Birth, Sex and Death

I hope I'm not messing with any blogging protocols, but I was reading through my blog to answer comments, and got to my guest post on Janet Frasers blog, and noticed there were no comments to answer.  So I went off and had a read again, and I just love what I wrote.  It really sums up last year for me.  And for what a lot of other people around me were going through too.  And I'm not convinced that you mob went off to have a read of it, cause it was all a bit different.  And I also really want to have it in all it's glory on my blog.  So I'm going to repost it as a post on my blog.  Have a read again even if you did before, maybe you'll get something new out of it.  I know I just did.....

Birth, Sex and Death

From the moment we're born, we want to go back.  Back to the womb.  Back to our source.  Back to that complete and total feeling of oneness.  Back to the experience of being inside someone else's skin, with them everywhere they go, hearing the noises they hear, the temperatures and environments, the foods and drinks, the thoughts and conversations, the fears and intense life events.......on the inside, cocooned in a warm, salty liquid that cushions us from extremes.  The sense of connection with every event, sitting sleepy inside, gently bouncing round, the completeness of your being sparking off the surrounding world.  

The critical experiential time at the beginning of the journey of life, from which we all come, and to which we all wish to return.  Young children and babies remember well the complete melting of two become one.  Or three become one.  And more are possible.  Serious little Spiral-Moon sitting next to me as a three year old, asking me all about how they cut my belly, and where they cut to get Balthazar out.  All the details of the amount of time it took, and how many layers there was between my belly and the world, and how they'd sewn me up again, and how both of us were allright now.  Till her questions had been answered, and she seriously pronounced that if they could cut him out, they could cut her back in, and it was time for her to go back into my belly now....

And just the other week, as we sat around some time during the day, we were talking about the urge to go back to the womb, and even Griff the nerf gun toting 10 year old who loves to watch scary movies, had a kinda coy smile and could recognise that feeling.  And Balthazar has quite sternly told me that he needs to go back to my belly a few times now, since Zarrathustra has been born.  Unfortunately, the desire to go back to the womb can sometimes be associated with a bit of terseness with the newborn baby, that's stolen the role of baby from the recently grown and moved over one.  Which is maybe similar to the terseness we feel as adults, when someone or something is standing in the way of us and something or someone with which we feel connected.  

The main reason we opted for a lotus birth with Spiral-Moon and Balthazar, was something more than the increased blood that the new born has access to with their cord and placenta intact, and the other physical and metaphysical benefits.  It was due more to the realisation that from the moment the egg and sperm meet, the union splits into two, and half becomes the baby, while the other half becomes the placenta.  The placenta and cord sit as twin to even babies that are solitary in the womb.  As provider, protector, pillow, plaything.  And when it was pointed out that many adults miss their placenta friend, that was so quickly whisked way to die alone, and replace it with purses, glasses,  bags, water bottle holders........anything that's a desirable object at the end of a cord........it kinda worked for me.  I've got a water bottle and crocheted holder that I get slightly panicky about going missing.  It comes with me everywhere.

It was one of the most profound experiences of my life.  Being escorted through the sac, the umbilical cord, and the placenta, and how it would have all sat inside me, and around her after Spiral-Moons birth.  Our escort being the amazing Rosey midwife, who'd known when Spiral was going to be born, and had travelled most of the 250km trip in her birthing packed car, before we even called.  And then over the next couple of days, watching the literal balance shifting between a baby who kep her eyes closed longer than any other baby I've had, slowly coming into waking, as the placenta she was attached to slowly died.  And the moment it all detached, she woke up completely to the world, ready to completely engage.

And her birth as my fourth child, was the first time I'd ever met one of my placenta's, or the sac, or the umbilical cord.  They'd been whipped away quickly and the mess all cleaned up, by the time I'd come down from my birthing high, in my two hospital births with Jess and Griff, or my homebirth with Lilly.  I'd always been curious about them.

Funny how we like to quickly clean up after the great events of life.  Cut that cord and get rid of the placenta, wash up all the blood, wash the woman, wash the baby, wash the sheets and wraps and blankets and pillows and cushions that were birthed on.  Clean away all the smells and colours and textural remembers of birth.  And we clean up after sex, the milky substances left behind on sheets, and on our thighs, and the sweat and sex smell that permeates our skin, and then get nicely deodorised and sanitised before hitting the public again.  And we clean up after death, with the blood and bodily functions that have spilled and left the body just like the spirit, the breath, and the vitality of life have left.

Just like we try to clean up our emotions, and our needs, and our feelings, and our wants, and our complete and total inner desire to feel that oneness again.  The oneness of birth.  The oneness of sex.  The oneness of death.  Our cultural taboos, and yet the very events that shape us.  Connect us.  Remind us of the great oneness that existed before we were born, that exists when we connect with each other inside our skins through sex, and that we go back to when we die.  A reminder of the big cycles that echo constantly around us.  A process we see through the universe, through our seasons, through our life cycles, through our relationships, through our families, through our ideas, through our cultures, through our religions.  A process of pregnancy or seed planting, and then inner growth and building, and then the great pause and extremity of transition, before the birth of a person or thought, and then the vital life of interconnection, and the intense moments of sexual communication, and spiritual realisations, and the equally intense moments of great illness or mindsets, through the cycle to the death of the person or idea or group or period, into the uterine depths of seed planting and pregnancy or rebirth again.  

A theme mirrored in the water that courses our bodies, and the fire of sex or spirituality that connects us, and the planetary bodies that dance their spiral dances, and the breath of conversations that take us on word journeys.......

So a fascination with it persists, even in the face of cultural taboos, and our great and enlightened culture that seems to thrive on separation.  But in an atmosphere of repression of our great connecting life mysteries, birth becomes a fraught event, be it in hospital or home, and fears come clinging to it like young children afraid of the initiation.  Sex becomes a possibly deadly affair that can leave you with fatal or uncomfortable diseases, and manifests instead as blond young women with shaved body hair, bouncing merrily on assorted phalli, making a cacophony of unnatural noises and imprinting unrealistic and shallow messages on wistful hearts.  Or a tool used in hate and revenge.  Or to capture a person and keep them caged.  And death is a trauma, a wailing, a shudder of darkness at our shoulders, threatening to drag us into its eternally dark maw.

