After Birth.......

In having 7 children, and births, I've learnt stuff from each birth that not that many women experience anymore.... With Jess' birth I learnt about the Goddess and feminism and sexuality, with Griffyn's birth I learnt how easy birth can be - even in a hospital - and how easily I could attempt a homebirth.  Lilly's birth taught me how nicely the journey can be taken at home and how important the post natal period is for bonding and setting up healthy family relationships. Spiral-Moon's birth taught me how incredibly blissful a home, water and lotus birth can be, how incredible it is to catch your own baby, and how a post natal period done well can change the vibration of your entire family. Balthazar's birth taught me about judgement, (mine towards women that had caesareans and western medicine in general), the fully medicalised birth, and also about post natal depression and healing from it. And during the period between Balthazar's birth, and as a result of my twins births, I reckon I've got a real handle on my 'big picture' of birth.

For a start I found out about 'Ethnopaediatrics', which is the marriage of child development research, anthropology, psychology, and pediatrics, and goes a long way towards explaining the science behind a lot of the conclusions reached by Jean Liedloff in 'The Continuum Concept'. I thought I knew a lot about birth, but it only really came together with this new information.

To put it in a nutshell, when we decided as a species to think and walk, we altered the course of our births from the relatively easy journey that we still see today in all the other mammals, to the tricksy process it can be today. Our pelvises could only get so big or we wouldn't be able to keep walking, and our heads grew as we thought more and developed our frontal lobes, and the result was that our babies began being born earlier than was preferable. If we hadn't of made these changes, our babies would be more like other mammal babies, and born when they could walk relatively soon after birth, more like a year old baby than our modern day newborns. And we would have kept the straight birth canal that other mammals enjoy. As it is, our birth canal's have become a twisty journey to the outside world, and we birth babies that are all virtually premature.

Nature had to help us adapt........

And did so beautifully, by setting up an intricate rewards system, that made sure that we'd keep our babies close to us and nurture them, to ensure the survival of our species. And a delicate cocktail of hormones and oxytocins to be released during specific periods of the birthing time, as well as infancy, to keep us following the carrot of baby care that people call now 'attachment parenting'. Sarah J Buckley writes eloquently on these hormonal cocktails, and how they are released and can be interrupted by medical intervention.

It really came home to me about a week after my twins were born. I was experiencing extreme sore nipples and nipple trauma for the first time ever, and finding it all a bit difficult and hard to cope with. Lisa came to visit and found me teary and overwhelmed, and told me I needed to get my clothes off, rest as much as I could, and hold my babies on my skin and close to my chest as much as I could. And as she explained, during the times that followed after we changed our evolutionary path, if I'd left my babies on a bed or ground as far away from me as they were at that moment, they would have been eaten by a predator or stolen by another tribe. If I kept my babies on my bare chest as much as possible, I'd trigger off the happy hormones as the reward for me keeping my babies alive and safe.

I tried it and it worked beautifully. And I realised I still had a lot to learn.

The night my 4th baby was born, my midwife Rosey was on the phone to me being gorgeous, and as my mum was there, she asked me to ask mum how she'd given birth to me - in which position.  I asked, and was surprised when I found that she'd birthed in exactly the same position as I always do.  Rosey told me that a huge percentage of the women she'd birthed with, (and that's a lot in over 30 years as a midwife) birthed in the same positions as their mothers.

But it doesn't stop there.

I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that having twins has been one of the most challenging physical, emotional, and spiritual journeys of my life.  In fact, the birth was NOTHING compared to how these past 5 months have been as a reality.  I tried really hard to imagine what it would be like to have two babies before I birthed them......

And I wasn't even close.

And what comes with pushing yourself and your limits to the very edge?  In my experience anyway, it usually produces realisations and self awareness.  And this experience has been no exception.

I've been saying for a long time, that as we're born, we're turning around and looking at our mothers and saying to ourselves, 'Now THAT'S how to give birth, and when we're being raised we're saying, 'THAT'S how to treat children, and THAT'S what to expect from life'.  I always meant it more metaphorically than anything else, but I'm coming to understand that this learning is literal.

For mammals and animals and us to survive, the very process I've just described has to be imprinted totally and completely, along with an imperative to remember and re-enact all we soak up as babies and children.  That's how great herds of buffalo moved across the grasslands following the water, grass and seasons.  Why Emperor Penguins go to that extreme place in the freezer all those miles from the water and perform the rituals they do, rather than just pull up shop and move closer to the sea.  Why birds flock together and go on their global journeys to eat, nest, and raise their young.  How all sorts of animals remember when and where all sorts of prey are going to be, and how to best eat them.  They learnt the patterns from their parents, how to birth, feed, procreate and survive, and repeated those patterns faithfully.

And guess what.  I'm realising that we're exactly the same.  Except we think that the re-enactment of our parents patterns in our lives is because of all the other reasons under the sun, except for, we do it because that's how we were shown how to survive.  And we've faithfully replicated the patterns.  We may do it in different ways, and with different costumes or descriptions, but in my experience anyway, it's a matter of the same poo (or joy) in a different bucket.....

And it's taken the extremeties of birthing and living with twins to bring me to the realisation that even though I've been merrily tripping down the path of thinking that I was doing things differently to my parents and had transcended my childhood......  I was in denial all along.

It's a long and complicated story, and I don't want to make my eldest daughter feel in the spotlight, but suffice to say, many of the mistakes I thought I wasn't making.....I was.  Many of the things I hated about my childhood.......I did to her.  And most profound to me, how I spent my pregnancy, was a way of being that is a big part of her life now.  In a different way of course, but the essence is still the same.  This shocked the crap out of me when I saw it let me tell you now, and then I started looking at all the other elements in my life, and realised there were a lot of patterns I learnt from my childhood that I'd re-created.  Again, in different clothing, and with different props, but the basic pattern was exactly the same.

To give you an example.  My mum raised 6 children virtually on her own with an alcoholic, disaffected husband, who'd walk in the door after work, drop his hat and bag as he went straight to his room, where he'd read a book, drink a bottle of wine, and mum had to keep us all quiet.  She had no help or assistance.  And Currawong's mum was equally on her own and alone, and had to keep him well behaved so as not to get in the way.  They were both disrespected and unsupported in their lives and choices.

And we live on a community, and are surrounded by friends, and not doing it on our own but with a loving partner (man was I bummed when I realised that getting over my parents patterns, by being madly in love with the father of my children, wasn't all there was to transcend!!) - but - my mum and eldest daughter have had other business, the 6 other adults here haven't helped a jot, and friends help when they can, but the logistics of getting out to see them or vice versa is tricky.  We've also got grumpy neighbours who want us to keep our kids quiet till midday.  In fact, in all the places we've lived since we started having kids, we've done it on our own, had to keep our kids quiet a lot and controlled, and not got any outside help to speak of.  And often end up in home situations where we're disrespected and unsupported in our choices.  All of these paradigms go out the window though when we're travelling and on the road.  We didn't get any patterns to recreate around travelling, so we do it with a clean slate.  And it's divine.

Now I'm not saying this to whinge, or to shame my fellow community dwellers, (and none of you are allowed to be disillusioned about communities because of this story!!).  In fact I'm sure that even if they wanted to help, they wouldn't be able to because my love and I have a learnt imperative that we've implemented for our survival!  And those survival skills we learnt are strong! Learnt at our parents knees!  And it's not even their fault, in fact it's not really anyones....it's just us human mammals acting out our learnt skills to survive.

But the good news is, and I'll have to keep you posted, that when you realise such a pattern for what it is - a misguided survival imperative - then you can change it.  You can unschool it.  You can unlearn it. Instead of justifying, rationalising, psycho-therapising and the rest, you can just say..

"Oh.  That particular survival skill I learnt from infancy doesn't actually help me survive.  In fact it feels really crappy sometimes and I'm only doing it cause my animal brain wants to survive by repeating what it saw my parents do, but now I've been through all these changes and got myself a bigger frontal lobe, I can understand why I was doing it, see where I got that particular dysfunctional survival skill from, and simply change it for one I like better"

Or at least it should........

A musical trip down memory lane.... Part 1

Currawong got home late from drumming last night, and we sat up till early in the morning as I took him on a trip down memory lane with music clips from Youtube.  I told him a whole heap of depth to my stories about my dyke days in Katoomba that I'd never told him before.  It's wierd.  I had such a blast, and I've always been very  proud of my stories as a scene queen in the Blue Mountains, but I kinda stopped telling them when I became very monogamous and heterosexual with the love of my life, and having copious amounts of children....kinda didn't seem to fit anymore.  And I was always wary of the voyeuristic tendancies of the folk I told stories to, and thought that if they wanted to know the intricacies of lesbian culture, then they should go have a look themselves (if they were the right gender of course), rather than get a peek through me.  And I was also very aware of the privacy and respect that a lot of the women I hung out with would appreciate from me.  So I just kinda tucked all my stories away, and got on with only being so weird as to be a big hippy with lots of kids, and a crocheted bus, living in and around community, into homebirthing and natural learning, and traveling, and the festival, market, and dance scenes.

But strike me pink and call me lemon, I had a huge amount of fun. I'm gonna tell you some of those stories, doing my best to respect everyone's dignity and privacy, just cause they were some of the most brilliant and magical moments of my life.

I moved back to the mountains when I'd got pregnant from a fling while selling life insurance to have my first child.  Her birth transformed my life completely and showed me layers in our culture that I'd never known about before.  Feminism, the Goddess, the divine feminine, spirituality, pagan culture, my world exploded into realms I'd never dreamt of.  I went to a meditation group and kept hearing about this tall, striking woman who was a lesbian, and when we met we almost instantly fell head over heels in kindred, platonic love.  We talked and compared and enlightened and shared and learnt the patterns and trends of whole new worlds together.  And just when we were both on the verge of thinking that women were the most splendid creations on the planet, and we could just launch into a parallel universe where men didn't exist, (more colloquially known as separatism) she brought a blue eyed man to visit me one night, we talked all night, and he instantly became part of our platonic love triangle.

We were all three intensely into LIFE and honesty, and unpeeling layers off our childhoods and popular culture and 'reality' and trying to find out who we all really were.  Exploring music and art and literature and concepts and foods and smells and sensuality and sexuality and gender and textures and natural found objects and everything we could lay our incredibly open minds on.  We got so into intense and brilliant conversations with each other that we forgot all about the people around us, and sometimes we'd all come too and find we had an audience with hanging mouths who'd been listening to our collective journey.

They became like parents to my young daughter, and we fast became inseperable, and they lived in a plush wooden mansion in Blackheath on Shipley road, with an incredible view from massive glass windows of cliffs and valleys reaching into Megalong Valley.  And we whirled and glittered and spun and talked, and freaked out nearly everyone around us.

We gals were bent, he was straight, I had a daughter, he was in a wheelchair, and we talked and laughed and tussled with concepts while dashing through the mountains in bright streams of colour and wafts of pure delight.  We challenged nearly every stereotype we could find, about disability, sexuality, relationships and gender.

"Your inability to see my ability is your own disability..."

And in the middle of these halcyon days, my gal pal and I were asked to make some music for a dyke dance in Katoomba.  We already had a reputation from a few parties we'd been at where we'd hijacked the sound system, so we set to our task with joy, using his music and our music, and sewing ourselves lush velvet capes with hoods, and long fitted frocks for the occasion.  We were cheeky as we made the tapes, putting on songs we knew were very different to the music normally heard at such events, but playing the music that inspired us nonetheless.  And even though he helped us create the soundtrack, our third mate couldn't come to this event, not even we tried to stretch that particular boundary.....

 
It was one of the most amazing nights and dances I've ever been to, still to this day.  It was like all cliches and stereotypes and distinctions dissolved, as all the gorgeous women of all shapes and ages just got on with the business of having fun. All the songs we thought would be challenging were just plain enjoyed.

