The Birth Art Journey Continues

This weekend I made two more additions to my series of birth art sculptures that I began during my last pregnancy.

Since A spends a lot of time in a pouch, I added this slingin’ mama to my collection:

And, just as I initially made a polymer clay birth goddess figure to incorporate the “pregnant woman” identity into my life, I wanted to make a non-pregnant figure (who isn’t holding a baby) to represent my return to the nonpregnant identity:

I also made some new pregnant figures for two upcoming mother blessings for friends. In a way, these too are a continuation of my series, since the cycle of life continues in other women after my own “return.” Here are my four new figures all together:

And now, here is my full birth art series from my pregnancy with Alaina, all lined up together representing my journey:

The first figure represents my incorporation of the pregnant identity. The second figure is a representation of my sense of being in the labyrinth of pregnancy. The third figure was created to help me work with my fear/concern about pushing the baby out. She was my most powerful figure and served as a source of strength to me. The fourth figure is an image of my actual experience pushing my baby out (I was kneeling, which is why she is kneeling). The fifth figure is the transition to nursing mama and then the final two figures are those I describe above.

And, finally, here is my series of figures plus my pregnant friends 🙂

Kiva Woman with Womb Labyrinth

Apr14

Today, a friend told me that she searched google images for “womb labyrinth” and mine were some of the first images to come up. I thought that was kind of fun and decided to post another labyrinth drawing I did a couple of years ago. She was posted on my now defunct birth art blog (need to move some of that content over here!) and I think she deserves a post here as well. Inspired by Birthing from Within, of course, this “kiva woman” (based on the BfW cover image) is contemplating her upcoming birth journey:

Kiva Woman & Womb Labyrinth

She’s approaching her “threshold moment” and getting ready to enter the “laborinth” of birth. Her baby is waiting for her in the center. I have several friends who are preparing to enter their own “laborinths” and I hope their birth paths are filled with beauty, peace, and power…

Birth Art: Final Chapter

Jan31

As I have noted before, this was my most art-making pregnancy. Rather than make birth art just because I like it (I do!), during my most recent pregnancy I used it as a way to work on—or through—various things. I wrote more about this in this post. So, now that my pregnancy has been completed with the powerful birth of my magical tiny daughter, I felt an intense urge to make two final pieces of birth art (that are directly related to my own current experiences, rather than just birth art for birth art’s sake!). Since I pushed her out on my knees and caught her myself and had worked on my pushing fears with birth art previously, I felt like making a new type of crowning mama sculpture. (Yes, her arms are raised and not doing the catching—because it just works better for me to make them with raised arms!) I have also written previously about the labyrinth metaphor for pregnancy and birth and so it seemed fitting to put this mama in the center of the finger labyrinth that my friend made for me as a blessingway gift 🙂 She’s taken her journey and she is birthing her baby!

Crowning mama in the center of the fabric labyrinth that my friend Denise made me for a blessingway gift

And, the logical final sculpture in my “series” is a mama WITH her baby!

This mama is happy to finally have her baby to hold and nurse!

I wish I had put the baby in a sling, so it doesn’t look so much like it is desperately clinging on with no support! I didn’t think of it until today though (I made these last night).

Side view

I actually made this one while nursing my own baby 🙂

And finally, here is a picture of my little treasure trying out the Ergo for the second time today. She looks a little skeptical!

Close enough to kiss!

Mother Blessing Ceremony

Jan14

Lots of good friend energy!

I keep wanting to post about my mother blessing/blessingway ceremony last week and I can’t quite manage to find the right words. So, I decided to share some pictures mainly and wait to see if more words will come…My mom hosted it at my home and 19 women attended (so, with me, a nice even 20). I don’t think there have ever been so many people in my living room! Early in this pregnancy I said I wanted to have the “biggest blessingway ever!” and it was a big one. A lot of my friends tend towards “small and intimate” for their mother blessings and while I definitely see the value to that too, it was really important to me to see and feel and know how many people in my life care about me and my baby and who have hoped with me and waited with me while I cautiously made my way to this time and this place. My mom said something about there being a lot of people here and I said, “yep, and I like them all!” My life has been touched/enriched by every woman in the room and it was very moving to look around the room and see them all here together. It was a very crying blessingway—they each stated their name and said, “I am here for you, Molly” and I was a wreck! I really felt like it was one of the best days of my life and was just what I needed. I felt so well-cared for and loved and full of emotion. I thank each one of them for being here for me and for loving my baby with me.