All events that we clean up after, and sanitise, and deodorise, and create polite conversations around.  Talk in metaphors and simplicities, about the complexities that we don't know how to express.  Hoping that if we follow the right rules, prescribe to the 'true' belief systems, and engage in the correct spiritual and metaphysical practices, that they will either go away and bother someone else, or wont impinge of our important life, of work and cars and mortgages and hobbies and homes and clothes and holidays and leisure and acquisitions.  

How did we get so far removed from our instinctual, animal, spiritual, eternally cyclic, and deeply symbolic selves?  How have we journeyed so far, that we can stand to see birth as a routine event, and death as an equally routine and regular occurrence on our televisions and media, while being horribly scared and avoiding of them in our real lives?  How can we bear to watch zombie after woman after man after animal being killed on our screens in horrific ways, and in our books and our stories, while we stumble all unknowing into the actual presence of death, stuttering and unsure.  How are we happy to vaguely allude to sex or only talk about it in extremes, and voyeuristically watch or read about other people doing it in spectacular fashions, while we sneak home to bed with our familiar partner, hiding our real feelings, and wishing there was a movie star next to us instead?  How can we be truly alive without the full stop and renewal of death as the accent and boundary that makes it all the sweeter?  And how can we fully embrace birth as the gentle sundering of the oneness, and journey into multiplicity, when it's been packaged and parcelled as a scientific and potentially dangerous event that needs to be dealt with by professionals?

I think it's been a natural process, as natural as a tiny baby growing to a huge human, and as a toddler testing the boundaries of those who care for it, and a horse checking the perimeter of it's paddock, and millions of fine tuned balances within nature, without which life wouldn't exist.  A process of expansion to the limits to find out where the end is, and then a making of sense of all that's in between.

Many many moons ago, when my love Currawong and I were courting, decked out in black leather and velvet, with extreme haircuts, haunting the suburb of Brunswick in Melbourne, as we did our best to resist an irrepressible urge to surrender to each other........we went into a book shop.  Neglected in a box of books was a tome that had a huge impact on me - L. Robert Keck's "Sacred Eyes", in which he compares the evolution of our entire human span......to that of an individual.  When we were young, we were safe in the arms of the earth mother goddess, in tune with her rhythms and flows.  Then we hit adolescence, and pushed away our soft mother, and strode out of her embrace to the war gods and the fathers in the sky, who told us we were sent to domesticate and subdue all around us.  And now we've come to our collective Saturn Return.  Where we bring our mother and father together within ourselves, and without ourselves, and evolve.  It really worked for me.

Cause I feel like our whole civilisation is poised on the point of implosion.  Of collapsing back into the source of ourselves and our interconnection.  Of having reached the outer limits of our explorations into science and religion and all those outer things in trying to work ourselves out, and realising that our connection and foundation is back where we started.  The great cosmic fools journey.  Like a massive solar flare that flung itself out as far as it could go, before sinking back into the sun from which it was born.

We're currently at the extremity of our distance from our earth, from ourselves, and each other.  We've got about as far as we can go without throwing out the balance in a life exhausting way.  We've hit the zenith of total disregard for and fear of the events that shape us.  The path that we collectively struck out on, started in part by Descartes saying "I think therefore I am", and sundering all the other living things on the planet from us humans, turning them into machines that had to be pulled apart to be understood.

The view from here is quite surreal.

In our avoidance of the alchemical mysteries and oxytocic adventures of birth, sex and death, we've strung it about ourselves in unrealistic and gaudy displays like christmas lights, hoping we can wear it as a symbol rather than actually tread the subterranean worlds beyond the world that we all practically, sensibly, and scientifically agree is real.  Sex has become a circus pony that we drag out to social gatherings to slap on the arse and force to perform.  And take home in the dark to subject it to our bestial and repressed desires.  Birth has become a feared nemesis to women, stalking their carefree moments with the threat of immanent pain and a cacophony of need.  Promising a life of duty and unappreciated work to its penitents.  And death has become the diseased corruption of a twisted society spending all its time and money in an effort to defeat it.  We hope to make sense of it by inundating ourselves with it, and have resulted in numbing to it, being afraid of it, and detaching from it even more instead. 

We've suppressed our raw feelings and inner desires to the point that an unexpected outpouring of them, can create horrific events where one of us will walk into a theatre late at night and shoot weapons into an unsuspecting crowd.  We're so unused to the bittersweet pain of loss and grief, that we can do things like take the lives of ourselves and our children.  We're so bruised and maimed and still scarily hopeful about our sexuality, that we do things like force sex on innocent creatures, and children, and unwilling victims.  We're so scared of untidy emotions that we've doped most of the western world on some form of pharmaceutical of another.  We send vast swathes of humanity into combat with each other, prepared to kill other members of our species over a political or religious belief, or a commodity, or an idea.  There are so many victims of so many things that it's becoming more and more difficult to work out who suffers the most anymore.  Everyone has their cross, their secret, their shame, their pain, that they wear on their wrist as a curse.

And in a very real way, our sense of connection, our oneness, and our source is where it's always been.  At our fingertips.  Elements of it sprinkled through every interaction we have. The pregnancy and gestation of a relationship, that goes through the intense transition of hardship or fear, before birthing into a full bloomed rose of tangled and intermingled tendrils of love and hope.  And can also die, and then be reborn with another person in another time and place.  The birth of our babies, in which our sexuality plays an awesomely midwifely role in helping the baby out, through the intense transition and expulsion into life.  Which also holds a death.  The death of the family as it existed before the new babe, the death of the maiden to become the mother, the death of the ego as it learns to surrender to the demands of life.  The life that can be glimpsed from a tight knit sexual connection, that dips into the deeps of hunger and oneness, and leaves a whiff of sexuality, as a lens through which to see events with a deeper understanding.  And the death of our loved ones, that leaves us with an unconscionable urge to be ALIVE!  To drum up the spirits and the sorryness and the fears and the memories, and let them float on the rhythm of the heartbeat of life, and remind ourselves of the things that only life can see, and hear, and feel, and touch.

