14 years have been swept away since I had my first. I suppose it was standard American Birth that happened to me that first time around, but it left me with a sharp and precise longing--a missing of something intangible and indefinable. My story could have become a part of the quilt of miserable stories of dysfunctional uteri and incompetent cervices. Broken bodied stories in which some hero of a doctor rushed in and saved a woman from her own self--saved a baby from a threatening vagina.
At first the birth work was a sort of healing. The trauma of my first birth sealed in tiny fragments with each baby who slipped easily into his own mama's hands. Every midwife I met fell in love with those mamas as they labored and birthed. Mamas were surrounded by family and friends and toddlers and babies and teenagers. Some mamas had no partners, but it was always the same. We surrounded these mamas and every single one of us in the room, no matter how many of us there were, fell in love with her.
This was the indefinable: love. The lacking part of the equation in Standard American Hospital Birth.
Since those early births in my early doula days, my healing has happened. Now I am motivated by a sure and righteous love of women--by a need to help women reclaim their right to birth how they choose and where they choose--by a radical idea that women's bodies are not broken and that every woman deserves to birth in bliss with folks who trust her body and her baby and who will ride that transcendental birth ride right along with her...
I am now a student midwife and the lessons I am learning from every prenatal consultation, from every birth, from every conversation with every birth worker I have met, are numerous.
Here is my place to reflect and bear witness to the process...
