Polymer Clay Goddess Experiments

May13

A couple of months ago, I attempted to branch out from my usual style of polymer clay goddess figures (see past birth art posts). I’m not particularly satisfied with any of them, but I had this post saved in my drafts to share pictures of them anyway! I have some new translucent sculpey that I’ve been working with without very satisfactory results. It is stickier and meltier than regular sculpey, which makes it a challenge to work with. The figures don’t hold their shapes/poses as well while baking and the clay also folds into itself and sticks very firmly and it is hard to reposition/refigure things after having let it stick accidentally before you’re ready). Anyway, I tried to make this sort of “siren” (double-tailed mermaid) figure first and she’s all right:

I also tried a figure using only the translucent sculpey. She turned out looking like she should glow in the dark!

I also had a vision of making a sculpture with a small “offering bowl” in which you could place a crystal or something else. She kind of sagged over to one side in the oven though. She is my first figure with a face too!

So, I tried again. This one sits on her own (leaning back very far), but I burned her by mistake!

So, I tried one more time. This one I used gold pigment on and I don’t really like how she turned out either. Back to the drawing (sculpting) board, I guess. After this third attempt I kind of gave up on my vision and haven’t tried to make any more in this style again.

At the same time that I was experimenting with these figures, I also experimented with using a rubber stamp and pigment to make a flat disk of sculpey with the embossed sort of impression of my Goddess of Willendorf stamp on it. I then used that disk when I took a class in making a stained glass panel:

My panel is on the left and Mark’s is on the right:

Then, this past weekend I became ordained as a priestess (more about this later) and after that ceremony I decided to make another figure to add to my series. I’ve never made a standing figure before and she needs some work. I’m lukewarm about her–she didn’t turn out the way I’d envisioned and I need to experiment some more before I really add her to my series of 3-D journaling sculptures.

Book Review: To Err is Common

May7

To Err is Common
by Margot Terrence
Paperback: 340 pages
Publisher: Prisyon Publishing (November 21, 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-0983872207
http://www.toerriscommon.com

Reviewed by Molly Remer, Talk Birth

Written by a hospital Risk Manager, To Err is Common is a “truvel” that explores the ins and outs in the lives of the nurses at a large hospital and the various mistakes and medically negligent events that occur therein. Deemed a “truvel” because it is a novelization of true events, To Err is Common brings to startling and distressing life the reality that almost 200,000 patients die in American hospitals every year due to medical mistakes and hospital-acquired infections.

While overall a compelling narrative, the dialogue is somewhat stilted and feels wooden in its delivery and the characters do not feel particularly well-developed.

While the truvel definitely has a moral about the laziness or apathy of some medical care practitioners, there is also a recognition of the human nature of mistakes. While some mistakes are due to negligence and involve unethical cover-ups, many are simply “honest” accidents with profoundly awful consequences.

To Err is Common confirmed some of my fears, perceptions, and lack of trust in the decision-making capacities, skills, and motivations of many in the medical profession. It is interesting and valuable reading for nursing school students or for anyone interested in process and practice of medical care.

—

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

Birthday!

May3

Today is my birthday and my mom sent me a guest post about my own birth!

Molly’s Birth Story (33 years later)
May 3, 2012

At the time of Molly’s birth in 1979, we lived in a 10 x 30, un-insulated building – a shack, really – and were completely off the grid. We used wood for cooking/heat, and kerosene and candles for light. We hauled in drinking water, and bathed in rain water. We had no phone, electricity, or plumbing and shared a vehicle. Many people were appalled at our decision to homebirth (fortunately, they couldn’t call us to yell about it!). Midwives were completely hidden and underground. I had two dear friends, both nurses, who agreed to attend the birth.

I was very close to term, and we were concerned that I would begin labor at home (with no phone or car) while Tom was away at work, so I spent those final days of pregnancy hanging around at the homes of neighbors and friends. Labor began while with neighbors, and continued to progress throughout the evening. It was a wild night – raging thunderstorms, torrential rain, and incessant lightning. It became apparent that this was true labor, so Tom had to leave me alone in our tiny home to go find a phone to call our support people. They arrived by midnight, and I continued to labor throughout the night, culminating in 2 hours of pushing and the arrival of a beautiful, sweet baby girl! I’ll never forget the surreal feeling of contractions punctuated by lightning and thunder. Towards the end, I was actually falling asleep between contractions and still remember the dreams I had…..