In the great cycle of our civilisation, we're straining in the throes of transition collectively.  Many of the constructs and political, spiritual and community ideals are crumbling in decay, and we're struggling to birth the love and connection that's whispering to us through the decay.  Great and terrible tides are sweeping our collective conscious, and everyone I know is being affected by them.  Strong and archetypal constellations are lining up in a grand procession in the sky, heralding change, the death of old ways, and healing of old wounds.  The largest peaceful protests that the world has ever seen are happening right now, and we're being blinkered from it.  The war against our natural spaces has just stepped up to a level of global insanity, as mining companies strive to destroy some of the most magical places on our planet.  People all over the world are performing horrendous crimes against innocents and fringe dwellers.  It feels like everything has been magnified.  My capacity to feel joy and love is increased magnificently, while my aptitude to sink into worry, fear and dismay is likewise fuelled.  I can feel like a high soaring prophetess and a low slung layabout within the same day.  Events that I could previously walk by unaffected, can pierce me with pain to my hear that totally stops me.

We've just got to hang in there, and keep focusing on the birth that we're all trying to create, and in feeling this great pain and the seemingly endless array of anti-life around us, must know that we're almost there.  This is as bad as it's going to get.  We've reached the limit of the invisible cord that keeps us connected to life.  And we're rebounding back into love.  Collectively.  All together even.  Back into a world where we can start making sense of ourselves and what we see around us.  Back into a world where the heart and the head and all our other senses are on great speaking terms.  Where we see all the countless reflections around us that mirror our internal cycles, and can feel at home once again.

It's time for us to stop and really look at each other and ourselves.  To tell each other our experiences as they really are, rather than sanitised versions that keep all our real juice and gristle hidden.  To treat each other as if we really were parts of each other, until our combined experiences show us that truth.  To pull apart our life knowings and plumb the depths of our authentic experiences till we can really dance and gaze at the realities of birth, life, sex and death.

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There's a group of Thai monks that meditate on death.  When one of their order dies, they'll go and lay them out in a room, and sit with them as they meditate on the decaying of a human body they loved.  In Mexico they hold a day for the dead, when they celebrate the people who have gone on ahead.  There's certain people who have made their study sex, and the positions, attitudes, and worlds that are accessible through it.  And there's whole cults to passionate love, and what that can mean in our world.  There's also those that study birth, and the implications of it, and what that can teach us about ourselves.  Let's search these taboos, and our learnings about them, and the stories that stretch between them all, to show us parts of ourselves.  Let's tell each other our stories without censoring the bits that we think other people might judge or not like.  Let's help each other to realise how similar we are, by telling our authentic truths.  Let's learn from everything how one we are.

And there's an amazing book by A.A. Attanasio, called 'The Sword and The Dragon', and the basic premise of the story, is that everything in our universe was in the intensely dense and impacted oneness of a black hole, that had been sucking in vast tracts of space for eons.  And at it's zenith, the black hole exploded into the universe that we inhabit now, and as it erupted, angels and demons were flung from the singularity.  The angels try to get back to the oneness through crafting belief systems and cosmic machines that may eventually take them back to the singularity, or the womb.  And the demons are so distraught at being severed from the one, birthed into a cold and dark universe, that they petulantly destroy as much as they can, devastated that they can't get back to the source, and willingly destroying what they can with their tantrums.

Which could easily be a metaphor for us all.  Flung from the singularity and desperate to get back.

We are the ones that we've been waiting for, and the time for us to awake to our connection is now.  We can get back into the womb of oneness through empathy, compassion, love and respect.  Through seeing the mirrors of oneness in all of creation.  Through the peace we create when we accept all the parts of ourselves.  Through the harmony of love, respect, peace and freedom, that we can learn from our families.  Through the melting and surrender that we visit in birthing, great sex, intense life experiences and death.

The time is now.  And you are the microcosm of the macrocosm.  Explore yourself with abandon, and set sail on the sea of connection........

Birth, Sex and Bonding

Currawong and I have been talking a lot lately, as we clean and move and open spaces and practice our Wombling arts.  And one of the subjects that has come up quite often, has been the noble art of the fence sitter.  I just want you to suspend all judgement for the purposes of this post, and when you hear the term fence sitter, instead of thinking of someone who can’t make up their mind, think someone sitting on the fence that can see both sides of it with equal clarity.  And respect.  And can choose to hop from one side to the other if they feel the need, but the comfortable space inbetween is where they’re most likely to be found.  And sitting on it means they can take advice and knowledge from both camps, as well as being high enough and empathetic enough, to be able to see even beyond the two camps, to the many other camps stretched along and beyond the fence.  With a doves eye view to compare the two main camps and their similarities and differences.  And with the potential to help people from either side over to each other.  And maybe even get to the point where the fence can be removed all together, and a respectful and honest discussion can take place without any fences or gates or even pergolas in sight. 

I’ve found myself on the fence a lot in my life.  Being able to see both sides of a situation, argument, sexuality, ideology, philosophy or concept.  And being blessed and fortunate to come across many others perching on fences, Currawong in particular, who have always gifted me with the treasures of even more ways of looking at just about everything.  And I’ve got to say I’m firmly on the fence in this whole homebirth/hospital birth scene, and can see many other scenes and perspectives on birth also stretched along the fence and growing out in the fields, for as far as my eye can see.   Many camps on sex and pregnancy and birth and families get a bit hidden by the huge clouds of smoke, that billow around the bitter battle being fought, by the most outspoken heroes and heroines of each side.  With the odd warrioress or warrior coming in from the outlands, to bring tales of other fences and other sides…………and even stories of the wildlands, where no fences dwell at all.

I’ve watched this big battle between hospital and homebirth, with the egos and philosophies attached to them, and the condescension and arrogance that can appear on both sides.  Their reactions against each other have ricocheted into the outside world, and often engage in personal attacks against individuals who seem to exemplify either camp.  One of those individuals has been me, as I’ve been painted as some kind of sex crazed tramp, selfishly putting my birthing ideals above the importance of the safety of my babies, and ‘bat shit crazy’ in my death defying birth choices.  I’ve watched the war from my perspective, go from being between a war between a few personalities on either side, to escalating into a war between personalities and the attendants that flock to support them, and attacking people on a personal level.  And also escalate into South Australia and other places, trying to ban all doula’s and birth attendants from attending hospital births.  And most alarmingly perhaps, to me anyway, I see the fallout from this battle result in scaring the shit out of women on both sides of the fence, about how demonic and deranged the other side can be.  Another sadder side effect is the huge, enormously large amount of women and babies and families and birthing experiences that go largely unheard of or ignored, as they’re not classical examples of the publicly agreed on versions of birth. 

