Honoring the New Mother - Telling Our Stories, Tending Our Souls Wet Set Gazette Nov/Dec 2005 column
The Ticopia people of the Solomon Islands announce birth differently than most: rather than saying, “A baby has been born!”, they proclaim that “A mother has given birth!” A subtle but important distinction. When a baby is born, a mother is born; even if she already has children, each birth experience unfolds new facets of self, often having to do with feeling powerful, capable, supported… or helpless, inadequate, insignificant. These are primal feelings that will weave their way through her life and her relationships, with her children, her partner, herself. Indeed, childbirth leaves its imprint, a faint yet distinct watermark on a mother’s soul.
Unless she belongs to the 2% of homebirthers, a laboring woman will most likely experience some level of technological birth intervention. The sad irony is that although most of us are enculturated to believe in the greater safety of a hospital birth (despite research to the contrary), and put implicit trust in the body-as-machine principles of modern obstetrics, it is not uncommon for a woman, following a technologically-managed birth, to feel a wordless sense of… some vague… what? Alice Adams calls it “an unnamable loss… I lost perception and control. Amniotomy, fetal monitor, I.V., anesthetic, episiotomy, forceps: I retreated from my body more with every intervention, until I could no longer connect my consciousness to the abject body that contained it.” She went on to suffer chronic postpartum depression.
With all sense of the sacredness of birth eclipsed by the intensely secular, mechanized efficiency of medicalized obstetrics, I think we suffer yet another unnamable loss at the level of soul. I believe that all women, consciously or not, willing or not, participate in a wordless knowing about the transformative potential of childbirth, a faint and haunting collective memory of the empowerment and profound initiatic experience we might claim in the birthing of our babies.
The three primary elements that shape a woman’s perception of her birth as positive or negative are: 1) her perception of control, 2) how supportive she finds the environment, and 3) her prior vulnerabilities. All labor and birth interventions, be they high-tech or human, will intimately influence and engage with each of these elements to help compose the final totality of her experience.
Ancient warriors (as recently as World War II) returning from battle always shared their stories of horror and heroics with their fellow warriors and eventually with their communities. In the past, birthing women also did this. Storytelling, dancing, music, poetry and chanting were all used to depict and re-live the raw, powerful, bloody experience. The recounting of her personal story helps a new mother integrate the intensity of her birth experience into everyday life and into her own consciousness. It also introduces her experiences into the community, where the next generation of young women can create a schema regarding pregnancy, labor pain, birth and motherhood. We have abandoned these kinds of postpartum rituals; in our culture, virtually all authentic expressions about the noble ordeal of birth are deformed into standard-issue sitcom punch lines.
Our culture is notoriously cavalier about childbirth; as long as it results in a healthy baby, the birthing experience itself (from the mother’s perspective) is seen as insignificant, a means to an end, nothing to dwell upon (“Oh, come on honey, Bill and Doris don’t need to see the video…”). Any detours from a woman’s childbirth expectations become largely irrelevant once a “good outcome” has been achieved. But new research suggests that we shouldn’t be so quick to sweep birth bygones under the rug: negative emotions linked to childbirth may be pushed back by conscious cognitive processing (“Oh, it wasn’t so bad, and look how beautiful she is!”) and framed into a “wordless and unelaborated realm of experience.”
We know that when negative experiences aren’t fully expressed and elaborated, a person can develop all kinds of avoidance mechanisms, including the inhibition of thoughts and feelings linked to the stressful event. Such a scenario can undermine healthy attachment between mother and baby, since he represents the stressful event! And healthy attachment is the essential foundation for her child’s lifelong development. In one study, women who were simply supported in writing or speaking aloud a narrative account of their child’s birth—including all of their associated emotions and worries without denying, “prettying up” or justifying them—greatly reduced their risk of experiencing postpartum stress symptoms. (An estimated 24% of postpartum mothers exhibit PTSD symptoms.)
In many non-Western cultures a woman is eased into motherhood—forbidden to work, lift, or cook, fed special foods, sung to and often held and rocked. But we civilized folk presume the transition from pregnant woman to expert-mother-totally-in-love-and-at-ease-with-her-baby will happen immediately and automatically. And the new mother is often expected to accomplish these adjustments virtually alone. A tip from the Ticopia: While the baby is jubilantly welcomed, the new mother is also tenderly cared for, in line with their cultural belief (and that of 250 other researched cultures) that the mother’s well-being is of paramount importance so she can successfully nurture her child. Amen.
Thanks to Jennifer Aguilar for her contributions to this article. Alice Adams’ quote excerpted from her book Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature.