A note to the menfolk......

Once upon a time I was a radical lesbian feminist.  I’d come to that position from having indifferent, dodgy, and invisible connections with men in my childhood, having been molested as a child, and probably partly being really pissed off that my dad had left me and died when I was 7.  After being brought up a fundamentalist Christian, I rejected the concept that men were better than me because they had a dick.  And when I birthed my first daughter I realised that there was a whole lot more to this mother/birthing/woman thing than I’d been told.  I read ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’ and Mary Daly, Barbara Walker, Alice Walker, Dale Spender, and a host of other feminist writers, and got really really mad.  Furious that my lineage of strong women had been kept from me.  Enraged that men had taken over the world and turned it into warfare and cruelty.  Brandished the word ‘patriarchy’ as a bludgeon, and attended women’s groups.  Not long after my re-education, I had a fling with a woman and slowly but surely morphed into a lesbian feminist that teetered on the edge of separatism.  I seriously entertained the notion of living a life surrounded by women only, to give my energy to my sisters who had been so oppressed.  I read books on lifting the curse of menstruation, coming to terms with the crone of menopause, and understanding the backlash against feminism in the fashion and cosmetic industries.  I learnt about ancient strong women who had been crucified for their difference, and many a treatise on the ancient matrifocal role models that needed rekindling.  I knew that fat was a feminist issue, and abortions and child care.  I heard about the glass ceiling and the tall poppy syndrome and read books about how the science of gynaecology was rooted in the barbaric acts of footbinding, sutee, the burning times, and genital mutilation.  I knew about equal rights and equal pay, how contraception was a feminist issue as well.  In fact, I learnt that everything to do with a woman and her sexuality were feminist issues – except birth and motherhood – unless it was about throwing off the shackles of them. 

Men were the enemy.

They were shallow and aggressive and abusive and rapists and liars and adulterers and threatening and sexist and privileged and everything that was wrong with the world.  There were always a few men that I considered to be ‘worthwhile’, but they always had to endure my rather pointed opinions about their gender as a ticket to my world.  Listen to my conversations with my sisters about the state of the world, with liberal doses of the use of the word patriarchal sprinkled on top.  And I knew an incredible amount of little anecdotes about amazing women who had been fucked over or ignored by men.  If only the goddess would come back and put women in their rightful place as the bosses of everything, then we’d all be a lot happier.

Much to my dismay, I soon learnt that the women’s utopia I’d leapt into wholeheartedly wasn’t all that groovy afterall.  I saw just as much alcoholism, abuse, hypocrisy, gossip, backstabbing and power play as I saw in all the other minority and mainstream groups I’d been a part of.  My relationship broke down, and I had some flings with women and men for a while, and then decided to leave the place where I’d paraded a lot of my different uniforms and badges.  I started off fresh in a different place to try and work out what I really thought about it all.  And one of the first things I realised was that I’d never really had brothers, fathers, or men friends, cause I’d kept them out for years after realising they were all fucked. 

And then I met the love of my life. 

The first man I’d ever come across who treated me with the utmost respect even though I was ‘easy’.  Who wasn’t afraid of my strength and sexuality.  I was in love.  I went back home and decided I wanted one just like him, but not him cause he was far too damaged.  So I wrote about our time together.  And when the book was done I took myself off on a trip through the desert in January, in my beat up old Gemini that couldn’t go faster than 80km’s an hour or it would overheat.  And I met men and father figures and brothers the whole way up, made peace with my father, and discovered my feminine side, that I’d never felt safe enough to explore before.  I had a cleavage!    And sometimes it proved very handy when it came to getting help and advice from the opposite sex. 

On the way home I bumped into my love again, our love story started weaving itself through our lives, and I determined to find out more about how I could love and trust men again.  One of the first things I did was read ‘Manhood’ by Steve Biddulph, and it taught me a lot.  I’d never before pieced together the perception that after the industrial revolution, boys had lost their fathers, brothers, uncles and grand fathers, as they’d all gone off to work.  And in the vacuum of role models they saw in their immediate experience, had to put together these cardboard cutouts that were a pastiche of movies, and books and magazines they read, rather than actual experience.  Whereas women had mothers, sisters and grandmothers showing them everyday how to be a woman.  Which I’ve got to say right now, is often how to emotionally manipulate, withdraw affection to get what she wants, steer things in an unnoticeable way, and create a supportive gossipy network of other women to keep fingers to the pulse of their worlds.  At the same time as exploring emotional depths, learning how to keep men happy whilst hiding bits considered unattractive, and creating a supportive network with other women to make sense of the world.  (Please understand that I’m talking in broad generalisations here, mixed with my personal experience, and I’m not suggesting this is always the case for women or men, and I’m also talking about myself as well) 

When my love and I really seriously got together, we would neither of us have thought we were sexist….yet  I was definitely more pro woman, and he was definitely a bit snarky about women and the way he felt branded as a rapist just cause he had a penis.  Both of us had horrid childhoods that we needed to heal and grow from, and both of us started as we continued, with the policy of no secrets, and the aim of complete personal and couple honesty between us.  I love this man more than any other person I’ve ever come across in my life, and he makes sense to me more than any other as well.  He’s warm and hairy, he’s soft and smells better than anything in the world to me, he’s intelligent and witty and has deep deep thoughts, he has a strong sense of justice and equity for everyone and thing on the planet, he gets angry and grumpy, and he was pissed off with the characters available to him as a man in this period piece, and also with a lot of the attitudes he comes across in women just because of his gender.  The theories I’d spouted for years about men and women were suddenly caustic and prone to causing bruised feelings.  At first I gentled a lot of my theories about men and women just to avoid annoying him, and cause I loved him so much I wanted him to feel good about himself.  But then life stepped in the way to give me some experience.

I was there when he was trying to put together tricky irrigation for a market garden, and had a massive tantrum about how he didn’t know how to do it, and how could he go and ask someone for advice without looking like a dickhead?  He spat about how as a man he was expected to know how to fix a car and a house and put together machines and do all these odd jobs and take charge with sex and work to ‘provide’ …….all without anyone ever really showing him.  He felt like he’d always just been expected to ‘know’ because he was a bloke.  And looked down on if he didn’t know how to perform a ‘manly’ task properly.  We had another fella staying with us at the time, and they both had a session about how hard it was to be a man in our society. 

I was there to witness his pain and isolation when as a survivor of abuse from both men and women, he remembered trying to buy a book to help him with his issues, and found they were all addressed to women and agreed that men were the abusers. 

I was there when he was crying and howling and beautifully eloquent about how much he loved the planet in all it’s intricacies, yet was the gender associated with despoiling it. 

I was there to hear his heartbreaking ache that there were no men in his world that he could look up to and admire.

And around then was when I stopped being sensitive to men because I loved my man, and started being sensitive to men because I was seeing things that didn’t add up.  Like how men are portrayed as unbelievably aggressive, dominating and ‘manly’, or totally bumbling buffoons that never quite get anything right, but are lovable nonetheless.  All the hundreds of little ways that men are told that they’re a bit dumb, as portrayed by main stream media in a ‘mere male’ kinda way.  How we’re meant to be a male dominated society, but there’s no acknowledgement of realistic archetypes for men beyond being the provider, warrior, king or hero.  No equivalent of the cycles of maiden, mother and crone that women experience.  Men often don’t have the emotionally deep friendship networks that women have, so when faced with relationship issues, sexual problems, or struggles with identity, they endure it on their own.  How there’s little importance placed on men as fathers, beyond donating sperm, and then going out to work to pay for what it created.   How thousands of men are scared of touching their children, rough playing with their kids, and showing physical love and comfort for fear of being suspected of being an abuser.  And I could never quite get that we lived in a patriarchal society, supposedly dominated by men, yet men who didn’t fit in with the prescribed roles and were feminine, gentle, alternative, anarchistic, or deviated from the very narrow allowances for what men were…….were shamed and given a drubbing as bad as any given to a woman or child.

Where is the representation of fathers in the world of birthing, and why are the fathers often invisible in birthing stories?  Where is the representation of fathers in bringing up children, and how can their importance and gifts go largely unacknowledged?  I’ll never forget reading a description of manhood by Vicki Noble in the Motherpeace tarot cards, that described men living in a tribal situation as the hunters and musicians, the inventors and the crafters, the even tempered conspirers of fun with the children.  And I’ve bounced this concept off men along the way, and virtually every one could relate to this kind of approach rather than that of lord, king and rule maker.  Shrugging off the assumed masculine mantle of power is not a difficult journey for many.   

I started talking about these things with other men, and was surprised by the effusive gratitude they had for a strong woman being kind to their gender.  We were locals in a country pub, and having a drink one day, a fella named Hairy Dave told me to go read a joke on a board at the back of the pub.  He told me I’d love it.  So I did.  There was a sheet of paper, that read “Men are like a deck of cards.  You need a heart to love one, a diamond to marry one, a club to beat them with, and a spade to bury them”.  I thought it was horrible.  When I came back he was already laughing, expecting me to join in.  “What did you think?  Funny eh!” he said.  “Nope” I said.  “I think it’s terrible, and if anyone said stuff like that about my man I’d slap em”.  You shoulda seen the look on his face.  “Really?”  he said.  “You really didn’t think it was funny?”  He couldn’t believe it.  He ended up kneeling in front of me and kissing my hand, he was so overjoyed that a woman could possibly not snigger at the chance of having a dig at men.  Which opened up a great discussion about men and women and all the rest of it.     

And I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy the ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’ trip.  I think it’s just another brick in the wall of our disease of separation.  And from life experience, I don’t think there’s any difference between the genders (apart from their bodies) that contemplation, honest communication, and deep introspection couldn’t bridge, for both genders.  And that whole ‘if women ran the world there’d be no more war’ thing gets up my nose too.  Tell that to the Amazonians, and Boudicca, and Kali the Destroyer, and Fu Hao of the Shang Dynasty, and the Spartan Princess Arachidamia, and Margaret Thatcher, and Condoleeza Rice, and Bronwyn Bishop, and Australia’s current Prime Minister, and Ghandi, and Buddha and Christ……they were all dudes that said not to kill people weren’t they?  It’s not gender that creates war and the separations between us all, it’s hierarchies.  By their very nature there’s someone at the top, and a whole bunch of disempowered folk underneath, that are ordered to do things they would not necessarily do if left to their own devices.  We could all choose instead the model of the wheel for decision making and creating order from the chaos in our societies…..a wheel where every spoke is equally important and necessary to the whole, and none is above or below the other.

At this point I need to mention that I personally also feel let down by the womens movement when it comes to my experiences with birthing and motherhood.  After 8 birthing experiences and learning from my children and witnessing the incredible influence of a father in a family that hasn’t been seperated, and through observing the vast amount of self awareness, contemplation and pattern busting that’s ensued, I just can’t buy the feminist opinion that motherhood and birth are ‘lesser’ paths, and that if I was really empowered I’d be Prime Minister.  Instead I believe now from my own experience, that motherhood and fatherhood and birth and children are actually as valid a path to enlightenment as any other, and in my opinion at least, far superior to most.  In actualising my evolutionary mammalian imperative, I find my perspectives on a vast array of matters and my self awareness, fears faced, and internal tool kit to be well worth the effort of taking the path less travelled.  And I’ve witnessed a similar journey in my love and the father of our children.

And more recently I’ve been really tripping out about circumcision.  It’s Male Genital Mutilation.  And it happens within days of being born.  99.9 percent of the willies that I’ve seen in my life have been circumcised.  (And I’ve seen a lot……I had to fuck my way out of total fundamentalist Christian sexual repression don’t you knowJ)  Without anaesthetic.  A sexual, intimate, uber sensitive part of a man’s body and sexuality is cut off.   Like a male friend once said….”How could I not have a problem with men?  The first man I met pulled me out of my mother and slapped me on the arse, and the second one cut off my foreskin….”  I’m still totally stunned and overwhelmed by the fact that as a general rule, and with everything that is discussed about Female Genital Mutilation and the repercussions of it……that there is no fuss made about circumcisions which no-one can deny is the same thing.  The same thing.  With no help groups and books and seminars and news reports and documentaries created about it.  Barely any men are given sympathy for the mutilation they endured as a baby, a totally sentient, sensitive, and hyper aware little person, days after emerging from the womb.  That shit totally trips me out. 

I’ve also had this theory for a while, that movements happen in three waves.  The first movement is the radical extreme that people are shocked by, the second movement is the main stream that takes a little longer to get it, and the third movement is the people who were dead against it when it happened, but get it last as everyone else around them is already there.  So if you applied that theory to feminism, the first wave was the Suffragettes leading up to the radical 60’s, and then the concept became more mainstream, and now it’s common to see even the radical right roll their eyes and snipe a bit about their menfolk.  And the result is that men have received body blow after body blow after body blow about who they are, what’s expected of them, and what they ‘should’ be. 

And I’ve known a lot of sensitive and deep thinking men who are really disturbed and distraught by this.  And can sometimes suffer the death of a thousand cuts, a thousand barbs about the thuggery of their gender, and how much they have to be ashamed of. 

Through my life experience and interest led research over the years, I declare that I think the term Patriarchy is misleading.  I don’t believe that the enemy that we’ve all sought out in each other all these long years is gender related, or religiously related, or sexually related, or environmentally related or anything at all to do, with anything other than the attitudes of power hunger, greed, control and hierarchies, that started to hold sway around 2,000 years ago, using many different vehicles, but the main one being the body of the Roman Catholic church, created in 325ad at the Council of Nicea, when the flagging Roman Empire voted on which religion to use to establish firm hierarchical control of the state.  We started to get split up from our family groups and communities, taught to give loyalty to those based on ideals rather than heart, and then during the Industrial Revolution got further splintered into men going off there to work, and women going there to keep house, and children going off there to school.  We haven’t been under the rule of Patriarchy, but of Powerarchy.  And because we’ve been so busy hunting the oppressor behind the guise of men or religion or science……..we’ve neglected to notice that the oppressor was within us all along in the form of our attitudes.  We’re all disempowered in a society that doesn’t accept us for who we truly are.  Because we are all unique sparks of the universe, living an earthly life to express infinity.  Men, Women, Children, all of us have our hurts and our repressions, suppressions and oppressions, and none of us are free until our true and authentic selves are respected. 

So as a woman who was once upon a time a radical lesbian feminist…….

I’d like to say I’m sorry.

To the men who feel so alone and isolated within their pain that they see no other course than to end their lives.  To the men who have dissolved into fear in the bottom of a beer glass.  To the men who have to go off to work when their heart stays at home.  To the boys who listen to their mothers talking to their girlfriends about the latest bastard thing their man did.  To the men who listen to a thousand reports about another man somewhere who did something bad.  To the men desperately wanting a boundary and never getting one.  To the men who feel closed out and blamed by a sisterhood of tight knit women.  To the men that desperately want to be fathers, but are kept away from it by one or another heirarchy……..