Homebirth seems to be increasingly seen as the choice of radicals or traumatized victims of unnecessary interventions in hospitals.  As a far out choice in birth, that a ‘certain element’ is always going to try and access, so should thereby be made safe, for those of the community who aren’t capable of making safe choices for themselves.  I’ve been the interest of a magazine that wanted to interview me as an anonymous contributor to an article about sex during birth, with a slant on how sex crazed Currawong and I must be, to even entertain the notion of it.  Viewing it as some far out option that people might like to voyeuristically and anonymously poke fun at. 

From my spot on the fence, and with all my experiences and research, as well as all the birthing stories I’ve read and been asked to read………in the overall wash it all seems to come out about even.  Some people have awesome hospital experiences, some people have awesome homebirth experiences, some people have crap times at hospital, some have a crap homebirth.  Some babies die at home, some die at hospital.  Some are safer at home, some are safer in a hospital.  All in all it seems that all we can truly learn from birth is that it’s unpredictable, undomesticatable, mostly ‘successfull’ no matter where it is, and universally unique to each individual person. 

And I feel increasingly that I’d like to jump off my fence and sit in the camp of homebirthing for a moment, to describe some of the aspects of homebirthing that have taught themselves to me along the way, and would like to have their flags flown as potential camps, beyond the warfare waging at the most focused on fence. 

Let’s first address sexuality in birth.  This concept was alien to me for my first three children, and I never even thought about it as a possibility.  But my third baby also came with lessons about bonding.  The importance of it, and more poignantly for me, the impact that a lack of bonding could have on a family unit.  When pregnant with my fourth child, bonding, and how to do it the very best we could, was paramount in all our minds.  And much to my surprise, I stumbled across sexuality during birth for the first time, in my search to do it better.  In books written by fundamentalist Christians about reclaiming birth from doctors AND midwives, and having it sacred for husbands and wives and their children only, and having liberal sex whilst birthing, as babies came out best, the same way they went in. 

Amazonesque, I strode into my fourth birthing experience striving for self acceptance in my midwife and hospital free stance, and also a dose of sex during the birth……which turned out to be a bit shy and new, and all a bit innocent.  Not quite a step towards an orgasmic birth.  And I was awful glad that a magical midwife turned up just in the nick of time to hold my hand and keep us feeling safe. 

Now just as an aside, apart from there being a large amount of truth to the concept that babies come out best often the same way they went in, there is also the matter of picotin.  Or in it’s more pragmatic description….pig sperm.  Which is what you could be given to induce birth in hospitals, as well as a machine that simulates sucking of your nipples to stimulate the same sexual hormones as the pig sperm, to induce your baby to come forth.   It’s an age old suggestion, when a woman wants to bring a baby on, to either have sex, or go for a drive on a bumpy dirt road.  Now call me old fashioned, but when it comes to trying to bring a baby on, I’d far rather have my partners sperm and nipple sucking, than a pigs and a machines.  And folk think I’M the weirdo?

So sex for the first time during a birth of ours, was more curiosity, loving and philosophical, rather than anything sensational or sexy.  Same for the birth of our fifth baby, as a semi-desperate attempt when we realized he wasn’t coming.  For our twins it was the same.  An attempt to co-erce a baby that was taking a long time, and more importantly my body that had kind of just shut down, to wake up and start birthing again.  In my post about the birth of the twins, I said “taking Currawong off into the back room for a quick fix of sex and semen”, when what I really could have said was we went off into the back room and I gave my love a blow job.  As a doula friend once told us, it doesn’t matter how it goes in. My dear little frangers on their hate forum made a good deal about the fact that there was also an umbilical cord present, but that kind of attention to detail says far more about them than about me. 

And as an addendum to sex during birth, our ultimate and climactic sex during the birth of our eighth child, put all our other attempts to shame.  Terrified of birthing out of water, the sexuality and strength and power of birthing on our bed with my lover, after we’d made love and had an intense orgasm not long before alone, and the bellydancer-esque movements I was making as we got closer to birth, was easily and more powerfully as transforming of birth expansions, as any of my experiences in water.  And really did show us both the real power of sex during birth.  Not to mention how incredibly bonding the whole experience can be.  Now I’m not saying that birth should be sexy, and all mamas should orgasm, and I remember being really pissed off at this kinda 'perfect' stereotype that seemed to exist of the organic food eating, homebirthing, orgasmic birthing, blissfull breastfeeding, psychically in-tune, new age earth mother thing, cause I’ve never felt overly in tune with any of my babies internally except for odd sublime moments, and I’ve hardly ever picked the right gender, and I’ve got my expectations wrong so completely, so many times, that I’ve learnt it’s just best to keep my mouth shut.  And I love and honour breastfeeding for the amazing thing it is, but I don’t really LOVE it, like some people seem to. But sometimes there’s moments of pure magic, and like I said before, I’m not saying anyone should do anything, but I just want to let you know that there are other possibilities, because glory be to diversity, and everyone feeling the freedom to check out whatever option appeals, no matter how wacky it might sound at first.

Lotus birthing sounded really wacky to me at first as well, but that kinda grew on me also.  I’m firmly on the fence with this lotus birthing business as well, cause I don’t know about anyone elses experience, but I’ll be damned if my two little lotus babies aren’t the most pernickety, tantrum throwing, WILLFULL creatures that I’ve ever met.  Full of the most surprises as well, but wild in a league all of their own.  I was kinda glad in a way that the twins births and that of number eight meant that lotus birthing was out of the question. 

But back to the main issues for this piece about sex and bonding, I would have to say that my forays into sexuality during birthing, have all been motivated by the desire to further explore bonding, and its importance to me personally, and to the world at large.  And in the process of writing this post, I’ve had my computer go off to the shop to get fixed for a week, and have had a week off all computer and internet action, and spent my time cleaning and reading stories and spinning and loving, but also thinking lots on bonding.  Just yesterday, Currawong and I had an inspired and expansive talk on the impact of bonding in our original families, where we both felt like an almost endless array of lines of dominoes knocked into each other in all directions, making sense of so many hard thought out childhood aches.  And present day problem knots all of a sudden appeared differently and clearly.

To be quite blunt about it, I believe bonding, or rather our collective and monumental mismanagement and ignorance of it in our current society, to be the root and cause of just about every personal and societal pain and evil and seperation and isolation and betrayal in our modern world.  And I have been led to this position by every experience in my life.  From my own conception and birth, to that of all my 8 children, the stories from my closest friends and loved ones, independent study, and a vast collection and memory of stories. 

