Welcome 2 – Every Life Your Teacher
A few weeks ago, we signed ourselves up for a ten-month pre- and post-natal class, offered by the birthing center where we plan to welcome our son into the world. The choice was more instinctual than it was intellectual: we had heard and experienced so much more in a one-hour visit than in so many trips to obstetricians and hospitals, it was like falling into the arms of the Wise. Adela, our midwife tour-guide, was in no hurry whatsoever, and answered every question, posed some of her own, asked newcomers to wait comfortably on the terrace as we talked on and on. When we finally stood and kissed her goodbye, once on each cheek, we stepped out into the sun and shook our heads: where were we? When did people start giving their time so freely (other than ourselves and community-minded close friends)?
Last Sunday was our second group session, and this time we were attended not by Daniel (who as counselor on staff was charged with weaving the group together and helping each build relationship with themselves and this new life) but instead by co-founder Ángels, whose entire adult life has been involved with delivering children, first in the protocol-driven hospital setting, and later in this center where the key is listening and flexibility. I found myself shaking my head many times throughout the day: why didn’t I know this?
What are our schools teaching, if not how to live on the planet, sustaining your life and helping sustain those around you? My son has been asking that. I love learning new things, so it didn’t dawn on me til quite late in my career as a human, that most of it is, in fact, bullshit.
∞
We stayed overnight at the center, in Sant Vicenç de Castellet, a small town overlooking the historical and spiritual monument Montserrat. The clouds slipped away with the sun as she set, and all those stars came out. Dry air is clear air.
We had scheduled our first individual appointment with the midwives for the next day and, as the travel time can be up to two hours, decided it would be more pleasant to be away from the city and have time to ourselves – the three of us. At ten in the morning, we met with Adela once again, as she was on call; during the course of the next three months, we’ll meet the other llevadores we don’t yet know, so if our preferred midwife is for some reason unavailable on the day of the birth, we’ll have a relationship with each of them. A small detail, and example of the careful thought and consideration given to every family under their roof.
Here’s my question: when you schedule a prenatal checkup, how much time would you expect to have with the practitioner? When we had our first (and last week, second) ultrasound, the time in attendance was something between 15 and 20 minutes. With midwives, and becoming accustomed to Casa Migjorn’s earth-paced rhythm of doing what is needed before doing what is scheduled, I figured an hour would be a generous amount of information.
Right?
Four hours later we were on that terrace again, shaking our heads to clear them of dead leaves and the ghosts of the past. Four hours? Some of that time was spent in gentle, instructive exam. A little more was given to logistics and bringing class and birthing fees up to date. The rest of the time was spent educating us about how things work in most hospitals, in comparison to how things work in most deliveries.
Wait, I can feel it now: as I relive that visit, an slowly rising anger and anguish bubbles up from somewhere deep in the viscera, and dark in the past. Not to rewrite history, or to judge in hindsight, but to revisit and process now what was simply “the way it was” a couple of decades ago, in the South of Brazil, during the birth of our two kids.
If…
Women were supported and trained for their first delivery by experienced female elders…
An equally educated husband were able to intimately accompany and support the hours of labor and delivery…
The fears that drive hospital interventions were balanced by fact and debunked when myth…
The environment were not clinical but protective and warm…
A normal, prepared labor and delivery did not require sedatives or heavy induction…
Did I already talk about all of this? The waves of information splash onto my experiences to date, and in perhaps unjust comparison, those experiences feel like desert, callous, unfair to the mother of my children, disempowering instead of encouraging, and through ignorance offering nothing but anguish. The “goal” is not to give birth, which is a long and natural process, but to have a kid in your hands, which is a commodity.
I am a day-two zealot, so be patient with me while I process all this. At Casa Migjorn, for example, why are most babies born without crying? Upon leaving the womb, they look for the mother’s and father’s faces for security. They make their way silently up to the mother’s breast. The umbilical cord, which is still pulsing and still delivering oxygen to the newborn, is intact, and only cut when the child is naturally breathing on its own and the exchange of oxygen, nutrition, and energy has gently tapered off and ceased. Who would slap a child to make it cry? Why? Do they run the rest of their lives that way?
Ángels, watching the final scene of a delivery where the baby is crying, frowned. There was something in that child’s delivery that caused anguish. What was it?
If a child is born and the cord is immediately cut – one to two minutes max, in my kids’ case – the source of all nourishment abruptly ceased, how could that living creature not be affected? What is the source of “separation anxiety”, do you suppose? How can a woman, bring a child into the world with vitality and strength, if she is told without words she is a passive participant in the show, as opposed to the entire show itself; if she is made to lie on her back until dilated, then told to get up and push? What, what, what, what, what?
From my soapbox beside the labor-room bed, I guarantee you I know nothing about childbearing. The mother of my grown children knows; Catalina knows more every minute that I will know in my entire life. All the mothers in the world are joined together by their knowing. What I do know is what I experienced, and the deep indignation I feel is about my experience, the lack of information and disregard I lived through, and the shock that I feel hearing how much things might have been different, how my eldest boy’s birth could have been as beautifully natural as his mother desired… had there been even a scrap of engagement and education by the (Director of Obstetrics!) who performed the delivery, even a gesture of education, even a nod of acknowledgement that the mother is strong strong strong, instead of somehow at risk by default, or inconvenient by nature, a Caesarian candidate as soon as she walks through that doctor’s door.
∞
I’ll tell you what: the future cares for itself, and this path of discovery we are one will bring so much world knowledge, the price of admission to the Midwive’s world is worth every centime.
The future also cares for the past, apparently, and for whatever anguish I am processing now, as new understanding looks back on a process that unfolded as a matter of course rather than a matter of choice; and what I hadn’t recognized as painful, or diminishing, or as less than it might have been reveals itself to be… less than it might have been.
I am not reaching back to judge that system, or those doctors, or our younger selves; I guess they are reaching forward to speak to me. I take them all in my arms, rocking them to sleep and, with tears in my eyes from a spring I thought long dry, welcome what was to what is, and heal a little hurt I didn’t even know existed.
∞
Hey! It’s a boy.