Day of Hope and Healing (Plus Amethyst Network Birthday Giveaway)

A Birth Healing Blessing

Blessed sister, beautiful one
with broken wings.
Your journey is a difficult one…
that no mother should have to endure.
Your path is steep, rocky and slippery
and your tender heart is in need of gentle healing.

Breathe deeply and know that you are loved.
You are not alone,
though at times, you will feel like a
desolate island of grief
untouchable
distant.
Close your eyes.
Seek the wisdom of women who have walked this well-worn path before you,
before,
and before,
and before you yourself were born.
These beautiful ones
with eyes like yours
have shared your pain, and
weathered the storms of loss.

You are not alone (breathe in)
You will go on (breathe out)
Your wings will mend (breathe in)
You are loved (breathe out)
~ Mary Burgess (Mending Invisible Wings)

Today is the Day of Hope and Healing, a national remembrance day for families who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, infant or child loss. Tonight, one of my friends is having a Day of Hope event for local families. I’m happy to participate and I picked out the poem above to read. I also made a prayer flag as part of the prayer flag project. I included lines from a song that spoke to me deeply during my second miscarriage. I left the mama’s arms unglued so that they can close, open, or wave in the breeze. Unfortunately, the glue I used leaked through, which gives her a “weeping Madonna” quality. I was bugged by it at first and almost didn’t show a picture, but then I decided I actually like it like that!

This week is also The Amethyst Network’s third birthday. I helped co-found this organization as a direct result of my own in-the-midst-of-miscarriage-realization about the need for miscarriage doulas in the world, and I’m proud of the resources we’ve collected and the services we offer to women around the country. As TAN posted on our Facebook page:

We hope you’ll join us in celebrating this week by doing random acts of kindness or paying it forward and then coming back here and telling us about what you did. Whether it’s related to your baby’s memory or not, what goes around comes around, and TAN believes in being a force for good in the world. We hope you will join us in celebrating our birthday by giving gifts to those around us.

***Giveaway now closed. Ravenna was the winner!***

So, I decided to offer a pendant giveaway in honor of TAN’s birthday! (I also reached 500,000 hits last week and I often do a giveaway for things like that, so it is doubly time to do one!) I made this pendant last night specifically for TAN’s birthday. It has a footprints charm like the one that was so meaningful to me, a howlite stone, and also a tiny amethyst heart (and a freshwater pearl). It comes on a simple ribbon, but can easily be taken off and added to your favorite chain instead. You don’t have to do anything fancy to enter, just leave a comment. If you’d like to share The Amethyst Network’s page or website with your Facebook friends or followers, then you can earn a bonus entry! (just make sure to leave another comment telling me you did so)

(classy twig not included 😉 )

The giveaway will close next Monday night.

I also made a diverse assortment of birth art goddesses last night and I decided to make a miscarriage mama with a footprints charm too. She is purple and is holding an amethyst crystal, in honor of The Amethyst Network’s birthday too! I haven’t decided what to do with her yet…keep her…sell her…do another giveaway…

Here are the rest of the mamas who came to life in my hands last night:

There are some VBAC mamas, a river mama, a laboring mama, a birthing mama, a moon mama, and a loss mama. I’m working on adding them to my etsy shop along with some more new pendants! 🙂

New Baby Ritual (Plus Maruti Beads Review!)

Jul22

One of my good friends recently had her family’s eighth baby. I’ve had mother blessing ceremonies for her with past babies and I meant to do so for this baby as well, but our unexpected trip to California occurred right at the time we should have been having the blessingway. Last week, I had the chance to visit her and to meet her new baby. I decided to put together a mini-welcome-new-baby-ritual and have it with just us by the river. I called it a “blessingway in a bag” and I included some tea, candles, and bindis in the bag, so that her family could have the complete ceremony themselves on their own if they wanted to do so. Several months ago, I also received a beautiful box of Maruti Beads to review. They’ve been sitting by the computer waiting for a special occasion and this was finally it! I made a pretty necklace for my friend to honor her family’s “tree of life” and I included one of the gorgeous Maruti beads (more pictures to follow).

At the river, we didn’t actually do the full ceremony that I’ve included below—I’d written it up as a complete ritual that could be done with a group, as needed/wanted—instead, I just read my friend the poems and gave her my gifts 🙂

Ceremony of Welcome for a New Baby

*Opening reading:

Wonder of Wonders

Wonder of wonders,
life is beginning
fragile as blossom,
strong as the earth.
Shaped in a person,
love has new meaning,
parents and people
sing at their birth.
Now with rejoicing,
make celebration;
joy full of promise,
laughter through tears,
naming and blessing
bring dedication,
humble in purpose
over the years.
–Singing the Living Tradition (UU Hymnal)

*Baby name is announced!

