In birth one is at one’s most naked. Literally and proverbially, one is both at one’s most vulnerable and most powerful. What I remember most about both births is small: meeting my midwives naked. It was an act so unthinkable before hand and so ordinary in the moment.
My son’s midwife once said, “I don’t understand it, birthing women go down to the underworld. When they come back up and tell their story, they come up with: contractions started at this time, then I went to hospital, then this, then that.” So when my pregnant friend B asked me to tell her about my birth stories, I felt keen to share my story, aware of how little we women share our dramatic experiences of birth. I wanted to share the whole spectrum from the traumatic to the empowered, but didn’t know how to go about it. I thought, Where did our oral history go? Are we losing our voices to medicalized birth? That didn’t seem quite right since natural birth communities seem to create their own rhetoric that can feel alienating. Why can’t we speak plainly about this? It’s like some fundamental part of us doesn’t have the language — is literally dumb.
To me, the biggest impact of birthing two babies is how connected I am to women now. At first my whole life, unbeknownst to me, was shaped by men, by a patriarchy. I didn’t feel feminine in any way I could put words around, except in the obvious tropes of romance and fashion. During the first few months of my son’s life, my second child, I left the PhD which had tapped into my self-discipline, but left the whole self-care part of me in a total mess. I was wearing this try to “be something” badge academically, and try to “be someone” badge as a mother. There was really no self left at all, except in my diary, which — because it was easeful, joyful, personal — I thought of as a non-existent entity, a nothing. The patriarchy is so deeply problematic it’s not out there at all, but within me, and not in a self-sabotaging way, but in a structural, wiring, hypnotic sort of way.
As it turned out, the moment I had some childcare during a family holiday, ideas that had been dormant came flooding in. These ideas had been there all along, only I was so busy trying to take my place beneath men (First in the art world, where all of middle management were women and all of the senior leadership were men. Then in academia, where by dint of the absent “I” of the so-called empirical writing style, the feminine was totally expunged.) I want to write from my whole self and there was no space for that in academia. In birthing my son, for those few hours, I was my whole self, my self at my most powerful. Alongside a woman, I birthed that baby entirely myself, without men’s tools or frameworks. If I could do that, I could do this. So for the first time, I stepped into the unknown.
In a strange way, because it was my son’s birth that changed my inner-relationship to patriarchy, a change that will impact the life of my eldest child, my daughter, most of all, this new perspective is his gift to her. The birthing woman in me, is embodied and lives on not only in my children, but in myself, through my diary. The diary represents, to me, the female mind, and in birthing my babies, what was once invisible to me has gradually become my greatest gift.
What I want to say to you, B, is that as bodily as birth is, my son’s birth was magic. The powerhouse of a woman, my midwife, who helped me birth our son in our home, she and I created an alchemical change in me so that a few months later I found myself at our kitchen table in Brooklyn with two friends, raising a glass to “dropping out” and found myself saying, “I have no idea what I’ll do next.”
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