The first time I really bumped into bonding was after the birth of my first child Jessica.  I was a fairly unremarkable and ‘average’ Australian at the time, having had a bit of a kooky childhood but who hadn’t?  Not too far really from my mormon upbringing at the age of 21, fresh from selling life insurance on the North Shore in Sydney and before that backpacking around Europe.  Birth existed in the slightly scary stories around me and in hospitals and with the ‘people that knew best’.  My sister-in-law had had a homebirth, but she kinda scared me too.  I’d been to pre-natal classes with my mother and got the poor single mother looks from the couples, and my mum had been blown away by the amount of information and alternative approaches on revisiting birth, 20 years down the track from her own experiences.  But I really had no idea.  No real expectations. Vague ideas about maybe looking in a mirror to see the babys head emerging.  And maybe bouncing on a ball. 

And it was a shock.  I was totally unprepared for its intensity, and when it came time to maybe look in a mirror, I was growling for drugs.  It squeezed.  And I fought it.  I didn’t know what to do or expect, and nobody had really told me.  It seemed harsh and endless and like I was abandoned to this foggy world between worlds.  But when she was born, the euphoria and ecstasy and bliss I felt, was also beyond any I’d experienced before.  This was another world altogether, one of purpose and pride.  The enormous sense of attentive protection was almost overwhelming.  I couldn’t stop looking at her and touching her and wondering at this little creature who had emerged from inside me.  The face and skin and delicate little body, that up till now had just been eerie movements and hiccups in my belly.  After a long while, I was prompted to have a quick shower, which I did while my mother went with my new daughter to have her checks.  And then we quickly tucked up in bed together, and that melting bliss continued. 

Some time later a brisk german midwife entered my room, informed me I needed to feed my baby, pulled aside my pyjama top, grabbed my breast, and then held her head to it, forcing us to connect.  I was shocked, but I complied, and then when she’d taken her hands off us, and we could settle into each other again, we got somewhere with breastfeeding, and then I was told that I needed to sleep and my baby would be taken to the nursery.  She took my little person fresh from my womb, and folded her into the plastic cot, and wheeled her out of the room.  I sat there stunned.  And that loving protective feeling I’d been feeling, turned into a fierce animal grunt in my belly that ached for that little part of me, and I felt like a strong rope between us pulled……..and I crept out behind the midwife, hiding behind doors and corners, till I saw her walking away and I swept straight in the nursery, wheeled my baby back in my room and tucked her back in my arms.  And I didn’t let her go till my mother got back to the hospital and took us home, to settle into each other without any observers except her.    And I was really glad that I was on the early release program, and didn’t have to stay the night.  Resultantly, my mother and my firstborn daughter and I, left to our own devices, bonded very strongly as a trinity.   

I was an overly obedient girl till that point.  Followed all the rules and laws and suggestions given me by everyone I saw as superior, which was basically everyone.  A few guilty secrets in my closet, and a few naughtinesses had happened, but I really didn’t feel very different to the norm.  I had no precedence for this kind of going against advice, and feeling a strong instinct of any sort.  I continued on my instinct, to breastfeed her on demand, co-sleep with her in bed, ( much to the differing advice of all the other young mothers and midwives and people around me at the time ), and stayed exclusively breastfeeding till she was 8 months old, against the rather angry advice from the baby check nurse.  I had a tremendously strong instinct to follow her and my instincts, with a focus on hers the most, as they were the freshest and more pure.  And she was totally robust and healthy.  I gave her the vaccinations that everyone else did, I had her checked regularly that she was growing properly, but apart from that, we were attachment parenting.  I had a very dear friend who’d had a baby a year earlier, and she gently broke me in to some alternative parenting methods.  And gave me a copy of ‘The Continuum Concept’ by Jean Leidlehoff, the reading of which left me with a sense of total validation and vindication. 

I was introduced to the concept of the human as a mammal, with the indigenous peoples parenting practices being represented as a bit closer to our evolutionary path, than the rather jagged and mechanical western civilization and it’s approach to modern birth and bonding. 

My first birthing experience, combined with what I discovered afterwards, was strongly with me 9 years later when we birthed Griffyn in a hospital spa bath.  I’d done a bit of growing and learning since that first time, and had also grown more experienced at breaking the rules, following alternative paths, and searching out rarified knowledges and concepts and approaches to life.  And I had a partner in love to whom I was sexually bonded, an equally strong yet different bond to that I have with my children.  And he was fresh from being an anarchistic punk rocker, with a special skill in exploding any beliefs I had left about the benevolence of those in power, and the world being overseered by good and godly people.  When Griffyn was born by surprise in the spa bath, while the midwife was off getting the machine that went ‘bing’, (I was only dilated 8 centimeters!), she got back to me in the bath with Griffyns head out, and she panicked and pulled the plug.  So in transition, and just about to push, I put my hand over the plug hole, gathered my energy, and then pushed him out.  After blissing in the bath for a bit, I got up, tucked him under my arm, said ‘That was so easy!’ (which it had been compared to my first birth), strode off to our room after pushing the proffered wheelchair out of the way, then pushed the hospital bed on its wheels to the wall, and showed Currawong where he could lay out the futon that I’d directed him to bring.  He’d been really embarrassed about the whole concept before Griffyn was born, but I’d insisted.  And when we all three of us lay on the futon, with Griffyn inbetween us, and Currawong and him sleeping, I thought my heart would burst with love, as I looked at my dearly loved man and little firstborn son, laying so beautifully asleep in front of me.  I cried with how amazing they were, and high on those bonding birthing hormones, I couldn’t sleep for how hungry my gaze was to feast on their perfection. 

We also went home that day, and didn’t have to spend the night in hospital, and we bedded in for two weeks altogether.  On the first day after the first night at home, we both sat in the bed together, with Griffyn as a newborn  on our kneeling up legs, crying about how much we loved him, how perfect he was, and how much we loved each other.  We had gentle friends coming peacefully to welcome him, and those present at his birth as our supporters came to visit us every day, to retell the story of his birth, and how beautiful it was.  We all bonded together, our inner circle of family, and two close friends, and it was like they were drawn back every day for two weeks to revisit the bond, and the smells, and the love, and the brand new life that had brought us so lovingly together. 

