a dream of two births

this afternoon i took a nap.  and i dreamt of being in a multi-tiered tree house with dark wet steps, ramshackled wooden rooms like in a fixer-upper house that is always being fixed up.  i was downstairs in the living room with a woman about to give birth.  she had asked me to be there.  this was her second or third child.  she knelt  on the couch with her head against the wall behind the couch and moaned and squealed and her baby came slithering out.  i didnt do anything but be there.  she pushed when she wanted.  she moved as she wanted.  i remember her rolling on the floor.  i remember her on her back.  at one point she grabbed my hand and squeezed.

while she was nursing her baby, a woman upstairs sent a child to ask me to come to her birth.  we walked up the slippery stairs.  it was raining.  her room had two maybe three walls the rest of it was tree branches shielding her from the rain.  patches of green and blue sky peeked between the overhead branches.  her child too came out of her body in the midst of groans and shakes and shrieks.  we were all wet from the drizzle.

i woke up happy and warm thinking about outlaw midwives.  why did these two dream women request that i be at their births.  they caught their babies in their own hands.  i barely did anything but hum under my breath, hold a hand, and witness.  they did not need me there at all.  but they wanted me there.

when i work as a doula, i work hard to make sure that the mother knows that she didnt need me there.  that she did it all herself.  i liked it best when everyone in the room is just enamored of the mother and child and i could slip out of the room with a soft goodbye and with barely anyone noticing my departure.  i like it best when they wanted me to be at the birth, but they know and i know, they didnt need me to be there.

one doula said to me that the best thing that she could hear from a mother is: i couldnt have done it without you.  and i cant help but think: it could be an indication of the disempowerement of the primacy of the mother during birth when a mother says that to a birth worker.

third/fourth wave midwifery and spinning babies

do you remember that democracy now! with melissa harris lacewell and gloria steinem talking about hillary and barack earlier this year?

it is one of the greatest exchanges that happened during the election imho.

it was the difference between second wave and third wave feminism…i know we are not supposed to acknowledge the difference between the generations approach to feminism…but i need the analogy to explain third/fourth wave midwifery…

well, alot of the midwives that i have met (primarily in minneapolis) are second wave midwives.  they have fought so hard for legal recognition that everything else becomes secondary or tertiary in their view.  and they are very protective over the ‘gains’ they have made, no matter how the privileging of ‘certified’ and ‘insured’ midwives has been not only negligent but destructive to women of color, the queer community, sexual and trauma survivors, imprisoned women, and many more marginalized in the birth community and in the world at large.

what they seemed to be much more concerned with is protecting their status and the status of certified midwives in order to advance their cause.  they do so by looking toward women’s cultures that are black and brown and saying: see!  see!  those women have ‘natural’ birth.  and we, white women, are using those black and brown exotic women’s cultures as a model for us to change birth in our white communities.