I see you and I love you and I know you really wish it could be better. 

I’ve got five sons and I want them to grow free and respectful of themselves and each other, and with a sense of purpose and of being who they really are.  In fact I think I’d really like that for everyman.  And woman.  And child.  And living creature.  And planet.  And universe, within which we are one…….. 

This piece is dedicated to my love Currawong, and in memory of the beautiful Michael Lusty.  Who took his life before I could have this conversation with him.  May he find the peace and love that he thought he’d lost…….

The baby that came bearing gifts - Part 1

It would be easy to assume on the birth of my eighth child that I am a veteran of birth, a knowledgable birthing woman in tune with her body and the rhythms of birthing, and secure in my role as a mother and lover and creatrix of little people.  But to be truthful, the more I birth, the more I realise I know nothing about birth, or more to the point – I could birth another eight times and still feel like I was standing before a limitless vista of birthing potentials and possibilities.  And lessons to learn and fears to face.  Attachments to let go of, and sacred cows to murder……  I had so much more to say about what was ‘right and true’ when I was just beginning my birthing career.  And now I find that everything just is.  Take out the judgement and it’s all just lessons.  The more I birth, the more I realise there is to know about birth……

So to set the scene for this recent birth, we’d all just got to a really nice place with each other, after a long long time of being observed and judged and in other people’s spaces, and sorting through recent trauma’s, and were all cohesively living and loving together and playing and having fun. The description of this time was in my last posting about Love….. Lasted about a week.

Only thing we needed to settle us, and before we got serious about baby preparation, was beds, cause the rest had been catered for.  So one day we get beds, the next day we drive to get our big girl from the airport, and the next day a friend turned up with her two young girls.  That same night a fellow community member dropped in too, and it was all of a sudden too many other people in our sanctum.  We slipped into our bedroom that night and felt overwhelmed and like we’d made a big mistake.  We’d finally got to a good and private place and then invited the world into it, and gave it away, what the hell was with that? When were we gonna be free to be ourselves in our own home again?  Went to sleep feeling slightly silly, distraught and ominous, after lots of activity and socialising….

And then woke up at 3am that morning, went for a wee, and had amniotic fluids running down my legs.  Shock, denial, fear, disbelief, horror, and panic played poker for centre stage, and I woke Currawong up to tell him, so they could tap dance in his head as well.  We decided to hope for the best, believe that my bladder had finally and all of a sudden sprung a leak after all these birthing years, and go back to sleep.  I woke up at 7 in the morning, had another wee, and this time the plug came away, with a whole heap of fluid, and I knew that I had to face up to it.  I was 35 weeks pregnant, which many people would agree is far too early to be considering birthing at home, and going into premature labour which is associated with lungs not yet ready, and a hospital birth with lots of backup, care, and postnatal attention.  After talking to my birth support person, Annetta, we decided that it was safest to just ring the local hospital and go in for their help, so sadly and miserably I packed my bags and asked my big daughter and our friend who’d just turned up the night before, to look after all our babies, while we went to the hospital for who knows how long.

We got there, and I mistakenly expected all the flurries and attention of the hospital folk that you’d see in a tele drama, and instead we got mostly left in a room for hours on our own. One of my first thoughts was about a midwife friend…….who had greeted this pregnancy with a seeming prophecy (that really messed with my head throughout the whole pregnancy), about how if this baby was to be stillborn, or with special needs, or needing intensive medical assistance, then that would be fine……and I told Currawong that she’d been right.  Here we were in hospital.  Feeling really depressed.  A hardened midwife of many many years was our tour guide into the system, and at first she was horrified that I was so far into a pregnancy at my age and with my history, without having had any tests, or ultrasounds, or doctors appointments…..  She wanted to kick us out and stop us wasting her time, so we could go and do paperwork and blood tests with a doctor instead of her.  It’s a tricky thing to try and explain to a hospital based midwife that I trusted my body and the process of birth, and hadn’t seen the need for medicalising my experience or getting information that might haunt me, especially considering that we wouldn’t have aborted this child in any case.   She put one of those machines on me that needed strapping in two places to my belly, and that recorded my blood pressure, baby’s heart beat, and contractions.  Currawong and I chatted and told stories, and asked her questions about herself, till she started to thaw, and realised that we weren’t homebirth extremists, and started making comments about ‘some alternative people who aren’t as open minded as you two….’ and the like. A sad chapter in the war between homebirths and hospital births is, this woman was bitter from the attacks she’d felt from ‘alternative’ types while she was doing her job to the best of her ability over the years……and if we had reacted to her reacting to us, we could have had a very different experience. 

A young doctor came in and asked a whole heap of random questions in the hope we wouldn’t notice he was checking us out, and that was the last we saw of him.  Then there was just hours of us sitting in an unused and sterile birthing suite, chatting, making phone calls to the kids and friends, Currawong popping out for fruit cake and bottled water whilst pouring money into parking meters, looking around at the standard fare in surroundings for women and families who birth in hospitals, and having moments of tears and disappointment, as we thought we were watching our homebirth sail off into the distance.  About 5 hours later and after not seeing a doctor or having an ultrasound or having anything really checked out, our new friend the midwife came in with a pill to stop labour, tags with my name on it for my wrist, and a shot of steroids in my bum for developing the baby’s lungs, as it was premature.  6 hours later another midwife came on duty who we connected with straight away, as we all told each other how judgement was futile, and it was far easier to make peace with your own decisions, and accept other people and the choices they made, rather than fight about it.  I had another 2 pills over the next hour, and time for a huge hug and cry with Currawong, as we realised that this was really it, and I’d be staying overnight in the hospital on my own, and he would go off to spend the night with the kids.  We really don’t dig spending time apart……

7 hours after getting to the hospital, a wild eyed doctor came in, asked about the dates, and within minutes had ascertained that I’d got my dates wrong, because I’d counted from  conception, rather than the two weeks before it, when the egg had descended and become ‘alive’.  Or in plainer language, I’d counted from conception, instead of from the first day of my last period, which is when the rest of the world considers the beginning of pregnancy to be.  I wasn’t 35 weeks pregnant, I was 37!!  We looked at each other horrified, and thoughts jockeyed in my head about how I’d robbed us of a homebirth, how stupid I felt, how I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life, and all sorts of other barbs.  But in my defence, we’d counted it from conception because we both remembered so clearly how this baby was made!  And the date of it.  It was a memorable event.  Other people remember holidays or outings, but my love and I remember conceptionsJ  So as we sat there looking shocked, the doctor tried to joke us out of it, asked us about our birthing history, and got very serious when I told him that our last birth was twins born at home in water and two days apart, and told us a few times in a tut tut kind of voice that we were very very lucky that it had worked out well for us.  He also told me that I was high risk anyway because of my age, and how many babies I’d had, and because I’d had a caesarean and twins most recent.  And then finished up by saying that I may as well stay in if I was already there, and spend the night even though there was no risk and we weren’t premature after all, and have an ultrasound in the morning so they could see what was going on.  Of course they wouldn’t be giving me any more pills to slow it down, or the other shot of steroids that was coming.   