Lilly, as my third born child and first homebirth experience, was totally different.  And taught me perhaps the most about the power of bonding, especially in its absence.  Between three midwives, the bonding between Currawong and Griffyn and I, and the bonding between my mother and my firstborn and I, as we were birthing in my mothers house……..circumstances ensued that I’m not really at liberty to talk about freely in order to be sensitive to the feelings of people I love, and absolutely no bonding happened at all except for between Lilly and me.  We experienced anti-bonding.  Nothing violent or terrible happened, but tragic miscommunications and age old patterns and unseen situations collided in a way that left the beautiful home and water birth of Lilly as an almost unnoticed event.  That quickly moved to the background in the light of inconveniences that intruded on the babymoon before it even started.  The first two weeks of Lillys life were spent in such lonely isolation, that I plummeted to a depth of depression that I’d not often been.  Her magical birth was overshadowed by the sadness that followed.  To such a degree that Lilly refused to be held by anybody but me for the first year of her life.  Nobody.  Not my mother, or Currawong, or close friends, or anyone.  Not even remotely would she abide the mere suggestion.  She’s very firm our Lilly.  So I just got used to my little friend that came with me everywhere, and there was more than ample room on my lap and in my arms for my little Lilly.  And our bonding grew stronger. 

And when she was coming up to two years old, and screaming louder and longer than any kid I’d ever heard, and I found out I was pregnant with another, I started unpeeling and unpacking what had happened in her birth, trying to work out what her caterwauling was about.  On her second birthday we were held strong in the arms of a loving market that we’d co-created, and a big surprise birthday was held for Lilly.  All her favourite people who she’d finally allowed to hold her after she turned one were there, and a whole market full of people stood around her as she sat on my lap, singing her happy birthday, and I felt her get it.  She looked around her at all these near and loved faces, and she knew they were there for her, and that they loved her, and I do believe that for the first time in her life she finally felt WELCOMED by the world and her family.  And it was good.  And she sat back comfy in my lap and I felt her world shift a bit.  And do you know what?  She never screamed as loud or as long ever again after that day.  And she finally allowed Currawong to give her a kiss at night without him receiving her elbow……

And I read the books that I mentioned above from the fundamentalist Christians, and they echoed in me.  The fuss made about midwives and doctors and all these other folk, when it’s a man and woman that make a baby most often, in the warm and sultry sweetness of a love soaked bed, and what nicer way for that baby to be welcomed into the world, than in the same way that it was conceived?  With two loving parents who know exactly who you are, and when you started, and are looking forward to what their love looks like clothed in the skin of a brand new life.  I started to think I wanted to try freebirthing.  Just Currawong and Griffyn and Jess and mum around.  With maybe a friend as a support person.  And I kept unpacking and unpeeling the sores on our hearts after Lillys unbonding, and it took me on the path that I told you about above, but one last little story is about her and Griffyn.

Who never really bonded.  And never really got on.  Lilly was an intrusion on a rather splendid life for Griff, and when she was born, all these strange things had happened, and his life had been forever changed.  Around the time of Lillys second birthday, and reading these books, and healing the aches from her birthing experience, I was reading some of the first information I’d consciously really taken on about bonding.  And it’s importance.  And it started to make sense to me what had really gone on.  And I tried to repair what I could.  And one day, as Griff at nearly five was sitting on a couch, it occurred to me to really tell him the story of Lillys birth, and what had happened, and how it went askew, and how none of it had anything to do with him and the sort of boy he was, or Lilly, and the sort of birth she had.  And it was one of my better moments, where I was fairly impassioned, and all sorts of puzzle pieces were coming together in my head, and Currawong and Jess and my mum and Lilly were all around, and they all heard what I was saying, and I saw him get it.  Saw the realizations hit him, and watched him making sense of it.  And their relationship changed from that day forward.  He was clear about the story, and how it wasn’t his fault, and him and Lilly remain to this day the best of friends.  Compadres who give each other as good as they get, have each others backs, and laugh, giggle and talk more than any other siblings I know.  Her relationships with everyone started to heal at that point.  Which was greatly assisted by the birth and bonding of Spiral-Moon. 

And my interest in bonding has gone on to grow and develop through all the other births of Balthazar, which is a story of an attempted homebirth that ended up as an emergency caesarean, and had disrupted bonding due to Post Natal Depression, and the births of Maxamillion and Merlin, which bonded us closely in our immediate family in the face of extreme adversity and total fallout with community and close family, but highlighted so many areas of bonding with other people throughout my life, and how bonding was an evolutionary imperative.  I wrote a post about bonding and evolution after the twins were born, trying hard to get across the enormity of what I was starting to connect between our society and bonding in particular. 

And most recently, the birth of Zarrathustra would have to be the penultimate in my experience of a spiritual, sexual, bonding homebirth,  that has transformed all our lives in a tremendously positive way.

To put it very simply, I believe that bonding is one of the most important things we do as humans, and it’s so integral to me and my family and our connected experiences, that we will do just about anything we can, to be able to hold a new baby as soon as it’s born, and sit around in the comfort of our home while we all meet each other, and sleep near each other as we soak in the new smells, and not separate anyone from each other in those fragile early weeks of the magical bond of birth.

To be able to treat birth with the sacredness it deserves, being the only time that this baby will ever be born into this body.  To feed and sleep when our instincts dictate, instead of to a schedule.  To be unobserved and protected in a love bubble of babymoon.

And now I’ve shone the light pretty well on my personal experience in regards to bonding……..I want to turn that light around to the rest of the world.

I just want you to sit for a minute, and think really deeply about all the advice and folk knowledge you’ve heard in your life about other animals and bonding.  The fragility and importance of it.  Did you ever get told that you couldn’t touch the brand new baby kittens, because their mother might smell you on them and reject them?  Did you watch news stories about all the incredible lengths they go to in Zoos, to help parents conceive for a start, which is an equally instinctual and hormonally fragile and important connection as bonding, and then to not reject the babies?  About how birds and their eggs and nests should never be disturbed? Did you ever see that amazing film/documentary called ‘The Weeping Camel’??  Where a camel had a traumatic birth and rejected her baby, and a local musician shaman, was called over to perform the ancient ceremony of singing the baby and mother back together again, with the rest of the family.  And the mother camel cried, and then the disrupted bonding was healed, as she welcomed her baby back.  When you really sit and think about all the stories you’ve heard about animals and their bonding, and if you’ve had a lot to do with animals, have you had experiences of bonding between animals, even interspecially??  Those stories about baby lambs whos mothers died, and they bonded with the first creature they saw, be it human, goat or dog? And what happens when that bond is broken, or disrupted, or betrayed??  And does it ever make you wonder if the same seemingly immutable laws of nature and mammals and bonding apply to us?