Birth altar table with many lovely new additions!

Birth doll adorned with small items from all the guests.

After the ceremony, I set up a different table close to my "birth nest" spot.

I hung these three lovely birth art pieces on the wall right around the corner from my little table. The Willendorf wallhanging is from my friend Trisha, the super cool photo from my friend Karen, and the firey pregnant woman painting from my lovely future sister-in-law, Jenny.

My whole birth art wall/gallery.

I wish I would have taken a picture of all the lovely and tasty food that was there for our feast as well! It was a beautiful, special day and felt like an amazing launching point on my upcoming birthing journey 🙂

Adventures in Birth Art…

Jan12

Celebrating pregnancy mandala

This has been my most art-full pregnancy and that has been so much fun! I’ve made polymer clay birth goddess sculptures galore, some womby finger labyrinths, drawn a number of black and white mandalas (see example to right!), made a specially decorated birth altar, and also made a belly cast. Each one of these projects has been meaningful to me in a special way. At my blessingway/mother blessing ceremony this past weekend, I was touched to be gifted with many birth art projects made for me by my friends. Really wonderful (more on this later, I promise!).

A little while ago, I wanted to incorporate the labyrinth metaphor into one of my sculptures, but was unable to make a tiny enough labyrinth to stick on her belly the way I envisioned, so she ended up with a double-spiral instead:

Spiral belly figure sitting on spiral birth symbol aromatherapy pillow gifted to me by my friend at my blessingway ceremony.

My current “issue” that I decided to work on through art is with pushing the baby out. I have never found pushing an enjoyable part of labor and the feeling of the baby’s head crowning to me is intense and scary and has—in the past—resulted in injury to my body that takes a long and challenging time to recover from. This is not a part of my birthing time that I am looking forward to. During my birth with Noah, since he was so small (15 weeks) there was no physical harm resulting from pushing him out, but there was the new association formed with having to “let go” of my baby this time in a very emotionally painful way.

So, I’ve been doing some mental work with myself about pushing, as well has having listened to my Hypnobabies CD about pushing the baby out. This baby is doing a very extreme cervical pressure thing every night and when I experience that, I consciously relax and release rather than hold tension in my pelvic floor. I’ve also been doing a birth visualization in which I envision the baby gently gliding out 🙂 So, I decided it was time for some Crowning Mother birth art. I made two sculptures, intending one as a doula gift and one for myself. I loved them while they were uncooked, but alas, I tried a new method—I mixed the polymer clay pigment with glaze and then I boiled them. Now, boiling has worked well previously, but I’d never done it with glaze before. They came out looking like they had peeling skin and were all mottled and discolored looking and very ruined to my eyes. I ended up deciding the one with gold pigment was still okay as she was (she has a peeling place on her back, etc. and you can see in the picture how her pigmentation is messed up/uneven):

First attempt at a Crowning Mama...

The second one was so discolored and bad looking, that I used acrylic paint to paint her pink:

Pink mama

She looks all right, but I still remember how she was supposed to look! (hmm. Do I sense a message here about how I might feel about my own unrepaired past tears? I remember how I’m supposed to look…)

I know they look like they’re sitting on their babies’ heads, but that was the best way I could do it to make them be able to be stable and freestanding.