He left the room and I wailed to Currawong about what an idiot I felt.  And then I rang Annetta.  “Get out of there!  And I’ll come visit you tonight, and we’ll see what we do from there” was her advice.  And big old strapping hippy me, the alternative lifestyler, the anarchist, the system questioning one……really needed somebody else to give me permission to go.  Afterall,  once I was booked in and had the tags on my wrists, wasn’t it a given?  And a really sad consideration that was probably one of the main reasons I was in hospital in the first place, and yet another casualty of the war between homebirth and hospital birth, was the knowledge that if something ‘bad’ happened in hospital, it would be considered par for the course, but if that same ‘bad’ thing happened at home, as the writer of a blog that was rather public about my impending birth, I’d most likely be hauled before the coroners court and demonised by the mainstream media and a horde of anti-homebirthing internet activists who’d doctor my photographs so I looked like Charles Manson……  What a shame politics has entered the arena of a woman’s personal choice for a place to birth.  So I needed permission.  All of a sudden this was a totally normal birth, and it was safe to do at home, and I could exercise my rights and just…..walk…..out…..of…….there……. 

The nice midwife came back in with a very unappetising hospital version of spaghetti bolognaise, and with tears in my eyes I told her that I wanted to be back with my family, to which I was overwhelmingly happy when she totally agreed, thought it would be best, and I’m sure she gave me a veiled message to stay the hell at home, when she told me about how I could come back in the morning, and sit around on my bum for another 8 hours till they could get around to giving me an ultrasound….or stay with my family and see how labour progressed at home.  She went and worked it out with the doctor, and before you could say ‘Homebirths-R-Us’ we were getting shooed out of the room, and I took those tags off my wrists, and we scampered out of the building to the big sky, and the fresh air, and our wonderful magic bus that was going to spirit us back home.  The feeling of reprieve from impending doom was immense.  The reminder of how unspecial a hospital environment can be, even when they’re doing you the tremendous favour of helping you or saving a life, was timely.  And maybe that doomsaying midwife friend hadn’t been right after all!!  Maybe we really could pull off another beautiful homebirth.  

And as a little aside and to skip to the present, it’s only a few weeks after our birth, and already the story has spread round the area like wildfire, and friends have already heard a few times how “That woman who has SO many children, didn’t even get her dates right!”  Reminds me of when I had an emergency caesarean with Balthazar, and “that woman who’d had all those natural births had to have a caesarean, so you never can tell!!”, and there were also some nastier comments about how the ‘mighty homebirther had fallen’.  And it sits in a funny place within me.  Like a slightly uncomfortable itch that intermittently annoys.  A bit of a wrinkle in my birthing fabric.  I also got my dates wrong with Spiral-Moon, because the first day of my last period wasn’t actually the first day of my last period…..it was a miscarriage of her twin.  And I only found out that I’d got my dates wrong because I was going to freebirth her in a town 250kms away from Adelaide, and thought I should at least make sure that the placenta was in a good place and everything was going well before we did.  And you know what?  Sometimes the medical system and ultrasounds get it wrong too.  I’ve got just about every detail possible ‘wrong’ throughout all my births, and hardly ever predicted correctly which gender they were going to be.  But what I’ve learnt from my  ‘mistakes’ could fill a book, and has taught me far more than being ‘right’ all the time could have.  And in getting so caught up in getting it ‘right’, we can get so swept up in using other peoples terms and talismans that we can miss the subtle little nuances that were meant just for us.  Like how in getting my birth dates ‘wrong’, we ended up in hospital for a day, and got to really live out some of my most dastardly fears about the birth I was about to engage in the Tango with, and to really sit with them, in the hospital, with all the staff around us, and then get the incredible opportunity to break free, fly the gilded cage, and empower ourselves towards the birth that we really wanted.  What an amazingly emphatic way of working through some last minute fears and creating some clearing around them so that the forthcoming journey was made all the sweeter and stronger!!

And (to get back to the story), the first thing we did was go shopping.  I was so unprepared for this birth, that I didn’t even have a pair of knickers!  Let alone something to bleed into, or soak up my excess breast milk, or baby clothing, or wrapping cloths, or a birthing pool…..  I was especially worried about the lack of birthing pool.  Annetta couldn’t get her hands on one at this short notice, and how could I birth out of water!  Surely there was a kids pool to be bought in the megaplex that would do? But they were all too shallow or too big, and I calmed myself with the knowledge that we had a bath at home that would probably do.  Getting back home again was like a homecoming scene from the Waltons……hugs and tears and many children draped all round me asking for the story, and telling us how glad they all were that we were both back.  We settled them all down, and got them into bed, our visitor and her girls went to bed also, and Currawong went to bed early too, after our exhausting and emotionally roller coasted day, while I sat up to wait for Annetta.

She drove up in her awesome 4WD home, and parked outside, walked into the front door, gave me a huge hug and kiss, and then scooped up a baby bat that was sitting in a corner between the bathroom and hallway doors.  “You’ve got a baby bat” she said as she held the little one up, and we looked for something to hold it in.  I brought out a basket that I’d made as a meeting between crochet and basket weaving, nice and wooly like a mamma bat, and we popped it in there, till I could pass it on to my big daughter and the other kids to look after later.  We both decided it was a good omen, bats being considered good luck by many peoples, and a baby bat to boot…..  And I told Annetta about how we were all sure that this baby coming was a girl, and how Currawong had liked the name Batsheva for years, with it’s meaning being ‘daughter of seven’ which we all thought was apt.  We chatted, I told her the story of the day, we had cuppa’s, and then she checked me over, felt the head that was down in my pelvis nicely, heard the baby’s heartbeat, and checked me on the inside to see how I was going.  The only danger now was one of infection, as the plug was gone, but if I kept clean, drank lots of water, and showered regularly, all that risk should be avoided.  Everything was tickety boo, I was so relieved and greatful to be home and out of the hospital, and we smilingly went off to bed, hoping that the next time we saw each other would be early in the morning while I was in labour, and could ring the hospital and cancel that ultrasound, as my baby had come and was safe at home.

3am in the morning I woke up and started having tightenings, sat up for a while on my own, and then Jess, my big daughter, woke up and joined me.  We had a lovely time out of time together, in the endless seeming hours of the early morning, as I told her stories about how horrendous I felt when I realised that I was 37 weeks pregnant in the hospital and thought I’d ripped us all off a homebirth, and how glad I was that we were home, and how strange it was to be birthing without my mother around for the first time, and how freaked out I was about birthing out of water……  A really bonding and connecting time.  She started timing the contractions, and they were very nicely and evenly heading down a narrowing tunnel of focus towards contractions close together and getting more intense.  In between them I kept chatting, and was getting more and more excited and empowered as I realised that I could manage my tightenings out of the water!  I was finding a position that tucked my bum in, while hanging my pelvis in as relaxed a manner as I could, rubbing the top of my bum, breathing out through a wide open mouth, and rubbing just under my belly all at the same time.  Currawong woke up feeling well rested, and joined in the dance I was creating through the house and the verandah, and we were both feeling happy and like we were going to meet our baby soon.  The contractions were getting closer and closer, and Jess went out to wake Annetta.  She came in too, and the dance kept winding round the house, and in between contractions I was brilliantly alive, and intense, and telling them the magic of this baby.  This new baby was all about letting go of the old and my attachments I decided.  I’d lost my birthing necklace with the Kali cow bone bead that I’d had since Griffyn’s birth, to Balthazar bashing it to smithereens early on in the pregnancy.  I’d left my breastfeeding dressing gown at my mum’s house.  I was birthing for the first time without my mother around, and interestingly, was out of the water and out of my traditional birthing position on my back, that was the same position that my mother had birthed me.  I’d been into the lion’s den of the hospital, thinking that my anxieties and that dire prediction had won, but had been released to birth at home, and was finally able to shrug off all those negative omens!!  I was standing on two feet strongly grounded, and looking birth in the eye!  I was wearing a lanolin soaked, handspun, bird cape with a raw fleece bustle that I’d made for Tribal Fibres, as a wrap to lend me power and magic.   I was meeting birth in a different way than I’d ever met it before, dressed in power clothes, standing tall and strong, perching my pelvis in a way that relieved the pain, and with my Currawong firmly at my side, instead of running around boiling water and making sure that the bath was the right temperature.  He was just as delighted with the new fangled way that this birth was happening.  I was grinning and smiling and laughing with delight at the fears I was facing, and the new birthing paths I was treading.  It looked like we were heading nicely towards birthing in time to ring the hospital with our awesome result, and then get on with the rest of the day…..