A Prayer for One Who Comes to Choose This Life

May she know the welcome
of open arms and hearts

May she know she is loved
by many and by one

May she know the circle of friendship that gives
and receives love in all its forms

May she know and be known
in the heart of another

May she know the heart
that is this earth
reach for the stars and
call it home

And in the end
may she find everything
in her heart
and her heart
in everything.

(by Danelia Wild in Sisters Singing)

*Gifts, Beads, Blessings…
A good idea is for each guest to bring a special bead and add it to a necklace/mobile for the baby–as each person places their bead, they offer a wish or blessing for the baby.

*Sing Call Down a Blessing
(each person fills in a word of choice for the blank space and whole group sings each in turn. i.e. “Joy….joy before you, joy behind you…”)

Call down a blessing

Call down a blessing

Call down a blessing

Call down.

__________before you

__________behind you

__________within you

__________and around you

*Hold up/out baby or mother and baby stand in center of circle.

*Group Reading (optional: simultaneous “anointing” with elements):

Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the infinite peace to you.

*And/OR

Stars give her strength
Sun turn her eyes
Moon guide her feet
Earth turning hold her
We pray for her
We sing for her
We drum for her
We pray.

–Chrystos (in Open Mind)

Back to the beads!

I received the 50 piece Maruti, Kashmiri & Lac Bead Mix. These beads are really something special! They are handmade in India and are of very high quality. Each one is like a small work of art. They are sparkly and beautiful and solid and wonderful. It is hard to decide how to use them, because they feel really special! Since my friend and her new baby are special too, they deserved one of these beautiful beads 🙂 Maruti Beads would make a wonderful, special addition to any blessingway or mother blessing ceremony.

: This little package is ready made for blessingway fun!

: See the cool little details like these tiny flowers? And, many handset little beads on the surface of this tube bead?

: The pendant I made for my friend.

: And, one I made for myself!

: Sparkly treasure!

: It is hard to decide which one is the prettiest!

: Sparkles are my favorite color…

: This lac bead seems ver apropos for a birth educator

: Maruti Beads

: Lac beads

: Kashmiri beads

: Kashmiri beads

: Maruti Beads. These varieties are my favorites!

Be Wild

Mar1

I’m in the process of finally setting up my etsy store to sell some of my one-of-kind polymer clay birth sculptures. As I do so, I’ve been “hearting” away on all the other stores I like there and I re-came across Mamacita Beadworks, home of two of what used to be my favorite necklaces.

Meet Mamacita and Rosalita…

Aren’t they grand? From these lovelies, my sons learned the word, “sassy.” I told them, I love these because they are such sassy mamas and when I wear them I feel strong and sassy too! However, as I’ve written about before, I have a very deep “jewelry memory,” in that I often use jewelry to mark significant moments in my life, to communicate certain messages, and to remind myself of things or serve as touchstones. Because of this, sad occasions may also become inextricably linked to jewelry as well. These two were my favorite necklaces before miscarriage. After miscarriage, they made me feel like a naïve, pathetic fool. I could hardly stand looking at them. And so, gorgeous, sassy Mamacita and Rosalita and all of my beautiful glass belly necklaces that I used to love so much got put away in the bottom of my jewelry box and I’ve not worn them for about three years. But then…thanks to Etsy, something changed yesterday because in the Mamacita Beadworks I saw THIS…

This pendant is one that I think of as my “be wild” pendant, because on the back is engraved, “the call of the wild is not a difficult song” and that makes me think of a Women Who Run with the Wolves quote: “Be wild, that is how to clear the river” (see prior post). I had no idea that this pendant was made by the same artist as Mamacita and Rosalita, because I didn’t buy this one from Etsy, I bought this pendant from the MANA booth at the ICAN conference in St. Louis when I was pregnant with Alaina. (Obviously, I’m attracted to certain artists without having any clue that they’re one and the same.) So, suddenly I felt this before miscarriage and after miscarriage jewelry memory link that felt significant.

Today, I put on Rosalita and Be Wild. And, I feel a little sassy…

Tuesday Tidbits: Precious and Fragile

Jan22

Via Birthing Beautiful Ideas, wisdom from BBI sponsor, The Mindful Way through Pregnancy from Shambhala Publications:

A better photo of our matching mother-daughter necklaces made by Mark 🙂

“Ultimately, what makes pregnancy a spiritual practice is not what kind of pregnancy we have. It’s who we open to it, moment by moment, breath by breath. Pregnancy is not about escaping or transcending physical existence. It’s about embracing it, in all its grit and mess and blood and uncertainty and pain. Pregnancy pulls us straight to the heart of what it means to be alive. It reminds us we are part of a universe that is infinitely creative and breathtakingly beautiful but where, ultimately, most of what really matters is out of our personal control. It teaches us that life is both precious and fragile–and that our hearts are both bigger and more vulnerable than we could have imagined.” –Anne Cushman

