unassisted childbirth

today i am going to hip you to the unassisted birth culture.  frankly, for all the strangenesses and weird alliances (can you say witches and fundamentalist christians sharing notes on childbirth?) i love this movement…and this blog has in large part been an exploration on the empowerment of women during pregnancy, birth, and mamahood and i believe that unassisted birth is a large part of that.

unassisted birth (a birth without birth professionals) is not everyone’s or most people’s imagined ideal birth scenario.  actually i was talking to my teacher from palestine a week ago and when i mentioned home births he said: people still do that?  ha ha ha.  but i do believe that in the core of our culture we need to know that birth happens.  it does not do so because of any professional or any machine, it simply happens because that is how the human race brings forth the next generation.  and that each of us has the right to decide what we are going to do with our bodies. we must decide for ourselves whether and how we are going to conceive, carry, deliver and  care for our young.  we must learn the ways that our body and our minds communicate to our person.  that the bodies intuition must guide us.  and if that intuition says scheduled c-section, then do it.  and if it says give birth in the woods next to a lake on a bed of mushrooms, do it. 

we do not live in a culture that honors this knowing.  and for those of us who seek this knowing without the vestiges and garb of patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, and other oppressions, it is harder for us, because we are going against the grain of ‘motherhood’.  our culture does not have models for anti-oppressive revolutionary pregnancy and birth.  and so we have added burdens (as if we do not have enough already) of creating these models, living these models, and sometimes, dying by these models.  these models which are so life-affirming and yet because they are so heretical to the ‘powers that be’ give our culture’s leaders permission to jeopardize our life and our children’s life in order to discredit these life-giving paradigms.  and yet we must continue to fight.  not simply for ourselves, or our children, but for the women who are looking for models…they must learn that they have the power to create their own. 

i dont vote

i wrote this as a response to moya’s discussion over at quirky black girls about ambivalence toward the election of obama…so i am posting it here as well…

i didnt vote. i never vote.
i guess i am of two minds…but them i am usually of two (or more) minds. the day of the election, i went to arabic class. my teacher had scheduled the class an hour earlier than usual because he wanted to get to grant park in time in order to celebrate obama’s victory. i was kind of surprised. he grew up in gaza, studied at bir zeit in the west bank and obama is very pro-israel. now, obama’s position on israel has not gotten alot of press, but frankly, when he announced that he believed in an undivided jerusalem, i was pissed. let me unpack the phrase ‘undivided jerusalem’ for a moment. jerusalem at the moment is one of the most contested pieces of real estate in the world. the israeli government has built large israeli settlements surrounding jerusalem in order to make the ‘facts on the ground’ that all of jerusalem and the land surrounding jerusalem belongs to israel. at the moment there is west jerusalem (israel) and east jerusalem (palestinian) and then surrounding east jerusalem massive israeli settlements that block east jerusalem palestinians from being able to reach the rest of the west bank without going through a series of military checkpoints. it can take hours to travel ten miles to the nearest city in the west bank. i am not talking about abstract people, or dots on a map, i am talking about my friends that can’t go see their family or their family land (if the israelis havent already confiscated that family land for israeli settlements).
on the other hand (the other mind) i think about my daughter. my little biracial daughter who is seriously going to grow up thinking that it was the olden days when a person of color could not lead the empire. she is going to shrug her shoulders and be like: whatev, mom. the way that i used to be when my mom used to tell me stories about integrating her high school in rural south carolina. when i was a teenager, in my (integrated) high school i told everyone that i planned to become president of the usa. i wanted to change the world and the presidency seemed like the instrument to use. i would tell people that i refused to say the pledge of allegiance (it was required that everyone in the school stand for the pledge every morning…welcome to virginia) until racism ended in the usa. a fellow student asked me how was i going to be president of the usa if i wasnt willing to say the pledge…and my lil 13 year old self quipped…well when i am president then obviously racism will have ended! in that school i was considered really radical for thinking that i (a geeky lil black girl) could be president.

aza and the family

aza and the family…

siarah, with the sandy-colored curly hair, my brother’s daughter, is three years old, very smart and cute

malik, my brother’s newborn son, also very cute

what will aza do next?

aza learning to drink, shoot, paint, and play