A Healthy Baby A Healthy Mother - Is it Enough?
There have been numerous articles addressing the statement many women hear after a traumatic birth ..
“At least you’ve got a healthy baby that’s all that matters”
This societal chorus of disregard is becoming more rampant – swaddle a woman’s emotional expression and distract her from her inner cries that need to be felt, seen, heard. Why do we, as a collective, endorse this?
What is at the core of this wrapping and putting her voice to sleep mentality?
Why can we not see that a healthy well supported mother is equally as important as her healthy well baby and that the dance of togetherness is critical?
I see many problems and the one I want to address here is this; the deep, gritty, raw aspects of birth to becoming a mother are not addressed not given the space to truly plunge into the depths of a psychological excavation.The conversation around conception, pregnancy, birth and mothering must come from an authentic feminine expression that is spoken in her vocabulary, her language rather than from, an at times, superficial language that skims the surface of the journey into the underworld. What gets bandied about in general mainstream “speak” of pregnancy birth and beyond does not go to the hard places of truthfulness where mothers can let it all hang out – we might be hanging out our clean baby’s blankets whilst leaving our white lies left soaking in bleach. It is as though those of us whom express the dirty, raw, challenging, ecstatic, confusing, difficult hidden gems of the journey have to somehow tone down our experience in order to refrain from looking and acting as though we may be out of control or hysterical women, who are infact in need of love and support. We shove Her angst into the back drawer of our psyche and get on with being grateful. I despise this limitation and have always challenged the status quo because this disregard has been going on too long and needs to stop ! It’s no longer good enough!
Women must invest in speaking the language of the feminine from now and forever more so we can all be grateful that we have a collective access to our authentic womb song.
We need to bring birth back to where she rightly shines and place our Crowns upon the throne of Life’s deepest sacred offering. The place where every mother has the non negotiable right to express it all in her own words and actions. Where she can,with her baby, freely integrate their birth experience exactly as she needs in a field of contemplation and revelation that summons courage with clarity.
In my mind there is no question that in order for the Humanity to expand into Love states we need to revere this birthing rite of passage so mothers and babies can simply be all that they are without hiding, trimming and morphing into a pretzel to placate a comfortable society view of ‘how grateful we should be’ to be holding our healthy baby while we diminish ourselves. Sisters can do it for themselves thank you very much !