And then our guest woke up.  She had breakfast, and was telling stories of herself and her relationship and her births, and chatting to all my people who’d been dancing with me, and the contractions started to slow.  I tried to entice her into the birthing cocoon we’d been weaving, and she joined in the dance for a moment.  But then we were hearing about her plans for the day, and her daughters woke up, and my expansions virtually came to a stop.  I was bereft.  We were heading so cleanly and strongly towards birth weren’t we?  What had happened?  How could it have gone away so completely?  I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask our guest to leave.  I needed to reclaim my birth space, and keep it sacred and for the people who were in on the dance with me, and immediate family and my birth support person only.  Our guest didn’t take it too well, and felt like she was being kicked out, and was very pouty about it, but I stayed strong.  Which was actually a really big thing for me.  Underneath the strong alternative exterior, I’m actually quite a wus, and have often given what I want over in the face of opposition.  I’ll compromise what I want to make others happy before just sticking to what I want and exactly how I want it.  But I was clear.  “This isn’t about you, it’s about me, and what I need for this birth, and who I want around me, and it has to be family only.  Bummer about the timing, and thank you for your help yesterday, but that’s just how it is.”   I organised with a dear friend closer to Nimbin for our guest and her girls to stay in their community house for a few nights, and after packing up she was gone.  And so was my birthing process that had felt like it was coming to a conclusion.

We sat around for a bit, I had a few spasmodic contractions, and tried hard to not feel like I’d failed in some way.  Annetta decided to head off for the day, advised me to rest, and said she’d be back later that night after the babies were asleep, and we’d see what happened then.  We all agreed that we’d give it till the next morning, and if nothing was happening then, we’d have to consider hospital again.  That day was a bit despondent.  I tried all the things that I knew could bring on labour….walking around, squatting, and other positions to give my body every chance to kick back into the birthing process.  The hospital rang to see how we were going, and Currawong told them that birth had been happening and then stalled, and we were waiting to see what the rest of the day brought, and if nothing had happened by the next morning we’d be considering coming back in.  But the highlight of the day was Currawong’s favourite birth starting procedure…..making love.  And this was the first time in our birthing career that it actually worked.  All the other times we’ve tried it have been with lots of people around, and as a purely mechanical antidote.  Currawong’s enjoyed it, but I’ve been unimpressed, unfocused, and interested in what it might do for my body only.  But there was no-one around, the kids were all off on a walk, there was nothing else happening, and our lovemaking session did kick off a few contractions, but that was not the main aim of the exercise anymore.  We actually had the time and space to melt into each other, and visited the special place we create together, with the added spice of immanent birth.  I climaxed quite a few times, and Currawong was crying as our bubble of us drew to a close, telling me that watching me love him was what he was born for.  That moment he was watching me, was the moment he was born to witness.  Gotta love a romantic bird man.

Birth meanwhile, had gone on a very extended coffee break, and wasn’t coming back into the space anytime soon.  The day dwindled into the night, and well fed kids went off to bed, and Currawong again went to bed early with them.  I sat alone and waited for Annetta again, sad, and depressed, and tired after two days now of little sleep and big stress.  She came in again like a breeze of hope, and just hugged me and let me hold onto her.  And then she checked me over again, checked the baby’s heartbeat and position, and we sat as she explained what she was piecing together.  After having so many baby’s, my uterus was looser than normal, and hadn’t quite contracted tight enough to start pushing out a baby.   My body had been taken by surprise by the plugs defection, and a bit like my birth preparations, just wasn’t quite ready.  There was nothing wrong with the baby either, and it seemed like the little person inside had been caught on the hop as well, not quite ready to shimmy down my birth canal.  The culprit it seemed was the fact that my cervix which, again after having had so many baby’s, had been dilated and open for quite a while beforehand, and had left the plug vulnerable and exposed to the hungry bacteria that live in every healthy vagina, which had snacked on the sweetness of my mucus plug.  And then stresses, and moving, and cleaning and the like had helped weaken it, till it came away earlier than my body and baby were ready for.  So there was nothing wrong with us, except a mechanical fault that had thrown a spanner in the works…..so to speak.  And we seriously spoke about how getting this far from the plug having come away, there was still an increased risk of infection to me and the babe inside, and I had to finally and completely let go of the idea of a water birth, as water increased the risk of infection too.  I went to bed despondent and tired, but I felt like I at least had a clearer picture about why this was happening, and that there was nothing wrong with my body or baby. 

And guess what……..I’ve reached my self imposed limit for a blog post, so I’m going to finish the story in another post.  We have another situation of a ‘to be continued’.  It may not be twins, but it goes over days again, and a lot can happen in three and a bit days!!  And sorry, but this birth was far too engaging and intimate for any of us to have bothered with taking many photo’s, so you’ll have to imagine how it looked in your minds eye………….

Trust birth? Well mostly..........

A little while ago on Facebook, when I was talking about the search for a home, a midwife, and a doula, a woman asked me why I wasn’t considering freebirthing.  As she pointed out, I’ve got more experience in birthing than a lot of other folks around, and have thought very deeply about it all, so why do I feel the need to have a midwife?  The question really sat with me, and I wondered why myself.  I’ve always had a tremendous respect for women and families that freebirth, and for the last 4 births Currawong and I have tossed around the possibility of freebirthing……..but it never really materialised into a realistic proposition for me.  But I’m really glad the question was asked, as ever since it’s been sitting at the back of my brain pan, tumbling around with all my other thoughts, and it’s been an interesting journey following all the threads that come from it. 

In my toolkit of experiences, I’ve had a few run in’s with homebirthing midwives that were less than empowering, and a few with doctors and hospitals as well.  I’ve read books from the Christian fundamentalist right wing about unassisted birth, and how midwives, doctors and all other birth workers just get in the way of what should naturally be a magical experience shared by the mum and dad alone.  And I really related to what was written.  When the books drew attention to the observation that many women focused their oxytocic love, thanks and bonding on the midwife, rather than their mate, I could really see what they were talking about.  There’s so many birth stories I’ve read, where women talk in loving and glowing terms about their midwives, and all their other family members kinda take a back seat to the show.  And there’s a lot of intervention that some midwives get into that is totally unnecessary and just gets in the way, like giving internals, and cutting cords quickly, and catching the baby and ‘giving’ it to the mamma.  And after having a less than positive experience with homebirthing midwives, I really got into this way of looking at midwife led births for a while…….only to get pregnant again, cleanse a lot of my negative juju about midwives by meeting one who listened to me rant and agreed with me, and then was present at our birth in the most unobtrusive way possible, and gave me the gift of ‘catching’ my own baby.  I then went on to become a bit of a homebirthing and midwife advocate, till Balthazar came a long and introduced me to the blessings of western medicine.  And of course in my most recent and publicised birth of twins, Lisa was an integral, necessary, and much loved part of the process, and I definitely had a lot to say about her in my writings.