I think they do. 

And I don’t think us humans messing with bonding is a new thing either. The Spartans used to throw a baby to the ground after it was born to produce warriors, and the Mayans used to bury the placenta on battlegrounds and separate boy babies from their mothers early, to induce the same results.  In fact, with the acquisition of land needed by early agriculturalists and settlers, a militia was needed to conquer and maintain control over lands acquired, and in our earlier times, it may have seemed that the creation of warriors was an important thing.  And maybe we got so caught up in disrupting that bond, that we forgot why we started doing it, and the horse has run away from the cart.  It's worth asking the question of what kind of an impact this disrupted bonding is having with all our relationships.

It wouldn’t be hard to look at the birthing practices of western civilization, and conclude that we bond our babies to machines and children of their own age group, with families as a poor second or third to the importance of their primary bonding.  Most other mammals and primates mother their children in groups until sexual maturity, and then sometimes the boys will go off, but the girls often stay within the clan for their lives, and share all the care and nurturance of their young. 

Bonding in the other animals of nature, creates a connection between family groups, that both teaches the young how to survive by instruction and example, but also creates enough love in the group, that they’ll have each others backs,  nurture the bonded young into adulthood, and help to share all the necessary chores with other family, hunt and gather for each other, and ensure the family groups survival.   The relatively new science of Ethnopediatrics shows how when we human animals changed our bodies design, by going from 4 legs to 2 and growing our brains, we also changed our birthing process, which ended up in babies having to be born prematurely, in order for their heads to be able to get out.  And then adaptation had to do its magic, so that mothers would be induced to keep their babies close for the 9 months or so outside the womb, that they needed to survive. 

And because of my dedication to bonding, and to doing it the best we can, or healing the impact of disrupted bonding, we’ve become a fully bonded family that many of us aren’t used to anymore, and I know this from the reactions and triggers we set off in nearly everyone we come across.  Who either don’t have such a close relationship with their partner, or their children, or altogether, or a pain and ache in their relationships with their family of birth, and either love us to bits and pieces as a possible way to run relationships…..or have a strong reaction against us, thinking us abnormal or just too confronting. 

I think we’ve forgotten how to have deep and loyal friendships and bonds, that last for a lifetime, regardless of where an individuals journey takes them.  I think we’ve forgotten what it feels like to experience unconditional love.  Just like we’ve forgotten what it feels like to wear clothes grown in the sun and turned into clothing by loving hands, and foods that are grown in our gardens and by those we love, and how incredible they taste, and homeing in living houses built by family hands, and the immense satisfaction and fulfillment in sharing in rich and connected bonded relationships, with the people and environment around us.  For those of you who have actually read Lord Of The Rings…….our recent cultural bonds are mirrored by how we turned the deep love and loyalty of the family bonds present in the book, to the fluffy and anecdotal relationship between the hobbits in the movie, who are portrayed as fools and not overly loyal, and leaving out the deep connection to the land of Tom Bombadill, for the flashy wars and fight scenes, which were fairly sparse in the book.  Relationships are dispensable in our throw away society.

And now to bring it all round in a circle, I’ll jump back on my fence between homebirthing and hospital birthing and suggest that maybe we could chuck this war and this fence and all the egos away, and put all the things we know about birth and its permutations into a far reaching and diversity supporting and interconnected meadow, and acknowledge that hospitals and midwives and women and men and children and psychologists and healers and body workers all need to get together, as essential parts of the same whole, and totally redress the way we do birth altogether in our culture.  And bonding.  And sexuality throughout it all.  And families, be they of blood or heart. 

Surely we can find ways that absolutely everyone, can create the space that they need, with the support that they want, to honour the importance and generational continuation, of the stories around birth and bonding and family and community that we create……..

The Birth of Spiral-Moon

I wrote this post on Spiral-Moons birthday, the 14th of October last year, and I thought it was a wrap.  I had it all ready to go in the afternoon, and then I read it to Currawong, as I always do before I publish anything.  And at that particular time, he was feeling so raw and tender, and so sentimental for our days in Peterborough around the birth of Spiral, that he went on an impassioned rave about how special and amazing that birth was, and how I didn't go into near enough detail about it's beauty, and I couldn't publish it till I'd re-visited it at a later point, and filled in all the gorgeous details.  

So I put it away and forgot about it.  As you do.  With 7 kids and in the middle of life and living.  And just last night, the subject came up again, and I pulled it out and read it and he loved it.  A bit less tender and in a different space, it was a story that was ripe for the telling, and as a bit of a preamble to the post I'm working on at the moment about birth, and more particularly sex and bonding in birth.  As a response to public interest, written in my own words.  

Here you go then.  This is the story of the birth of Spiral-Moon, written and meant to be launched on the anniversary of her 6th lap around the sun.......posted belatedly.

.....................

About this time six years ago we were all busy falling in love with a newborn Miss Spiral-Moon, my fourth baby. After my previous births - two hospital births and a home birth that hadn't quite been our families ideal - I wanted a fairly hands off birth, and was focused on the bonding period afterwards. And we were living in our own house for the first time, and taking full advantage of our privacy by enjoying a thoroughly sexual pregnancy.  She'd been born around dawn at Peterborough, in the most beautiful home/water/lotus birth we were ever a part of.  

After being scared off by the very narrow paradigms of the local hospital, we were gonna free birth, except for a very magical and long time midwife Rosey Smart-Vaher, who drove the 250 kms just to be there, and knew when it was going to happen, and would have just sat in her car as the backup if we'd asked her to.  But I was so glad she was there to be with and shelter us with her knowledge. 

The night she was born, I danced with my mum while she giggled about how she'd never seen me do THIS in a birth before, and later sat in a warm birthing pool in a room I’d covered with photos from my life, my loves, and my previous births and children.  I’d spent lots of time sitting there during my pregnancy, sending love and strong birthing energy to the me in the future who would birth in that room.  The whole room smelt of a powerful bush essence, that will forever take me right back to that room, and candles burnt for the whole joyous night.  It was a real time out of time.  Endless and timeless and like all the best aspects of late nights in my adventurous past.  Convinced this was going to be my last birth, (Ha!  Only half way there!!) I was determined to try every birthing position and aid I could think of, and my mum and I were the only ones awake, in a house exhausted by a day of gentle birthing.  