I also made a three generations sculpture that was supposed to be a gift for my mom, but again had with the bad glaze/pigment issue. I ended up painting it green and don’t know if I will end up giving it to her or not (she saw it by mistake, because I had it sitting on the counter still when she came over):

Triple figure

Here all of them all together with my belly cast as backdrop 🙂

While I was at the painting, I also painted a mother-baby figure that my friend Summer made for me as a blessingway gift (don’t I have nice friends?! This was one of her first attempts at creating birth art and I was touched that she gave it to me! She left it white, saying that I could paint it if I wanted to. So, I painted it sparkly purple :))

I decided to redeem myself artistically by making a new Crowning Mama figure the following day. This one I applied pigment to in my usual way and decided to bake. Interestingly, I accidentally set the oven for 350 degrees, rather than the normal setting for polymer clay! Yikes! When I got her out, the tips of her hands were smoking! (I’m reaching now, but perhaps some kind of subtle “ring of fire” issue being manifested here…;))And, the pigment turned from purple to blue in some places, which actually isn’t a bad effect, but is also not normal! And, I am critical of the shape of her arms—too fat, long, and no graceful taper like some of my others.

Now, I have to decide whether I’m going for round three or not! (Perhaps there is a lesson to be found here in that birth isn’t supposed to be perfect and neither is birth art.) I feel like accomplished my original goal, which was to make a positive crowning/pushing image for myself—I thought all kinds of helpful, “open” thoughts while creating this last one especially and imagined welcoming the feeling of the baby’s head, rather than feeling fearful of it! So, she reminds me of that feeling. And, maybe she—and thus, myself–are actually good enough after all.

Belly Cast

Jan12

I feel like I have about 15,000 blog posts that I want to write before my new baby is born! I’m also trying to add content from articles that I’ve had published over the years—some of my best stuff is in those articles and I feel like sharing the pre-print versions on my own website at last! Those things can obviously wait, but the posts that I have swirling around that have to do with pregnancy, I want to post NOW, while I’m still pregnant and while the feelings are fresh, not as retrospective posts later. It has been a different experience to blog while pregnant and it has definitely shifted the direction and tone of a lot of the posts I make to this blog—much more personal and less educational. I’ve also found that family and friends have begun reading my blog during my pregnancy, when they didn’t before, so I also like sharing things with them in this way.

Since I only have about 20 minutes right now, I’ll go with the shortest subject first, not the one I most want to write about (which is my blessingway last week—however, I think I feel a little too filled with emotion over it to really write about it the way I’d like to do, but I do have plenty of pictures I want to share).

On Sunday afternoon (38w1d), we made my belly cast! I seriously underestimated what a chilly experience it would be to make a

Trying to look enthusiastic despite the trickling...

belly cast in January! Yikes! My only other casting experience was in May (2006)—very different. For this one, we decided to make it with me standing up (for fullest shape) and so I stood in front of the furnace vent, but it didn’t help much. Even though the water was warm, it quickly chilled down as soon as the plaster was applied and ran in slow torturous trickles into my underwear and then

down my legs and into my socks. My heels also started to feel stone bruised from standing on the hard floor without moving (I did stand on a towel, but it didn’t help much!). If I shifted

them, Mark would complain that it was messing up his sculpting!

I’m really glad we did it and I’m glad to have an accommodating husband who doesn’t think something like this is silly or weird. I do not plan to actually paint the cast until after she is born. I am thinking of doing a black and white design on it similar to the mandalas I’ve been drawing during this pregnancy.

Finished (still unpainted) cast

Aside from “buying car seat” (which is winging its way here right now via site-to-store shipping), making the belly cast was my very last pre-baby “to-do.” Of course, I’ve now added, “finish blessingway and birth art blog posts…and a couple more…and maybe a couple more” to said list!

Finishing Up!

Jan5

I have had a crabby and annoying day for much of the day, which is not the frame of mind I envisioned being in when writing this post! I originally set out to write about what a nice time I’ve been having the last couple of days, sooooo….going to just write and perhaps I’ll recapture some of the peace and sense of harmony that was prompting me to write in the first place!

On Sunday, I had a very delightful time spontaneously working on the birth altar I planned to make. When I say spontaneous, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t know I was going to do it—I knew I was, someday—just that I suddenly started working on it and basically didn’t quit until I was finished and it came together in a perfect way for me. I felt so good and content after making it. Inspired by that experience, I then wrote down a list of my fears about the birth (this was also on my to-do-before-actual-birthing-day list) and then did a Hypnobabies “fear release” session after that. And, then I burned them all up in the kitchen sink. More good feelings!

Also on Sunday, while the kids were at my parents’ house, I worked in the bedroom getting all of the baby’s clothes sorted and into the right boxes as well as assembling my special tub of birth supplies so that everything is easily available in one place and no one has to ask me for anything—I even put a box of raspberry leaf tea in, which could also easily just stay in the cupboard where it usually lives, but it is right there with everything else now. While I was doing this, Mark worked on sorting out his own clothes and decluttering the closet. We also decluttered some of the “hot spots” on our kitchen counters that attract random piles of nothing important. So, more good feelings about that!

The next morning, I woke up before the kids and did the Hypnobabies “visualize your perfect birth” exercise (not a CD, my imagination). It suggested spending about 5 minutes and I spent almost 20 minutes—since I am having some strange “death” fears about this birth, I went ahead and carried the visualization through to my being 89 and then to the baby being 89 ;-D Maybe this was excessive, but I felt good about it—ending the visualization with just the initial “hi, baby!” moment didn’t feel like enough to me! So, then I felt really positive and complete about that 🙂 I also finished my birth altar that morning—I put a glaze over the images, took pictures, etc. I also listened to the pregnancy and birth affirmations from Hypnobabies while I did some of my other work. Later, we went on a nature exploration walk in the woods to enjoy the nice weather and when we came back, I read some of my kids’ homebirth books to them—Welcome with Love, Runa’s Birth, and We’re Having a Homebirth. They are excited and want to be there when the baby is born, but I’m strongly leaning toward only having them present if they happen to wake up. I don’t know that I want them woken up if they’re not ready (I realized this for sure after Z mentioned how he is going to be “screaming” when the baby is born. Um. No, thanks on that).

Then, on Tuesday, I had some more belly pictures taken. It is fun to be “special” and get my pictures taken 🙂 I love all of the ones I’ve seen so far from this shoot, but these two are really good!

Today, I had my first prenatal appointment with my midwife at our own house. I’ve spent the entire pregnancy not being able to picture her in our home and so, now, I can—because she’s actually been here. I hadn’t really realized before that she hasn’t really ever met Mark or my mom, other than very short introductions about 6 years ago! She seems to think I will have the baby early—baby’s head is very low (which I can feel, for sure!) and she said my amniotic fluid has decreased. She also thinks baby is on the small side, but I think I will fool people once again. I only measure 33 weeks, which is kind of funny, because I wonder what I would look like measuring 40 weeks—I guess pretty extreme! I have been having a lot of pre-birthing waves (trying out my Hypnobabies words!). I always do, but they’ve definitely increased in frequency to about every 15-20 minutes throughout the day. I also reminded her that I don’t expect to call her until near the end, because what I want from her is immediate postpartum help—I like being almost alone during my birthing time (more Hypnobabies words. I like this one especially—it isn’t “labor” it is my “birthing time.” :))

After the midwife left, my mom stayed and we went through my box of birth supplies so she knows what is where. I also made sure she knows how to use my camera because she is on picture-duty. I also showed Mark and my mom the things I learned about neonatal resuscitation at the training I attended last month and we practiced with my resuscitation bag so that we all know how to do “positive pressure ventilation” and chest compressions on a newborn now. I know this might seem kind of over the top, but I find it very empowering to know how to do these things now—they always seemed “mysterious” and specialized before—and it doesn’t make me feel like I’m planning for a “worst case,” but that I’ve completely resolved any fear I had about things I wouldn’t know how to do for my own baby if I was giving birth alone! We’ve been talking about needing to do this since the end of Dec., so it felt very good to get everything all squared away in this manner.

Really the only things left I’d like to get done now before she is born are the belly cast and my blessingway and to crochet one more hat for her! (Of course, I have non-birth/non-baby things in abundance that I’d also like to get done—double checking the exam questions for my online class, finalizing the FoMM newsletter, submitting two articles, finalizing some the blog posts in my drafts folder, etc., etc., etc. , <sob>), but right now my mind is on the specifically getting-ready-for-baby to-dos and I’ve done ’em! Go, me!