And while I know the statistics of caesareans in hospitals is incredibly alarming, and I get the whole interventionist dance that often leads to caesareans, as well as the scare mongering that happens from doctor folks when homebirth or natural birth is suggested…..I’ve had some really empowering, respectful, and peaceful births in hospitals too.  My main beef with hospitals has been their overwhelming attitude that birth is fraught with danger, and that birth belongs in the same corridors as deathly illnesses, physical trauma, great sickness and slow death.  I’ve got a bit of a problem too, with how the trend in hospitals at the moment is to separate mamma’s and babies, and that whole invasive separation they do with cleaning, testing, jabbing needles etc.  Kinda doesn’t really aid in a gentle welcome, compassion for a little being who’s been living in a controlled, peaceful and watery womb, and bonding.  Also, how it’s really hard to feel safe and cave like, and tap into a woman’s mammalian brain, in the sterile and bright environment of a hospital ward.   But then again, if a woman is really afraid of birth and what might happen, maybe for her a hospital is the safe place that she needs to be able to fully relax into the birthing process?  Afterall, even though much ado is made of interventionist practices in hospital, there are still a huge amount of women who birth naturally and without drugs in them.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think either camp has all the answers, or even all the questions, and I think that both homebirthing midwives and their supporters, and hospital birth workers and their supporters are two halves of the same whole.  Very antagonistic and despising of each other halves, but halves nonetheless.  And while they’re stuck in this anti each other and polarising dance for the soul of birth, a lot of women, children, families and individuals on both sides of the track are being overlooked, seriously neglected, and damaged in the process.  On the one side we have the birth trusting, all women have been beautifully designed to birth naturally, and by the way we’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so hospitals and doctors should just get back in their boxes, and take their hands off birth, and leave us all to do it peacefully at home approach, that also makes a fair deal about the scaremongering of doctors and obstetricians, and how a lot of their ‘facts’ are lies.  And then on the other side we have the medical approach that points to the harm that can come to unprepared women and families facing an emergency situation at home, and perhaps a long way from a hospital, as well as some of the dangers that can be faced when there’s an un-regulated body of birth workers attending births at home.  There’s also the body of information they hold about the dangers of birth, and how fraught birth HAS been in our history.  Yes many women pushed out babes on the fields and kept going, but a lot of them experienced babies getting stuck, and dying, and cords around necks stopping them from being born, and a hundred other possibilities that can and do happen even in these days of improved diet and hygiene and birth trusting.  But unfortunately, it’s the mainstream medical model that has the weight of the government and legal practitioners behind them, willing to send the horses of the apocalypse after homebirthers, and resulting in an unfairly balanced war effort on behalf of the hospital birthing scene.    

And the result of this antagonistic polarising dance in my opinion anyway, is causing many a casualty in the self esteem and bonding of families and birthing women across the board.  Unsuprisingly, with the amount of kids bounding around us every time we’re in public, a lot of my conversations with people we come across revolve around birth and kids.  And I’m really saddened that a lot of women respond to my stories with half ashamed accounts of how they weren’t brave enough to try birthing at home, or they tried and just couldn’t cut it, or they used every drug they possibly could because they were so afraid, or they didn’t have any option because their pelvis was too small, or they had health complications, or they had a natural birth and it traumatised them, or they suffered post natal depression, or a million other reasons why they didn’t give birth in either the wholistic, alternative accepted manner, or the hospital, mainstream accepted manner.  And these women all take it onto themselves, as their own fault, as their own body failing them in birth, as their inability to birth ‘properly’ being all their own doing, as an experience that happened to them that was less than they hoped, the result of which, can put some serious bricks in the wall of their lack of self esteem and body confidence, which then leeches from their parenting confidence, and sense of connection with their families, and becomes part of the general body of stories around birth that go unacknowledged from either side of the polarised fence, as it doesn’t fit appropriately into their accepted picture of what birth is.

I see so many women and families in pain around their birthing experiences, that I’ve taken to saying something like this to them….. 

“Ya know what darlin?  There is no ‘perfect’ birth, birth just is what it is.  Every one is different, and every birth is perfect if you let it be, no matter whether it was at home or in the hospital.  And we haven’t been designed perfectly to give birth, cause we CHANGED OUR DESIGN!!  When we decided to grow our frontal lobes and walk upright we changed our design from the less problematic mammalian birth canals that were straight, and we turned them into this twisty birth canal that can really cause problems.    And babies had to be born a year premature, which meant they couldn’t walk like all the other mammal babies, so mother nature had to create a tricksy system of oxytocic rewards if we held them to us and fed them when they were hungry, so they weren’t eaten by dogs or stolen by other tribes.  You just need to be true to yourself and do what feels good for you, cause that’s all that counts really.  Trying to birth or parent in any kind of way because that’s what you’ve been told is ‘right’ is never gonna work, cause it doesn’t carry the weight of your belief and life experience.  Don’t let anyone tell you what to do, and listen to yourself and your new baby whose instincts haven’t been convinced otherwise yet, and all will be fine…”

Or something like that anyway. 

Cause the biggest casualty in the war over birth is birth itself.  And it is a war, and quite a vicious one at times.  Nastiness and personal attacks are hurled by both sides, personalities especially associated with either camp singled out for horrific attention, and it seems that no-one’s getting the law of attraction proven by quantum physics, that you get more of what you focus on!  And my own personal experience that you become what you hate is also coming into this equation.  No one is winning anything, except for long drawn out battle plans being enacted, and a lot of energy being spent on the fight.  And a whole lot of people are losing, their integrity, their passions, their experiences being validated, and their sense of self worth.  Sometimes it seems to me that the fight just takes up too much space.

In an ideal world, both halves of birth would come together and hold hands instead.  Doctors and obstetricians would study their own sciences, especially that of Ethnopaediatrics and the beautiful works of Dr Sarah Buckley, Leboyer, Michel Odent, and all the others who’ve championed gentle and welcoming births, and provide birthing centres all over the world that allowed lesser and greater influences of homebirth and hospital birth depending on the blend required by the families that use them.  And homebirthing midwives who feel drawn to the trade, will work co-operatively with them in partnership and backup, so that all the potentialities of birth can be dealt with effectively and cohesively.  And the women and families entering the mysterious world of birth will have equal access to all the different perspectives and possibilities available, and have free access to whatever option works for them, based on their life experience and deeply held beliefs.  And imagine what we could do with all the energy focused on this war if the war dissolved!!  If the polarity that exists melted into a whole, there would be no ‘taboo’ subjects left anymore, so women walking into birth for the first time could explore the possibilities of natural caesareans for example, and alternative forms of pain relief, and maybe, just maybe, we could also focus our attention on what happens AFTER birth, a largely ignored realm in many birthing circles.  We focus on the conception, the pregnancy, the hormones, the birth and all it’s possibilities, but what happens after?  What about the importance of bonding?  The exhaustion many women feel after entertaining family hours after birthing? How to fold cloth nappies?  How to deal with sibling rivalry?  How to deal with the issues of step parenting?  How to address problems that occurred during the birth and set up patterns that aren’t life enhancing?  How to ‘unlearn’ survival skills that we’ve been taught by our parents that don’t help us survive, and in fact may be really stuffing us up?  I can think of worlds that we could be spending our collective energy on that would be far more rewarding than the argy bargy between hospital and home birthing.