Unfortunately, I sustained a large tear, and was unable to push to release the placenta. We had to pack up, borrow a 4-wheel drive truck, and slip and slide through the mud to a doctor who had agreed to provide postpartum care if needed. I was curled up on the seat with baby Molly – this was before car seats were in use! I lamented having to go out in such horrible conditions. The tear was major, and took 42 stitches, making my days of postpartum recovery very difficult. Nothing daunted, I went on to have 3 more children at home – still off the grid, still with no indoor plumbing, but some of the time with a car and a phone for the last two.

This experience – having my first baby – was a transcendent transformation. I became a mother at that moment, and being a mother is still a defining element of my personality and identity. Molly grew to adulthood altogether too fast, and even though she stands before me now as a mother herself, I will never forget the infant, child, and teenager that she was. We’re inextricably linked, and while I marvel at our sameness, I also celebrate our differentness.

I had 2 favorite books that I read to prepare for a very rustic homebirth – Spiritual Midwifery, by Ina May Gaskin, and Special Delivery, by Rahima Baldwin. These books are still being recommended to birthing women, and while the climate of homebirth is certainly in transition, each woman must find her own path through the labyrinth of birth.

Who knew, when I was planning a homebirth all those years ago, that Molly would grow to be the birth advocate and authority that she has become? Perhaps my decision to homebirth had some sort of deep-seated and profound influence on her!

Happy birthday to an amazingly intelligent, witty, loquacious, creative, generous, intuitive, compassionate and productive daughter. I am incredibly proud of the woman you have become, and I love you beyond all reason.

Love,
Mom

She also uploaded a photo of me at 11 months–we think Alaina looks like me 🙂

I also had this nursing picture already saved on my computer:

Happy Birth Day to both of us!

Present day…

Today we had to take Alaina to the pediatric dentist in St. Louis to have her front teeth looked at. I thought the four upper front teeth all had decay, but it turned out to be a pretty best case scenario—she only had one actual cavity (some pitting and staining on three others, but not decay) AND the dentist said, “would you like me to just fix it now instead of you having to drive all the way here again from Rolla?” So, not only was the problem more minor than we feared, it is already ALL FIXED! Yay! So, I was able to go on and enjoy the rest of my birthday rather than fretting about her teeth or planning the follow-up visit for the “big work.” We did have a horrible 15 minutes while I held her on my lap and she screamed and cried and they did the work, but that is a tiny blip as far as things go and it was SO much better than the anesthesia route we did with Z (ambulatory surgery clinic admission, etc. Boo on that, especially because most of the work then chipped off—that’s what $5000 or so gets you!). After we got home she was extra clingy and very needy and mama’s girl-ish though, which makes me feel bad because I know she must still be feeling traumatized by the betrayal of being taken somewhere to, essentially, be hurt, trapped, and helpless 😦

After the dentist, we went to my friend’s house who lives in the vicinity. Another friend joined us and we had a little party with a nice lunch and cupcakes. My friend’s kids had blown up balloons and hung them up all over and there was also a great sign hanging in the tree:

I cried when I saw the cute sign! I really miss seeing both these friends on a regular basis, but I also feel thankful that they still live close enough to be within reach!

Recovered enough from tooth trauma to swing like a big girl!

On the way home we stopped at the pie shop for the Boston cream pie Mark ordered for us to enjoy with my parents:

Couldn’t resist taking a picture of the sweaty, wild hair of a traveling baby!

My parents came over bearing gifts and my favorite dinner of beef stroganoff and we also ate the pie. I’m tired, but relieved. I was also feeling weird to be 33 now and said something along the lines of, what happened and is Alaina going to be 33 soon too?! My dad said, “this can never be a long time ago…” and then reminded me that it was a Laura Ingalls Wilder quote: “…They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago...”

Later, I laid in bed nursing Alaina to sleep and thinking about how my parents remember me as a baby—their baby—but I don’t remember being their baby. And, how this intimacy with Alaina will someday soon be only my memory, not hers (at least not consciously). How strange, because it is so total and so real and so right now…it can never be a long time ago.