We knew when this song was coming, and ran outside to hide while we giggled helplessly about what the reactions to it might be, and to our surprise, no-one said a word.

At one point outside the hall, there was a circle of about 10 women standing together, hugging and holding and talking and sharing, and everyone seemed to step out from their internal worlds and stand together united.

 
And when this piece played, as it was our threesome's collective favourite at the time, me and my beautiful friend skipped and swirled round the dance floor with capes billowing out behind us, and slowly all the women joined in as we whirled our way through the drum beats.

And we all had a huge amount of fun......

Ode to Sovereignty Day....

I got to the ripe old age of 27 without hardly ever seeing a black fella. Or woman for that matter. I remember the first time I saw a black African, whose skin was shining blue black, and I couldn’t help but stare, as I’d never seen anyone like him. I grew up around the Blue Mountains, spent lots of time in Sydney, travelled up the east coast, moved to South Australia and lived in the hills……and barely a black fella was seen. I didn’t even know that this country had been populated by indigenous people until year 5 at school, when we had a relief teacher who read us a story about Pemulwuy. It came as a bit of a shock. And not long after I was watching telly with my stepfather, and saw on the news the Tent Embassy in Canberra, with some fascinating looking coloured people, and when my stepfather explained they were asking for land rights and they were the traditional owners, it made complete and instant sense to me that if the land had been theirs, we should just give it back!! He didn’t quite agree. I heard vague stories about how they got all sorts of special attention, and got more money from the D.S.S. than anyone else, and had special services at schools and universities, and got free land and houses and all sorts of myths that typically abound about people that are ‘different’ (like refugees). I also got warned about Redfern in my forays to Sydney, and told that I’d be in danger if I went there. I had a friend years later who went to university and stayed with a white woman in Redfern, and I went to visit her quite regularly, but even then, the indigenous folk were kind of shadowy background figures that didn’t really impact on me, except for my fascination when I saw them. I was also brought up a Mormon, with it’s inbuilt racism, and taught from day dot that black people were somehow inferior – Cain’s punishment had been to be turned into a black man, and the creation myth of my religion stated that all black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and folk other than white fella’s, were getting punished for being fence sitters in heaven, by being sent to earth as a colour other than white. So when I did see an indigenous person, I found it hard to not leave with a slight distaste in my mouth…they were somehow more uncouth, animal like, dirtier and unknown in a potentially scary way.

I left my childhood religion and realized my taught racism (sexism, homophobia, etc), and did my best to transcend it. After leaving home I spent some time in the area around Bathurst, where there was still the odd Aboriginal. I hung out with an indigenous girl at school for a while, and was surprised that there was not much difference, and she didn’t really want to talk about it much. As I got older I hung out with dykes and witches and goddess worshippers and started hearing better things about the indigenous folk of this land, but not as much as I did about Native Americans and Eastern mystics and Voodoo religions. Then nearing the age of 28, and Saturn Return, I decided it was time to check out the desert. It was time to take an initiatory trip through the middle of the country in the middle of summer and really learn about the country I lived in, as well as facing my fears and setting myself a challenge. To tell the truth, I didn’t really think much about the indigenous folk I might meet, or even realize that I was about to enter the main country that had been left to them to inhabit, after the white folk had divided and conquered the more alluring coastal and farming areas.

So off I set, car serviced, spares onboard, lots of water stored, and all my hippy and witchy artifacts along for the ride. The first place I stopped after Adelaide was Port Augusta, where there were more black fella’s around than I’d ever seen in my life. I had no idea what to do so I just smiled, and got lots of smiles back. They were in fact the only people who did smile at me, and made happy comments as I passed them. I was staying at a youth hostel, when I started getting the warnings that I became used to as my journey unfolded. I was told to stay away from a certain pub in town cause it was a black pub, and they’d probably either harass me, steal my money, or try to rape me. And also to stay away from a bridge on the other side of town cause that’s where the indigenous kids hung out and jumped off to swim in the surrounding waters, and that was also a dangerous area. Port Augusta was also the first place I came across where valuable assets – like the drive through bottle shop, and a very luxurious caravan park which I camped at for a while – were surrounded by high razor wire….suggesting that violence occurred that the white fellas needed protecting from. So I kept smiling at the black fella’s, and went and parked my car surreptitiously near the bridge and watched all the kids jumping off the bridge and having a ball. There was a certain un-domesticatedness about them that I found really attractive, but I was still very new to the whole situation and unsure about everything.