And, in considering life’s precious fragility, we need also consider the preciousness of midwifery:

“Bickering with each other will lead to our demise. We need to move away from a culture of blame and shift our focus to working collaboratively in order to identify a range of care options. This is a vastly different model than one group of midwives exclaiming, ‘VBACs are safe, all midwives should do them!’ or ‘VBACs are unsafe, no midwives should do them!’ (This is the same rigidity that accounts for high c-section rates in hospital settings.) Could it be possible that midwives who feel safe doing VBACs should be doing them and those who do not, should not? What if we each excelled at particular things and referred women to other midwives when we felt unable to provide care for them? We all need to take responsibility for the overall heath of our industry by honoring the journey that others have made to get where they are and the roles they play in service to mothers and babies.” –Jodilyn Owen (in Midwifery Today, Spring 2012, p. 28)

Shared via ScoopIt:

Some articles about birth:

Writer looks for healthiest, happiest approach to childbirth – California Watch

Study finds widespread ‘criminalisation of pregnancy’ in US institutions

Ky. Voices: Doctors often push for risky births | Op-Ed | Kentucky.com

And, some articles about parenting:

In not very enjoyable parenting articles, I found myself annoyed by this piece…

The Attached Family » What To Do When You Crave a “Mommy Time-Out”

The basic message is, you don’t need a timeout! Just hunker down, spend MORE time and love ’em harder! You are bad for ever wanting a break! Breaks need not ever occur to you. Bad, bad! Attach MORE, more, MORE! The sanctimonious and holistic-er-than-thou tone is exactly why I eventually discontinued my API membership. I am a very crunchy, AP-type parent, but I find that there are certain voices of the “movement” that make me want to run away screaming and saying, no wonder some people HATE US!

In enjoyable parenting articles I very much liked these companion pieces from Dreaming Aloud:

Dreaming aloud: The Sacred Role of a Parent

Dreaming aloud: Finding Our Centres – Tried and Tested Techniques for Family Sanity

And, I also found some things to identify with in this article:

Please Don’t Help My Kids

I’m more likely to be irritated by what I call Maternal Failure Alert alarm-raisers, in which someone “helpfully” points out something your child did or is doing or is asking or is needing or is located, when you already know it very well and in some cases are choosing to ignore/not respond/let them do it/or wait a minute.

Over the weekend I updated my Handouts page also.

Jewelry Memory

Nov8

Those of you who know me in real life may know that I really like jewelry. You may or may not also know that I often use jewelry to mark significant moments in my life, to communicate certain messages, and to remind myself of things or serve as touchstones. For the last couple of days, I made sure to put on three significant necklaces and the order of the necklaces told a story. The first was my baby-in-my-heart pendant. Unfortunately no longer available for sale anywhere, I very much connected to this pendant and bought it as a connection to the baby in my own heart. I used to even sleep and shower wearing it and wore it continuously until midway through my pregnancy-after-loss in which I then felt like putting it away. Now, I wear it on certain meaningful occasions like on Noah’s birthday or on holidays.

The second is a pendant I bought right after my second miscarriage. It is a small medallion style piece with the words, “believe in yourself” on the back. I wore it throughout my pregnancy with Alaina, including in labor. Now, I wear it when I need encouragement, courage, or strength. I have a tradition of wearing it to the first night of every class I teach. It serves as a reminder for me and helps me feel strong.

The third pendant is the dancing goddess logo from SageWoman magazine. My husband gave it to me after Alaina was born in 2011. It reminds me of my Happy Birth Dance feelings of relief and joy at her birth. I still wear this one almost every day.

Together, obviously, the three in a row tell a story of loss, hope, and joy.

Lann took this picture of me a couple of days ago on Nov. 6, the third anniversary of the day we found out the baby had died and I was going to have a miscarriage.

[Side note: Jewelry is significant enough to me that there are still birthy necklaces I haven’t worn since my miscarriages because they represent a happy point of pre-loss naïvety to me and I now feel uncomfortable wearing them. I put many of my very favorite necklaces away after Noah was born, because I couldn’t even stand to look at them and be confronted with the joy they had previously represented, and even though I am no longer in that dark and distressed place, I still don’t enjoy wearing them. Their association for me has permanently changed.]

Noah’s angel bear and my necklace on the priestess rocks yesterday afternoon.

Do you have jewelry that is especially significant to you? Do you wear it when you need to tell the world something or remind yourself of an important moment or experience? I’d love to see a picture of it!

I also felt inspired to quickly make a new birth art figure—this one incorporating the “baby in my heart” image that I found so valuable. And, it also connects to the persistent feeling I had for months after he was born (until I reached his due date really) that I was going to be, “a little bit pregnant” with him forever.