New Pictures! (and life musings)

Apr23

During my aunt’s visit from California two weeks ago, we had a last-minute photo shoot for some Mother’s Day pictures (it wasn’t last minute for my aunt who planned in advance to hire the fabulous Karenfor a photo session, but the addition of me and my crew was last-minute). I’m currently at the end of the another school session with the accompanying 50 papers and finals to grade, so I haven’t had many opportunities to write posts in the last two weeks. I have ideas piling up like crazy though! For now, some of the pictures and thoughts from our recent photo shoot:

I absolutely love this picture! The cheeks, the eyelashes, the puffy hair, the powerful shoulders…

: I absolutely love this picture! The cheeks, the eyelashes, the puffy hair, the powerful shoulders…

After getting these pictures taken I came across two items on Facebook that made me think about why I want pictures and why I write blog posts. The first was this: A daughter grows from 0 to 12 — in 2 minutes and 45 seconds. The dad videotaped his daughter every week from birth to age 12 and then put a little snippet of footage from each week together into a fast-moving montage of her life. It was a cool project and also so poignant. As I watched it, I thought about my own fast-growing kids and also about a moment I had last month when I was watching Alaina walking away from me on the porch—suddenly I felt fast-forwarded and like I was watching her adult self walk away, like my future self was seeing her and looking back at the porch moment thinking, but she was JUST MY BABY!

So, along those lines, I also enjoyed reading a thoughtful blog post by Stephanie Soderblom about her son’s seventeenth birthday:

When ‘they’ kept saying, “it goes by too fast!”….what ‘they’ mean is that memories don’t fade. My childhood is foggy, a distant memory of playing outside and brief snapshot memories of friends or school. But raising our children – that memory doesn’t get foggy. I remember this almost-17 year-old man’s first week as clearly as I remember this past Christmas. I remember the clothes I dressed him in….I remember the chair I would sit in and rock him. I remember the smell of his silky hair, the feeling of him cuddled up in a little ball between my breasts as I rubbed his back. I remember rejoicing in the tiniest of accomplishments – learning to coo, smiling, rolling to his side – as well as the big ones.

I also remember the insecurity that came with being his mother…

from Left to cry….alone

I really connected to the mention of the children’s memories fading or becoming indistinct, but the parents memories feeling like “just yesterday.” This makes a lot of sense to me and feels true from my own childhood and now with my own kids—being a mother to small people is so sharp and so defining and so all-encompassing that it seems impossible that this phase of life will end. There is an element of initiation to it, of almost a spiritual journey, a defining, core life experience, that I wonder how it will feel to have only teenage children and then young adult children. Will I still identify closely with mothers of toddlers, or will I “move on” and just remember “what it was like” from afar. Since my oldest is only 8, I have a ways to go before I figure that out, but my experiences as a breastfeeding support group leader is that the memory of caring for a small nursling is as sharp and potent as ever (of course, right now it is, since I’ve still got a nursling of my own, but I’m talking about the time during which I was a leader and had no active nurslings).

And, speaking of memories and how childhood memories can be blurry or indistinct or amorphous, I was a little depressed by this observation in a current article in Parents magazine:

For years, I’ve been asking audiences of parents a deceptively simple question: “What was the sweetest moment of your childhood?” I wait so they can come up with a memory, and then I say, “Please raise your hand if your parents were present when that sweetest memory took place.” I have done this with thousands of people and the result never varies much: Around 20 percent say their parents were part of their sweetest memory and 80 percent say their parents weren’t. When audience members turn in their chairs to see the result, they laugh self-consciously. As parents, we hope that we’re laying a foundation of happy memories for our children. When we’re confronted with the fact that our own best memories of childhood took place away from our parents, we’re a bit confused. That’s a slap in the face to dedicated moms and dads. Or is it?…

via Thrive in 2025: How to Raise an Independent Kid.

Bummer! All of this time, energy, and constant life investment isn’t producing any sweetest memories for my kids, only for me?! :::sob::: My own dominant memories of my childhood are actually mostly about my sister. Watching my boys play and appreciating their tightly interwoven lives, I predict they will have the same experience in adulthood. I also have more specific, event-based memories of my dad than I do of my mom and I think that was because he was gone at work during the day—my mom was everpresent and thus it is harder to pick specific memories for her. I think that is one of the good things though—since she was always there, I could rest in that security of presence and affection, rather only focusing on “special occasions” or special days/moments. She was (is) my life’s constant.