I guess it was around this time that I realized there was a whole other part to my journey that I hadn’t suspected before. I’d never really had firsthand experience of Aboriginals, and had heard a lot of guff, which I knew from life experience was most likely exaggerated or just untrue, and also realized that I knew nothing, and that any preconceptions I had would most likely be far from the mark. So I decided it was time to learn about this amazing land I was entering, and it’s traditional care takers, without making any judgements at all until I felt like I’d learnt from my own experiences.

After a few days I got ready to head into the desert….in my 84 Gemini that was tending to overheat, afraid of the heat, afraid of the unknown, afraid of being on my own, afraid of all sorts of things. For about the first hour driving out of Port Augusta towards Coober Pedy, I was shaking….legs barely managing to stay on the pedals…totally terrified of my big adventure into the great unknown.

Every petrol station I stopped at on the way up, when the attendant saw I was a white woman travelling on my own, took it on himself or herself to warn me that I was entering dangerous territory, and I got told over and over again that if I saw any black fella’s on the road, even if it looked like I hit them, to just keep going and not stop, cause they’d steal, rape then murder me as soon as I did. I was quite bewildered by this, and realizing I still knew nothing, just decided to keep observing and see what panned out.

In Coober Pedy there was a lot more unhappy, obviously drunk and scarred indigenous folk on the streets. I watched the locals treat them like scum and animals, and the tourists try to deal with them and have an ‘authentic’ outback experience. A lot of Aboriginals were asking for money, and a lot of locals were disparagingly telling them to fuck off and get drunk somewhere else. I was still paying attention, but also a bit distracted by the international tourists that I was bumping into and my own trip of self realization and fear facing. From Coober Pedy I went out to Uluru. It was suprising how few black fella’s were actually at or around the luxury resort of Yulara, and how easy it was to have a totally white experience of the heart of the country without an indigenous person in sight. The guides were white, the hoteliers were white, even the shit kickers were white – though they were all very happy to be selling Aboriginal paintings and boomerangs and all the other tourist clap trap that suggested we were an integrated country that honoured it’s original inhabitants………

Anyway, if I were to tell you every story that happened for me to form a conclusion about the indigenous inhabitants of this land, it would end up being a very very long story, and I really want to just tell a simple story for this day in our country – Invasion or Survival or Sovereignty Day – otherwise known to rather heartless folk who don’t mind celebrating genocide, as Australia Day. 

In Alice Springs I learnt a lot. I met a lot of racist white folk and a few beautifully behaved white folk. And I met lots of chocolate brown folk in varying states of sobriety, and totally understood the desire to be out of it, in the face of so many inequalities and downright disgusting behaviors of many of the white residents in town. I heard stories from all sides of the fence and understood them. I noticed the fact that the town existed in unofficial apartheid. There were black taxi’s and white taxi’s, black toilets and white toilets, black pubs and white pubs, and a whole heap of extra special rules that were designed to keep indigenous folk out of shops. And on my way out to work at a station as a Jilleroo, my car broke down and about 4 white folk, and 1 very nervous indigenous man, stopped to ask me if I wanted help. I asked them all to ring the station I was on my way to, and get them to come help me, and out of all those people, it was only the indigenous man who actually rang. 