Birth Altar

Jan5

Inspired by the birth altars by artist Amy Swagman of The Mandala Journey, I decided I wanted to make a special birth altar for this upcoming birth. My mom bought me a small, unfinished curio cabinet/shadow box from Hobby Lobby to use for this purpose (thanks, Mom!). The first thing I did was to paint it “placenta red” using a blend of red and purple paints to get the shade I wanted. This is my favorite “power” color:

Door open (door is glass, but it doesn't show up in the pictures and looks like an empty frame).

I had a variety of postcards, tags, and inspirational words saved and some of them posted on the wall by my computer. I decided it was time to do something with all these accumulated goodies. I made a reversible, removable card to insert into the front door of the box. For the front panel, I used a card that I bought from Birthing from Within with the “kiva woman” painting that I really love and connect with. I didn’t like cutting it up, but it was worth it! Around the edges I picked words from the tag that came with a shirt I purchased from WYSH (though the quotes are intended to be about the parenting journey, they are amazingly apropos for birth—which, of course, is part of the parenting journey too). I also used some of the tear off pages from a little “happy thoughts” sort of page-a-day calendar that I had a couple of years ago from the $1 Shop (again, totally appropriate for birth, even though it wasn’t the original purpose). Finally, my paper-hoarding tendencies have come in handy, because these little words of wisdom were perfect! Part of me felt like I “shouldn’t” have so many words as part of my birth altar—birth brain doesn’t really “speak” in words, but words are my thing and my “medium,” so to speak, so I followed my intuition and I loved how it turned out. It is perfect 🙂

First side of reversible card

I am less happy with the second side—I was going for less wordy on it and maybe I should have worded it up too! The upper left hand corner is a linoleum block print carved by my husband 🙂

Second side of reversible card

Front of the altar with card inside:

Inside of door with card inside:

For the back, I had a small collection of items that are round and so I thought they seemed to go together. In the center, I attached the womb labyrinth I made a couple of weeks ago. In the upper right hand corner is one of the black and white drawings that I’ve been doing that my mom modified and cut into a linoleum block print as well. The lower left hand corner is a postcard version of a womb labyrinth that I drew in 2007.

Then, I filled it up with some things that hold meaning to me that usually are around my house in various places including two of my polymer clay birth goddess sculptures. I included two little LED tea lights, which look really cool in there in real life, but are less cool in the pictures. I also put in a little plastic baby, which might be kind of weird—I can’t decide…

Remember the reversible card? Now the front is also the inside panel! 🙂

With card removed and door closed.

Opened all the way with front and back both visible.

This was officially the most fun and rewarding birth project I’ve worked on 🙂

Seated Mountain Pose

Dec11

I have a special affinity for pregnant seated mountain pose images. My logo and the polymer birth goddess sculptures I make are both in that yoga pose. So, during my recent maternity photo session, I wanted to include seated mountain pose as one of the pictures 🙂

Speaking of yoga poses, one of my favorite pictures from the session is of my friend/doula/colleague and I in a Two Moons partner yoga pose. Our alignment isn’t the best of the best (primarily because we had to both fit in the picture!)

More Birth Art!

Nov22

On Saturday, I became inspired to create some new birth art and worked on it rather than the other work that was on my list.

I wanted to make a “womb labyrinth” finger labyrinth and after some experimentation and a LOT of time, I made this one, using a drawing I previously created as my model:

This was my original drawing from 2007 on which I based the clay design:

Since I had the polymer clay out, I couldn’t resist making another one of my birth goddess sculptures. This one I colored using gold pigment and she looks very royal. I feel like making these sculptures has helped me integrate “pregnant woman” back into my identity and I really like this one in particular:

And, here is a picture of the two together—a nice day’s work if I do say so myself 🙂 And, more consistent with my “savoring” and self-care goals than some of the other things that I had on my list for the day (but hey, write two book reviews was on there and I did that too!)