(Side note: I’ve found that as my kids grow, I find more to enjoy in Parents magazine. It isn’t a helpful resource for pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, infancy, or medical care, but many of the articles about older kids have nuggets of interest for me to glean.)

You’ll miss this?

These musings also reminded me of my post from last year: You’ll miss this. I think the intent of my post has been mispercieved by some readers as thinking I’m saying not to savor or appreciate time with my little kids or that I’m somehow thinking that I won’t “miss this”—I most definitely will miss many things, I already miss them with a sharp pang of nostalgia as I in the moment see them passing by, which raises a whole other issue because I want to make sure I’m parenting the child right in front of me, rather than the memory of their baby self or the vision of their future adulthood. I also stand by my personal assessment that it would hurt my feelings quite a lot to know my mom was spending tons of time thinking wistfully about me as a baby when I’m right here now! Why would I expect to spend the second half of my parenting journey any differently? The current people who my kids are and will hopefully continue to be are so rich and vibrant, that there isn’t much space for “missing this”—they’re right here and I like who they are right now. (I also note that perhaps not everyone picks up on the shaming undercurrent that I perceive—particularly online—in the “you’ll miss this” comment and how it is used by other mothers against each other and against themselves.)

What I know is that there has not been a single day of Alaina’s life that I haven’t savored and appreciated her. Almost every day I experience a moment in which I feel like my heart is breaking open at the sight of her and how she is growing and just how magical and she is. My boys are so very much integrated into my life—I can’t imagine life without them and so my pangs about them are a little less sharp. They also aren’t babies and so the changes they experience aren’t so obvious and striking, they’re more subtle. Lann is getting taller and taller and I can see into the not-too-distant future that he is going to be taller than me. He has grown two inches since last year. My husband was six feet tall by the end of middle school. Lann is going to be nine in September, so doesn’t that mean that I may only have three more years with him as a boy instead of an almost-man?! Ack! Zander continues to surprise me with how bold and confident he is. In my own family, the older sister (me) was the “leader” and the one who was more confident. In our family, while Lann does boss Zander around quite a bit, Zander is the “brave one”—the one who will go talk to people, or turn on the lights in the dark room, or ask questions, or step up and speak up. They are tightly connected and their senses of self are obviously entwined with each other. This is my brother. It is one the deepest and most profound bonds they will ever experience. I feel both lucky that they have this connection, that the genetic dice rolled so compatibly, and also mildly smug, because I think one of the reasons this relationship is possible is because we homeschool. If they were going to separate classrooms all day, I can’t imagine that they’d be quite as close—their “spheres” would be different and Zander would probably be treated like the pesky little brother and Lann would be the bossy big brother, instead of the rock-solid team of best friends that they are.

Case Study: Low Carb Diets and Breastfeeding Mothers

Apr23

(not case study dyad. Molly nursing A in 2011)

I recently had an interesting experience helping a mother with a breastfeeding situation. I received her permission to share her story here as a case study to help other mothers/breastfeeding counselors.

Helping situation:

The mother contacted me because her baby was experiencing poor weight gain. Baby was three months old and after having gained steadily during the first two months had not gained weight in a month and was still at nine and half pounds. In addition to talking about signs of dehydration, we explored a ton of possibilities during the hour-long call, including the fact that baby started daycare and then weight gain stopped. Towards the end of the call, I asked a couple of questions about the mother’s diet, mentioning that sometimes certain proteins in foods can cause sensitivities in the baby. Mother paused and then said, “so protein might possibly be related to this?” She then shared that she has been on a high protein/low-carb diet that she started last month. My brain tickled with a memory and sure enough in the conference notes from Diana West’s presentation at the 2011 LLL of Missouri conference, I found the note that, “Low carb diets have been observed to significantly decrease milk production.” I suggested mama go back to eating the way she used to do.

Follow-up results:

At the beginning of this month, the mother emailed me to let me know that she’d discontinued the low-carb diet and baby gained a pound in a week. A second follow-up email reported another pound of weight gain and a third email showed pictures of a happy, chubby breastfeeding baby. I was fascinated at the potent results from this seemingly small/possibly unrelated change.