SNAPSHOT......... I’m standing at a big row of phones in Alice Springs about to make a phone call, when a black man walked up to me not speaking much English. But his name was Leonard Possum, and he wanted me to help him use the phone so he could ring his woman, and he didn’t know how a phone worked. I was delighted to help, and he gave me the number on some paper and the coins for the phone, and we walked two phones down to where he wanted to ring. In the space of that time, two very white men obviously leant out from their phones to glare at him and watch his every step. The harsh woman who I was working for stomped up to us while I was dialing, and started speaking to him like he was a recalcitrant, deaf and dumb child…. “Where are you from?! Where’s your community?! You go ring them and get them to help you?! Leave her alone?!” To which I of course replied, “I’m doing this gentleman a favour, which I’m happy to do, and you can bloody well leave him alone!” Leonard was kind of cringing the whole time we stood there, and we were watched by about another 4 white men the whole time I was helping him. I felt ashamed.

Overall, I saw the white folk using a few black fella’s getting drunk and showing some undomesticated behaviours, as an excuse to act very very badly……. Bone jarringly badly. As if they weren’t even human.

SNAPSHOT......... The same harsh woman I worked for who had me busy in my Jillerooing duties of cleaning her house, decided to take me to her daughter’s, so I could clean her house too. On the way there she threw a beer bottle out the window, saying “We can blame the boongs for that one!!”, with a jackal like leer on her face. At her daughters house, after a day of cleaning in 50 degree heat, we barbecued by a waterhole. They told me with glee it was a sacred men’s site, as they threw more bottles in the water. The sweet faced young white couple were talking about how good it was that the canoe tree in Goolwa had been ringbarked. “It’s about time someone got the black bastards back!!” They said. Got them back for what? For being victims of genocide?? For walking nervous and shaky through the streets, unwilling to look at anyone?? On the way home, the woman I was working for saw a flock of galah’s, and sped up to try and hit one, managing to kill one on the bullbar, where it got stuck, head lolling and feathers flying, right in front of my window. I felt sick and ashamed. 

So many other things happened. I met an indigenous man called Billy White, who wore a white cowboy hat and white clothes and lived on White Street. He was the most gentle, philosophical, thoughtful and compassionate man I met in Alice Springs. In lots of places actually. And a sweet white hippy woman who treated the black fella’s like absolute gold, and gave me a beautiful example of how best to treat the native owners of the land.

And then I’d had my fill, had been around town for over a month, and decided it was time to head up through the middle and then strike for the east coast. On my way out of town, about 11 o’clock at night, I got overtaken by a low slung holden, spewing smoke from it’s exhaust, packed tight with huge hulking people. Not far down the road I wasn’t surprised to see them pulled over by the side of the road, and would you believe it, but all the warnings flooded my head and I went to keep driving. Till I came to, remembered all the things I saw and people I’d met and stories I’d collected, and I pulled over to the side of the road, did a u turn, and headed back. Where I met 5 huge indigenous men, who asked me if I could give them a lift to their community so they could get help to come back and tow the car. I told them I only had room for one passenger, (hippy artifacts take up a lot of room you know!) and they nudged forward an old fella who got in the front passenger seat. Before we drove off, we introduced ourselves, (he didn’t speak much English) and I said to him, “You’re welcome in my car. There’s my cigarettes, and there’s my water, and there’s the music if you want to listen to it, just make yourself at home." Nearly the whole way to his community, about 100kms or so, he kept telling me in every way he could think of, how alike we were. He was grabbing my arm and saying “You’re white”, and then grabbing his own arm and saying “I’m black”, and then waving his fingers between us saying “We’re the same…..we’re the same”. I grinned. And I laughed. And I felt such overwhelming gratitude that this heartfelt man wanted me so much to know how similar we were. We got to his community and before he got out of the car, he grabbed my hand and kissed it. I instantly kissed his hand back, and we both parted richer and warmer and happier from the whole experience.

And I’d like to leave my tale on that note. A perfect metaphor for the whole trip, and what I learnt from it. My family and I have gone on to travel to a lot more places and have had a lot more experiences, and every single one of them has been respectful, connected, and significant. The native caretakers of this land are some of the most beautiful, deep, and spiritual people I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. And I’m real glad that my skin colour doesn’t prejudice black fella's as much as a lot of white fella’s let skin colour prejudice them, to connect, and share, and increase understanding and awareness.