So to get back to the original question, I guess that on deep contemplation, I’d have to say that I trust birth implicitly metaphysically, but not completely physically.  I’m aware of the things that can go wrong, and that HAVE gone sideways for me in my experiences, and when I’m in that intensely vulnerable and ‘elsewhere’ state of engaging in the age old dance of birth, I really like someone around to hold my hand, and who I know will cover my back.  Someone who isn’t Currawong and my family, who are caught up with their own experience, but who is there to just focus on me and the baby inside me coming out safely.  Someone who knows enough about the intricacies of birth to be able to fix any solvable problems at home, and also to get us the hell out of there and to a hospital on time if that’s what is needed.  And I’m so greatful for the folk that spend years in university learning how to help me and others when we really need them in hospitals, as well as the midwives who dig into the past to find old ways of birthing, as well as making alternative information available as well.  I’m greatful for all birthworkers really, and see the value in all their work and ideas.  I just wish it was something that they and others could see mutually and in themselves as well.

But that’s just my perception of birth, and the best way to do it, and when it comes down to it, I’d argue for anyone else’s perceptions till I’m blue in the face, cause that’s what it’s all about to me.  The combination of all our experiences and perceptions are equally valid and enhancing if taken that way, to the whole.  And if we put em all together and respect them all, we have a really healthy blueprint for the evolution of us all and our consciousness so we can USE those frontal lobes we traded easier births for, to help our planet and ourselves move beyond this warring and fighting over who’s right and wrong that happens in every sector, and move into an evolution of love, respect, peace and freedom for every single thing in the universe.  I’ll keep dreaming it up………

Every good relationship needs lots of time for personal space doesn't it?

 

After all, there’s so much accepted wisdom from so many different camps about how parents, lovers, children, even pets, need some time to themselves, to spend some ‘me’ time, to work on the individuals goals, spirituality, hobbies, meditate or whatever.  An ex girlfriend of mine gave me a beautiful piece of writing, about how every great love relationship needs some time for the ‘winds of heaven to dance between them’.  Currawong and I have been told by so many people, from so many different paths and spiritualities, and in so many different ways, that we should spend some time apart.  Have some space.  Get some perspective.  Give each other room.  And that’s not all, the same goes for our relationship with our kids.  They all need more space and time away, and we should be sending them off to all the other mandatory and standardized forms of child care that other people do, and inflict many other children of their same age on them, whether they like each other or not, but that’s what we all have to get used to, because you’re always gonna come across people you don’t like at work, and you have to start working out how to get along with them as soon as possible.  Infancy in fact.  

In being so obviously different to mainstream society, as well as being a big family that does everything together in a very ‘life as art’ way, we tend to bump into a vast amount of varied people who want to let us know that they get us or they don’t, or ask us how we do it, or say “Didn’t your lot die out in the 70’s?” and the like, and there are some common things we get as feedback from a lot-a-lot of people.  Like I’ve mentioned before, many people feel inspired by our smiles and love and colourful selves, but in the conversations, a lot of people want to justify their own choices in life, or why they don’t live a life more similar to ours even though they wish they could.  And some of the things we commonly hear are things like “I’d go crazy if he didn’t work and was underfoot in my house all day”, and “I’d love to be the sort of mum who could do homeschooling, but spending every day with my kids would drive us ALL mad” and “Do you ever get some time to yourself?” and “I’d love to stay home with my woman and my kids all day and do what they do, but SOMEBODY has to pay for it all” and “I don’t know how you stay sane with all those kids” and “I’d homeschool too but I’m on my own, and it’s not something that one person can do solo” and the like.  And sadly for me, a lot of women mainly, and men, make the judgement that I’m a domineering, bossy, pussy whipping, harridan, who has Currawong firmly tied to my apron strings (if I wore an apron that is), because there’s NO WAY a man left to his own devices would choose to spend time with his lover and family doing domestic things.  No way at all.  Surely he’d rather be off watching sports, or down at the front bar, or doing blokey things with other blokes, and busily suppressing his emotions like all (Australian in particular) men do.  He needs to be off hunting and gathering, and being a warrior, and bringing home the bacon and the eggs and everything else too, to fulfill his male, lion-like pride.  And me, I should be fine cause I’m a woman afterall, and as a lot of people have decided, also a bit of an ‘earth mother’, so I’ll be okay, but what about poor Currawong?  How is he going to fulfill himself apart from all this ‘women’s business’ he’s trapped in, by my deadly spider like ways and arts??  (Is there a bit of bitterness starting to seep in at this point do you think?  Maybe I should get to the uplifting bit sooner rather than later….)  But just before I move on, there’s been some funny times as well in all this.  Especially when other men have tried to ‘rescue’ Currawong to go and do something ‘manly’, and not noticed his panic stricken face behind them as he mouths to me ‘rescue me!’ Or the time when a big alpha male was talking to me at the market we ran about how there were womens’ places and men’s places, and he thought Currawong needed to come along to his men’s group.  I was just in the process of telling him that we didn’t really do gender roles in our house, and if we did, Currawong performed many of the more traditionally female roles, and I could definitely sometimes be described as wearing the pants in the house.  We were in the middle of talking about this, when Currawong walked up to us and had a huge hissy fit about something or another, then stalked off with the Alpha male looking a bit bewildered, and quick as a whip I turned to him and said….”His time of the month”, with a shrug of the shoulder, and he went from bewildered to totally confused.  HA!  It may be a result of our early sexualisation, or our same sex relationships from the past, but we prove to each other that men and women aren’t so very different after all.  I like to call Currawong my ‘chick with a dick’, and he truly enjoys hanging out with all my women friends, you just try and stop him!

And now the preamble.  I’m only just starting to really get how very different us mob are in how we run our lives and our family compared to a lot of other folk.  You may laugh, but being a freak show isn’t something that’s happened over night you know!  It’s taken a long time full of baby steps for us all to get where we’re at, and it’s like I’ve all of a sudden woken up and realized that to a lot of folk, we’re radical extremists living a really different reality.  And I’m also getting that a lot more people than are brave enough to engage us on the street, are really curious about that life style.  And what it’s like on a day to day basis, and how it works, and what we do and all that stuff.  I’ve come from an extremely conservative and sheltered background, and Currawong’s come from a rough childhood partially on the streets, and identifying for most of that time as a punk, and through each other and our relationship, we’ve morphed/osmosed into colourful, homebirthing, home educating, self taught artisan hippies with a big family………………for want of a better description.  And on that journey, we’ve come across so many different lifestyles, spiritualities, approaches and the like, and we’ve met them all with respect, honoured them for what they are, and accepted other folks versions of reality for being as true as they believe they are.  And I guess I’m at the point where I want to respect, honour, and accept my own version of reality as much as I do other people’s, and give it voice as much as other folk do about their brands of reality.  Cause mine is really different.  And unique.  And largely self created from experience.  And also liable to piss a lot of people off if they take it personally, as in thinking that I’m trying to tell people what they should think or do, and judging them by my particular set of values.  I really want to stress right here and now, that everything I talk about is my experience and reality only, and I totally respect EVERYONE else’s right to their own beliefs and reality.  Sometime’s to levels that other people get all moral at me about, but that’s another story. 

Now, enter stage left my opinion, experience and viewpoint, on the whole space in relationships issue.  I’ll never forget a friend in the midst of the fallout of her long term relationship breaking up, telling me, “We gave each other so much space, that in the end space was all we had…”.  I reckon if the advice of taking space and ‘me time’ was such a good and sound and valid approach, we should be seeing something better in the state of relationships around us.  But I don’t. I see a lot of people in relationships who are busy working and playing and being themselves and bringing up kids and doing all the things you do…..with someone who they used to know and love a lot better, and there’s a kind of sad distance between people supposedly ‘in love’, who don’t have the time or resources to get back to each other.  In fact I see a whole lot of people – men, women and children – who deep down feel very alone, isolated, betrayed by their love and trust in people, and with a whole mess of deep down darks and secrets that they don’t share with anyone for fear of being disliked, and a dream of what they wanted their love to be like, and a rheam of reasons why they can’t or their partner can’t and ultimately why they feel alone in a room full of people.  I think that rather than take space from each other, we need to work out how to step closer to each other, and really let each other in, and teach each other how to truly be emotionally intimate and trusting with ourselves and our loved ones.  There’s an evolution of parenting skills that’s happening in attachment and conscious parenting circles, that I’m finding really interesting.  They suggest rather than punishments and yelling and bribing and all those other vastly outmoded ways of child taming, and even some of the more peaceful ways of trying to get your child to perform, like time out and such tactics……….that you should just hold them close.  That obnoxious, childish behavior that makes you want to rip your hair out, instead of reacting to, you should just hug them.  Hold them.  Keep them close.  Realise that often anti-social behavior comes from the behaver feeling unloved in some way, and break through all the bullshit and prickles, and just swamp em in love. And I reckon inside most of us supposed big people, is a little person in pain wanting some love, for some long ago hurt, and I suspect that deep down we’d all like to be held close, and no matter how many walls we may try to build, have someone knock em all down and give us a hug and love. 

Currawong and I spend nearly all our moments together, and miss each other like crazy when we don’t. I don’t know whether it’s cause our Friesian past connects us like glue, or our miserable childhoods, or the fact that two chameleonic fringe dwellers getting together creates great synchronicity…..but we’re inseperable.  At first we ran our relationship more like other folk – he went off to work sometimes, and went off to the pub on his own sometimes, and I did stuff without him – but it wasn’t long before we fell into wanting to spend all our time together.  We’re both big energy people, and Currawong was in particular very raw in his private inner sanctum, and it took a lot of work between us to let each other in.  We’d both been molested as children, so there were plenty of wounds to heal, and trusts to build, and we were so wrapped up in each other and plumbing each other’s depths, that we soon got into the habit of hanging out together all the time.  Currawong had never really had anyone in that deep before, my poor petal had a lot of acquaintances he thought of as friends before I came along, and I’d been in lot’s of people’s deeps, but never one quite so intricate, who I also got to play sexually with.  And it’s just kept getting closer and deeper and more amazing as we heal and peel off layers.  And now, it’s not a clingy pining thing, but when we’re apart, after an hour or so, we just quietly miss each other.  And usually ring each other to chat.  We make so much sense to each other, and we’re each other’s best mates, and we talk all the time about all sorts of wild and undomesticated things, so that when we’re apart, and when we’re hanging with other people, there’s a big empty space.  Not to mention that the common conversations to be had with acquaintances, can sometimes feel a bit empty and superficial compared to our worlds……  

Which leads me to the question……..which comes first?  The inseperableness or the great relationship?  I’m sure everyone’s heard the stories about dream relationships of people who love each other madly and spend all their time together and spend a lifetime in great love – I know I have – and I never dreamed that I would get to experience it.  And maybe they’re so great because the partners ARE inseperable?  Because they hold each other consciously in their day to day lives and deal with their stuff as it happens?  If attitudes sent towards Currawong and I show a collective attitude towards closeness in relationships, maybe folk are too scared of being consumed by someone else and becoming ‘co-dependant’ (which incidentally is a totally inappropriate term to apply to close relationships, as the term was originally coined to describe the partners of drug addicts who helped their partners to get their fix) to really experience great love. 

To be blunt, I believe our society is so full of ‘space’ between lovers, parents and children, and families in general, that we accept and expect emotional distance as the norm, which allows a lot of us to get away with a whole heap of emotional deceits, inaccuracies, and masks. To hide from ourselves and each other, and just avoid situations that ask for too much emotional authenticity.  There’s all these different compartments – home, school, work, playtime, hobbies, ‘me time’, church and the like, where people can be totally inauthentic.  One person at work, another at home, another at church, another at the pub, another at football, and all the time playing the polite dance of chit chat and social expectations, and declarations of loyalty and honesty, that are all shrugged off as easily as being put on. Situations occur where people build each other up, and almost dare each other into honesty and intimacy, and their dreams and hearts start flying till BANG! One of them changes, or gets scared, or drops the mask, or disappears, or works too hard, and the other is left holding the broken bits and telling themselves that to trust and hope equals pain.  Or they experience great love till they buy into the great western dream of a job and a mortgage and a house and a child or two and all of a sudden that’s all there is.   And there’s no consistent person/observer who is watching us through all the compartments of our lives, and asking us why we said this and meant that, and why we were so different with that person than the other, and how we could live with our lies and hypocrisy, especially to ourselves. 

Except in our family.  And a lot of others too, I know.  We consciously hold each other and our children and our emotional authenticity together all day every day.  We notice when one of us is hiding an emotion, or in need of some extra love, or being inauthentic to who they really are, or doing something amazing that they’re learning.  And it’s not all love and roses, we have humdinger fights that explode all over the place, and we all yell and scream, but we’re always picking over the carcass later on, and apologizing or working out why that happened, and working out how we can do it better afterwards.  And learning from each event that happens and building on what we know and love about each other.  Currawong and I have no secrets from each other.  None at all.  After childhoods filled with secrets, it’s one of the most important elements in our lives to have no secrets at all.  And our kids have followed that tradition, and give us astonishing honesty that we handle with care.   

And I need to take a moment here to speak about money.  We’ve consciously chosen love and family and togetherness over money.  And it’s not all that easy, but is tremendously so all at the same time.  Because we haven’t bought into the mortgage paradigm, or the working one, it’s meant living in other people’s spaces, or travelling a lot, or living in cheap housing which comes with all it’s own compromises.  It’s meant not having enough money for all those entertainment devices that I’m really not sorry we don’t have.  It’s meant living on a lot less than most people in our society are used to having.  And though this paradigm does have it’s challenges, it’s one I can recommend.  A lot of what we can’t afford we wouldn’t want anyway, and our adaptations have made us resourcefull and skilled.  We find joy in the ordinary and each other, and maybe with more money we would have developed more expensive tastes.  It’s funny how often you need a stack of money to make money – to pay for the childcare, clothing, vehicles, entertainments, and foods needed to provide an income. 

And we don’t find it suffocating, or soul squashing in any way.  There’s a huge amount of love between us, and none of it is forced.  When the kids go away for sleepovers we all miss each other, and phone each other to say good morning.  When they get back, the siblings that missed them will tell them, and there’ll be hugs all round.  They’re surrounded by a big family of people that love them best, and are with them through most situations to hold them consciously and look out for each other.  And we’re also all very different and unique, and supported in being ourselves by all of us, and enjoy our social interactions with everyone, knowing that if it ever gets intense, scary, or intimidating, that there’s a bubble of family to escape to and debrief with.

I’m going to stop now, cause I think I’ve made my point, but I’m only realizing now how very much more I have to say about all this, and maybe I’ll just have to save all that for my book.  And other writings that are going to be available for you to buy soon on a stick in their own little crocheted pouches.  I’ll get there soon……

 And by the way......I know a lot of the photo's don't really make sense compared to the writings, but I just loaded a whole heap of photo's on a removable drive, and have kinda been using only them in this period of using the library internet...photo's will get relevant again soon:)