LLLI has additional information about low-carb diets and breastfeeding women here, but it does not seem to include information about the possible drastic milk supply consequences that we experienced in the case study above. I do recognize that all mothers are different and that some mothers may not experience this effect from a low-carb diet (I fully expect to get some comments reporting that mother is on a low-carb diet and baby is doing just fine). However, after this experience, I know I am going to remember to ask about low-carb diets in future calls with weight gain issues with young babies, because I’m wonder if this might be more common than I’ve realized. Low carb diets are a popular weight-loss solution and there is a lot of information available about them online. People perceive it as a healthy choice and may not ever think to mention it to me. Even though we remind people to expect it to take at least nine months to lose the “baby weight,” postpartum mamas can be very concerned with weight loss and may find a low-carb diet a logical “trick” to try. As I reflect back on the numerous helping calls I receive and put these two elements together, I find myself wondering if some of the “not enough milk”/”baby isn’t gaining weight” calls might have a low-carb connection that I’ve not been catching onto…

Virtual Mother Blessing, Part 2

Apr18

Last week I posted about a virtual mother blessing for Molly Westerman of the blog First the Egg. Tuesday, I emailed her a “blessingway in your inbox” containing the words of birth energy, thoughts, and encouragement emailed by her friends and family as well as a recording of the blessingway chant, “Woman Am I,” that my friends and I sing at all of our ceremonies. This inbox version was also accompanied by some mailed items (a blessingway in a regular box).

I enlisted the aid of my friends last week at playgroup at the skating rink to sing a rendition of “Woman Am I” using the voice memo feature on my iPhone. I feel really lucky to have a group of friends who will stand in the skating rink lobby with me and sing heartily for a woman they’ve never met. Seriously, not everyone is this lucky. My friends rock! The recording is available via soundcloud here for anyone else’s benefit. 🙂

Take 1. iPhone on floor of skating rink lobby.

Take 2. Phone on top of trash can in skating rink lobby.

Woman am I, Spirit am I, I am the Infinite within my soul...

Blessingway in a box!

Some goodies for a blessing bracelet/necklace.

You can read about the mother blessing from Molly’s perspective in her post here.

3-D Journaling

Apr14

After writing my recent post about the resuming of my cycle post-baby, I felt the urge to add a new figure to my ongoing birth art series of polymer clay goddess sculptures. I am the only person I know of who has done a series of sculptures like this and it feels like it is essentially a 3-D art “journal” representing different points in my life. I wonder if I will continue to feel like adding to it in future years. I could end up with quite a crowd! My new figure has an appropriately dark red stone in her belly and a clear stone in her hands—this represents the womb-moon connection. I colored her with silver and blue pigments also as representative of the moon.

The stone I set in her belly is kind of small and thus hard to see from this angle.

I then took an updated photo of the whole series in order. Other pictures of the whole series are in this post.

As a further evolution in the series and of my own process, at their request, I showed two friends how to make polymer clay goddess sculptures today and we each made a figure.

This has been a very personal process for me and it was interesting and challenging in some ways to share it with others. The gold figure is mine and the other two were my friends' first forays into polymer clay goddess-making!

And, here we are holding our sculptures! 🙂

Maybe next time I should try making a little step-by-step photo tutorial or video and further share this process of polymer clay goddess life/art journalling with others!

Is there really even such a thing as second stage?

Apr13

Is there a second stage in labor? Who says so? Who thought it up and why? How did they decide what it would be and when it would start? How it would be measured? When it would end? Is there really even such a thing as second stage? If there isn’t, might it not be important for midwives to know that? Is the Earth really flat? Well, it is in some places. Mothers that lie, sit, walk, stand, crawl, glide, stride, squat, climb stairs or hills, dance, sway, cry, throw up, chant or create positions and sounds never heard or seen before are moving their baby from the inside of them to the outside of them. That’s labor. It doesn’t have stages. One thing melts and overlaps another. It starts slowly and gets bigger. It changes a mother’s breathing from light to deep. Her sounds change as her body and baby mould and mimic each other on the journey from inside to outside. By the time the baby is low so is the mother, her breathing and her sounds and her body. –Sister MorningStar in “Midwifing Second Stage” in Midwifery Today, 98, Summer 2011

After having written recently about the rest and be thankful stage and the spontaneous birth reflex and then finally about the
birth pause, the above quote caught my eye in an issue of Midwifery Today from last year (I’m trying to catch up with my stack of magazines/journals). I explain to my birth class clients that birth looks different from the outside than it feels on the inside. Perhaps from the outside we can identify stages and phases of labor. From the inside, we are just doing it and the stages and phases meld into one continuous experiencing.