My mum and eldest daughter had taken the kids to Steamtown, so we could test-run sex during birth for the first time. It was more innocent and shy and philosophical, an approach recommended from the fundamentalist christian books I'd read that were reclaiming birth from doctors AND midwives,  and claiming that babies came out best the way they went in.  Also age old advice given to any woman wanting to bring on birth, as engaging in either sex, or a drive on a bumpy dirt road.  Currawong had loved it,  I was distracted and elsewhere, but it was fun nonetheless.  And all day little preparations for the birth that was slowly beginning were made.  The clothes, the blankets, and the hot water bottle to keep them warm, the rabbit fleece jacket I’d spun and made for her first garment, and the red leather pouch with umbilical cord holder that I’d made for our first Lotus birth.  And the surgical equipment and supplies that are stock and trade of a midwives tools, were boiled and ready to be used.

Towards night the expansions started stepping up and we all slowly filled the bath.   Everyone drifted off to sleep, and left me and my mother alone for hours to dance, and talk about birth, and I took odd moments in the birthing pool.  When the expansions really started hotting up, I called ‘CURRAWONG!’ through the house, and he was dressed and at my side within seconds.  Everyone else woke up too, and I lay back in the warm pool with my ears underwater and listened to the sounds of my body.  At one point I quipped “Not quite like the best sex I’ve ever had….” as a reference to sexual birthing and my desire for it.   Everyone laughed.

All during my pregnancy I’d worried about scaring my two younger children with my birth cries.  And so as I started to want to make noise, I toned, and I hummed, and I chanted.   Aware from the reading I’d done that the openness of the throat related to the openness of the cervix, I opened my mouth a lot like a Tibetan throat singer.  The noises seemed to come from the depths of my toes, and something about the controlled way they were coming out, helped me feel more powerful.  And the little ones said later that they weren’t scared, cause it sounded like I was singing.   The adults thought I’d sounded like I was channeling an elder…….

And then came transition.  The zenith of birthing pangs.  The most intense that it was going to get.  The most extreme test and initiation my body has ever gone through.  And I was laying on my back in the water, holding onto Currawongs arms as he stood behind me out of the pool, staring into his eyes, and telling him I loved him.  Over and over, as my body knew that it was full enough to burst, and gathered energy to start the quick process, to push her from my womb.  In that seemingly eternal moment between the body being ready to birth, and the actual push getting together to make it happen, I told him I loved him, and his tears of awe dripped onto my face. 

A few pushes and she was out, bouncing down to the bottom of the pool, and then rising to the surface, with her arm in the air like superbaby.  I raised my head from the water, and Rosey tapped my thigh and said “Your baby’s there…” and I picked her up myself, and held her to my chest, and knew right then and there that nobody knew what gender she was, and it was up to me to find out, and I could do it whenever I wanted, and take as long as I liked.  The feeling was euphoric.  I’d birthed her in warm water, chanted and toned her out, loved my man while it was happening, and then been the only person to touch her as she came earthside, and the one to find out what gender had been added to our family.  I don’t think I’ve known a more powerful, fulfilled and elated time in my life. 

Griff had woken up before she was born, chose to sit the birth out in the lounge, and then was at my side in an instant the moment she was born.   Lilly went in and out of the birthing room while the birth was happening, and was there for the actual birth, but had been able to regulate her own capacity for dealing with what was going on, by instructing my mum where to go.  Mum and Jess were in the room, and so was the shining Rosey.  Dawn was rising through the heavy velvet curtains, and starting to outshine the candles and tealights round the room.  The placenta was born, I got out of the pool, ate some food on the lounge, and had a quick shower, before heading into the bedroom to nestle in, say hello, have a huge cuddle, and meet the placenta laying still and cooling in a colander in a container on the bed.

A bit later, when the bliss was calming, Rosey took us on a guided tour of my placenta, of how it would have looked to Baby Moon (which is what we’d been calling her from the moment we knew she was there) while she was in her sac, and how it all would have sat.  You see, half the genetic material that’s created after the egg and sperm get together make the baby, and the other half make the placenta.  Your placenta is like your babies twin.  That keeps it fed and eliminated and protected and company…..  It was quite a magical experience.  And the first time I’d consciously met one of my placentas.  We washed it and dressed it like a loved dead body, and were amazed to watch that as it slowly died, Miss Moon slowly came awake.  The slowest out of all of my babies.  And she fully came awake and ready to engage with the world, on the 7^th day when her cord came away, and she was lotus born.  

Which is also when we had her birthday party, and a big pink placenta cake that the kids still talk about.  Balloons and presents for the other kids, party food and our magical midwife just happened to be there too, and our bonding was cemented as we all knew more love than we’d ever known before.

Weeks after she was born, I finally got my way and called her ‘Spiral-Moon’, for the spiral of hair that whorled round her third eye from the moment she was born.  People had freaked out about the name, and told us that it was negative, and that’s when we started to realize that the energy shift in us all since the birth of Spiral-Moon, had literally moved us to another place, where we fell out of attraction with a whole mob of people we’d been satelliting around for years, and fell into attraction with a whole mob of new and incredible people.  She changed our lives.  Her birth changed everything.  I felt like I could take on the world.

Months after she was born, the local newspaper printed an article about her birth, comparing it to the birth of baby Jesus in a manger.  The local journalist was surprisingly savvy bout home birth, as his partner was an activist, and he’d even read an obscure Michel Odent book that I hadn’t.  It was quite a rap for homebirthing. 

And every morning for the first year of her life, Griffyn would come into our bedroom first thing, to kiss her and say good morning and welcome to the day.

And now as she turns six, Miss Moon is still changing our lives and encouraging us to evolve, and has the most magical stories that flutter round her all the time.  When she has an impact on someone it’s huge.  She’s incredibly deep and sweet girl frilly all within moments.  And just yesterday morning she was starring in her very own musical, unaware that I was listening, and spent half an hour in her pink princess dress, singing about finding a shoe from the shoe box.  She’s the most loyal and true friend a person could ever ask for, and has a magical imagination that could take anyone on a journey, no matter who they were. 

I’m so glad you decided to come on down and turn our toadstool upside round Spiral-Moon!  And teach a powerful lesson about just how amazing a birth can actually be.  Thank you so much for showing us what a completely perfect birth for us actually feels like.