptive words, I could simultaneously feel like I’d found home, and also the complete understanding for why my ancestors left there to come here.

“Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
And we dance”

Obviously, I’m a very different girl now than I was back then. Still in love with James and Christy; I’ve made room aboard the boat for my copies of their works. I find odd comfort there sometimes. I reread “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man” when I was pregnant with Rowan and couldn’t do anything but read, and it was a completely different book from what it was in high school.

So again, I find myself back with Christy. (And Shane McGowan, naturally. Somehow they go together, for me.)

Christy Brown, a clown around town
Now a man of renown from Dingle to Down
I type with me toes
Suck stout through me nose
And where it’s gonna end
God only knows

Down all the days
The tap-tap-tapping
Of the typewriter keys
The gentle rattling of the drays
Down all the days

I have often had to depend upon
The kindliness of strangers
But I’ve never been asked
And I never replied
If I supported Glasgow Rangers

What would Christy have become, without his mother? I think about the odds she was overcoming, and I am absolutely stopped in my tracks. Twenty two births? Thirteen children, one profoundly handicapped? How incredibly easy would it have been for her to throw up her hands, declare she couldn’t cope, and leave Christy to rot in a corner? She didn’t have laundromats, she didn’t have take-out dinners; she had grinding, grinding work.

And her love, mother’s love, was so big, it got straight past those who marginalized her 10th child, past the work and the poverty and I cannot even begin to imagine the physical exhaustion, to hold him up as someone worthy. Worth existing.

So here’s to you, Mrs. Brown. I do not even know what your name was. Christy refers to you as mother, everyone else calls you Mrs. Brown, or Christy’s Mum. I only hope to God I can be half the mother you were.

On a list I’m on, a woman just asked a question about using IUDs. It got me thinking, which got me writing. I thought I’d go ahead and post this.

Right after my cesarean, the very thought of getting pregnant again was so completely horrifying, I got an IUD immediately (I’d had one before I’d gotten pregnant, I was familiar with them, blah blah blah.).

And it felt… wrong. Not medically; everything was fine. But on some deep psychic level, it felt weird and wrong and uncomfortable. Someone demanded that I get a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility.

I sat in my bathtub and read it. And cried. And screamed. And shook my fist at the sky, that there I was, a very-educated 33-year-old woman with a newborn son, and in all my life, I’d never known that stuff. It was frankly horrifying, how much goes on with your body that a few incredibly simple observations, done regularly, will let you understand, that no medical professional ever bothers to educate you about.

It was in reading that book that I realized that what felt “wrong” about the IUD, for me, was that it was a form of the allopathic medical community waging war against my body every single stinkin’ day. It was “liberating” me from having to really listen to my body, pay attention to its rhythms, and thereby gain wisdom.

I realized that for the first time in my life, I had the knowledge of my own body to know when the sexual act was likely to result in creating a new human life, and I had the ability to share that information with my partner. And we were free to choose.

I discovered that I didn’t much like the idea that the medical community thought it was OK to stick some hunk of metal and plastic into my womb, placing it in a state of constant irritation, all so that I would be uniformly sexually available to my partner whenever he desired. Oh, and of course, freeing me from the responsibility of having a baby when I didn’t want one. Cause that’s all my responsibility, right?

I used to think birth control was a critical issue in women’s rights. I believe that even more now, but I think we were told a half-truth, and we swallowed it whole.

I love NFP/FAM. Love love love. I love knowing, for instance, that the week before I ovulate I’m generally miserable, so I leave that week clear of meetings or heavy obligations. I love knowing that morning when I’m going to get my period, and being prepared 100% of the time. I love knowing what all those weird twinges actually mean, rather than taking all this information my body is giving me, and ignoring it.

I believe that medical control is false control, an illusion of control based on good marketing spin and brainwashing, just as surely in birth control as in birth itself. I don’t choose to be saved from knowing myself any longer, any more than I choose to be “saved” from my pain in labor, and so every morning, I take my temperature, I check my cervix and fluids, and I make my little marks in my chart. I know myself. And I don’t need any medical infrastructure to tell me anything about me. I don’t need to spend money on their drugs and their contraptions, I don’t need to be dependent on a medical infrastructure to prevent, or to create, a baby.

It’s a kind of freedom I was never even aware of before, at the other end of a little purple beeping thermometer. Who knew?