I love the final comment in this quote especially–we don’t really need tips, tricks, and vaginal checks to tell us where baby is positioned. When mother gets “low” baby likely is too! This reminds me of another article I read in MT recently. (I didn’t save the actual quote, just going from memory.) It was about a traditional midwife who was asked, “aren’t you going to check her?” when a mother felt like pushing. The midwife put the tip of a finger in and the other people laughed at her—“that isn’t checking her!” She said that all you needed to do was feel for the baby’s head—it the finger only goes in a tip, that means baby is close, if it goes in up to the knuckle, baby is pretty close, if you can’t reach the head, baby will be a while. Why would you need to try to reach the cervix or know what it is doing?

I love Sister MorningStar’s writing. It is so beautiful and expressive. Some time ago, I reviewed her book The Power of Women and I highly recommend it.

Moontime’s Return…

Apr11

With all of my babies, I’ve followed Sheila Kippley’s Seven Standards for Ecological Breastfeeding. Kippley reports that mothers who follow ecological breastfeeding will experience an average of 14 months of amenorrhea (and associated infertility). Sure enough, with my first baby, right at 14 months postpartum my fertility returned. With my second baby, I said I was going for 18 months and I ended up with 16 months of amenorrhea before my “moon” returned. Now, Alaina is nearly 15 months old, and in what I find to be a fascinating biological twist, I’m experiencing my first postpartum mamaflow in exactly two years—it was my April cycle in 2010 during which I got pregnant with her. I just find that so cool—what body wisdom we have. (I then found my old journal from Zander and my cycle returned with him in September of 2007…again exactly two years from the month in which I got pregnant with him.)

Moon mandala I drew last year.

I sensed this was coming and have found myself interested in several related websites and blog resources recently. As part of the Wilde Tribe teleseries, I listened to Deanna L’am, author of two books with a focus on menstrual empowerment (specifically for girls who are coming of age) and founder of Red Tents in Every Neighborhood speak about Red Tents and about honoring this time in our lives with specific quiet time for rest and renewal. I also listened to a presentation about “Honoring Your Crazy Woman” (and her companion, the Creative Rainbow Mama) from The Happy Womb, who has a new book out called Moon Time as well as some super-cool mandalas for charting your cycle. There, I also enjoyed a great guest post about going with the flow and spending time in your own red room.

In one of the classes I’m taking, before exploring any of the above resources, I wrote about planning to take a monthly time of retreat each month during my moontime—kind of a mini Red Tent, whether it is only for 30 minutes or for a couple of hours or a whole day. I’ve read several articles that make the point that one of the causes of PMS, cramps, etc. is the reluctance, unwillingness, or inability to take any time off to listen to what our bodies are telling us and to heed the call to take some time to turn inward. I also thought about how during pregnancy and birth it is so vitally important to listen to our bodies, to take good care of ourselves, to rest when we need to, and to celebrate being female—why not continue that practice of care and recognition each month during menstruation?

I’m almost finished facilitating a series of Cakes for the Queen of Heaven classes (a feminist thealogy curriculum published by the Unitarian Universalist Women & Religion program) and one of the discussion questions we explored was with regard to our first menstruation, how it was treated by our mothers, and whether we felt like that experience was related to our later experiences of birth, breastfeeding, and menopause. Our overall conclusion was that yes, it is related, and we theorized that girls who are taught to feel ashamed of and annoyed by their periods, may well grow up to be women who fear giving birth or view it with trepidation rather than anticipation.

I really looked forward to my own first period and the day it began my mom gave me a special ring that I wore every day thereafter for years until it wore through on the back (I actually got it out today to look at). When I was still a teenager, I picked out a garnet ring that my aunt gave me once thinking that it was the ring I would give to my own daughter someday at menarche. While I went on to have a very challenging and pretty debilitating time with menstruation after that—headaches, nausea, vomiting, clotting, and horrible cramps—my introduction was one of celebration and recognition, rather than any kind of shame. I do think it set the stage for positive feelings and expectations about the rest of the stages of my life cycle as a woman. (Also helpful was having a mother who had homebirths and who breastfed her babies.)

After this discussion, I saw this quote on Facebook:

“Our rites of passage create and sustain culture, our inner culture and the outer culture. The current dominant culture is one of blame and victimhood and unconscious rites of passage reinforce this, within and without. Conscious rites of passage in a likeminded group of folk, creates and reinforces a culture of self responsibility and inner power. It is said that if a young woman does not experience an empowering menarche, then she doesn’t start womanhood with a relationship with the empowered feminine.” –JHC

And, I also came across the powerful phrase, “womb ecology reflects world ecology.”

So, I did take some special time for myself today. It wasn’t a huge amount, but I made myself tea, listened to a recording, drew a picture, went down to my special place in the woods, and spent some time thinking and pondering about fertility and the rhythms and tides of our bodies. I also gave myself permission to finish writing two essays for one of my new classes and to browse through some new books, rather than “catching up” with the house, which feels like it is becoming more and more cluttered lately. I also felt like I will need to re-negotiate my relationship with my period, since we have decided that we really are done having babies. I’ve spent nine years with my body cycling through pregnancies and breastfeeding (with the accompanying ~15 months of amenorrhea for each baby) and thus, all things considered, I haven’t had that many cycles over the last 9 years. It is time for me to become re-accustomed to this monthly experience and to form a new relationship with my body that is not based on planning for a pregnancy or a birth.

I look forward to making a regular habit of spending some moontime quiet time with myself. I often crave stillness, retreat, quiet, and solitude, but I’m so “productive” all the time that the stillness I seek is pushed off until “the right time,” which then doesn’t come as often as I hear the call. I forget if I’ve written that I’ve stopped doing yoga (after 11 years of daily practice—little Miss A basically makes it impossible for me and I was getting so stressed about trying to fit it in, that I just let go and then I actually felt a lot of relief about that, rather than disappointment). I do spend at least 15 minutes of quiet, meditation time almost every day in the afternoon while the kids are visiting my parents. That time is really good for me and very centering. I know that it will also be good for me to plan in advance to take some Red Tent time each month.

I feel strange about this return. Like a chapter is closing in my life and some of the ways in which I have related to myself and my female identity will need to shift also.

A Virtual Mother Blessing for Molly Westerman!

Apr10

I spy...a pregnant woman ready for some honor and celebration!

In 2007, I started blogging for Citizens for Midwifery and one of my favorite blogs was a little gem then called Feminist Childbirth Studies. The blog’s author, Molly Westerman, later became more public with her blogging identity and began writing her current blog, First the Egg, a feminist resource on pregnancy, birth, and parenting. I enjoy her thought-provoking writing, her insight into birth culture and politics, and the glimpses of her family’s life in a nonsexist home. She’s smart, funny, interesting, and she’s also pregnant with her second baby and due any time now! I think every mother deserves a blessingway or mother blessing ceremony and I’m pleased to hostess a virtual blessingway for Molly. There is a tight turnaround since her anticipated birth time is so close, so if you read this and think, “I’d like to do something…” immediately stop thinking and just DO IT!

During my last pregnancy, Molly offered multiple supportive comments in response to my various musings, anxieties and fears as a pregnancy-after-loss mama (even though she didn’t have personal experience with PAL, she did know the right things to say!) Her comments, particularly one about the fact that I was doing this, meant a lot to me. I’ve now followed her current very physically challenging pregnancy with interest and long-distance support/rooting her on as she prepares for the homebirth of her new baby this month. I’m happy to have the chance to offer her a little more encouragement and love through this virtual mother blessing.

Here’s how you can participate:

Email me with your…

Words of support, affirmation, encouragement for Molly–either written or recorded (think about what you’d say face-to-face at a ceremony and then, if you have a smartphone, use the handy dandy microphone tool and talk into as if you were speaking directly to Molly in a mother blessing circle. After your voice memo is recorded, choose “share” and send it to me!)
Favorite birthy readings/poems/etc. (again could be written or recorded)
Birth art (i.e. a picture of something you drew, or you can mail Molly an actual drawing–see below).
Beads or charms for a birth bracelet/necklace–if you’d like to do this, email me for Molly’s address and then mail it now, so there is a chance she will receive it before the birth. I figure that all postpartum mamas can use ongoing doses of birth power energy anyway, so even if it gets to her post-birth, that’s cool too!

As I mentioned, there is tight turnaround on this, so on Tuesday of next week, I will gather everything that has been emailed to me and send it to Molly as a “blessingway in your inbox.” 🙂