Access + Privilege

Olive was born at home. I have been hesitant to share much of my birth story because it is so incredibly steeped in privilege. Lots of people talk about home birth as if it is somehow a heroic act, or superior to other ways of birthing. I just feel like it was an incredible privilege.

I got to make my own choices about how I wanted my care to look, what interventions I would embrace or reject, who I wanted to touch me and when. I got to prepare and recover exactly the way I wanted to - in my own home, with my own food, in my own clothes, my own bed with my daughter and husband beside me. I had access to all the herbs and supplements and nourishing broths and infusions. And did I mention, my care came with built-in postpartum visits? In my own home!!

But what's upsetting about all this is that it's not the norm. What's upsetting is that there are lots of people, most people, who don't get to have this experience. What's upsetting is that in order to have an experience like this I had to have the money to buy it AND the prior knowledge and education to seek it out. I'm not saying that everybody should have a home birth or make the choices I made, but I do think that everybody should have the option. I do think that every single birthing person should be fully informed and given tools for understanding and then allowed to choose exactly how they want to birth. I do think, at a bare minimum, that every single birthing person should be treated by their care providers with the same respect and trust and dignity that I was. 

Way over on the end of the spectrum anyone who lacks the education to know better (or the money to hire a doula) is being sold a bunch of useless, unnecessary interventions that do more harm than good (while making things simpler and more efficient for their care providers). Anyone who doesn't fit into the narrow standards of "optimal" weight and health is being forced to birth with little or no autonomy according to the strictest guidelines "for their own safety" (in order to limit the liability of their care providers). And the maternal mortality rate for black women is still 4 TIMES as high as it is for their white counterparts, with most of those deaths occuring in the postpartum period (due to the overtly racist treatment they receive from their care providers). 

All of this is unacceptable. How we birth = how we live. How we recover from birth affects us for the rest of our lives. And yet, how many of us can actually afford a postpartum doula? How many of us can afford bodywork to help us heal? How many of us can even afford nourishing food?

Getting to birth the way that I did set me up for an optimal postpartum period. It allowed me to step across the threshold feeling empowered and supported. Things have not gone exactly as I'd imagined or hoped but I'm still ok, because I came into it from such a nourished place.

I talk a lot about postpartum awareness and how important it is to be honest about the real difficulties of this period, but we also need the solutions to those difficulties to be affordable and accessible to every. single. birthing. person. We need to establish a standard of care that doesn't leave the most vulnerable of us behind. We need to make collective postpartum healing plans that center those who have the least privilege and the least access.

A nourished postpartum isn't truly nourishing if it isn't for all of us.

(This post was inspired by the Nourished Postpartum Challenge, which was created and organized by my mentors at Birdsong Brooklyn. Go to birdsongbrooklyn.com to learn more about them and their advocacy work in the postpartum space.)

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A Letter to my Husband from the Fourth Trimester

I watch you sleep all night long. 12:30 am. 2:30 am. I am awake feeding the baby and you are sleeping soundly, right beside us like nothing is happening. I start to hate you at 4 am, when my nervous system is no longer able to drift off between feeds because I've forced myself awake too many times and now I have nothing to do but lay there next to a baby who is finally sleeping and you, who were never not sleeping. You did not wake up when I asked for help putting the baby back down and instead rolled over away from me and pulled the covers around you tighter. You will say tomorrow that you do not even remember. It's not your fault. You just sleep more deeply than I do.

In the morning I lay in bed awake again, listening to the sounds of you making breakfast with our daughter. She is laughing and affectionate. My heart aches for her. Yesterday, I let you take the baby in the morning while I made breakfast with her, got her dressed for school. You came in every couple minutes to say things like "I know it's a little different that you're spending time with Mama today, but different is good too!" As if it is your job to never let her forget how absent I've been these few months, taking care of baby, pinned down and breastfeeding, watching the two of you live our life without me. I hate you for this also.

I hate you when my friends remind me you are a good man. Some men leave, they say, at least he is still here. 

I know that they are right, that you are a good man. But not for those reasons. Not simply for existing.

I think you are a good man because you try to understand the systems that have led us here, to this point. I think you are a good man because you try so hard to unravel the conditioning that posions you into believing that these inequities are normal and ok. I think you are a good man because you see the unfairness of it all and try, try, try to make it right even though it means pushing against the weight of the world. But for all your trying, we are still here in this place where things feel profoundly unequal and sometimes I feel like I hate you.

But there are other moments too. Moments when we are in flow together, finding our rhythm. Moments where it feels like we are a real family, the kind I always dreamed of being a part of.

There are moments when we are so tuned into each other that you know exactly when I've reached the point of being completely touched out and you swoop in and take the baby without having to be asked. And there are moments when I can tell you are exactly 10 seconds from losing it with our toddler and I get to rush in and save the day. 

There are rare moments, when both kids are asleep and we remember to kiss each other or hold hands and it feels so novel it's like falling in love all over again.

There are moments when I watch you holding our daughters, reading to them, or just looking at them with so much love, and my heart feels so full and I know that I have never loved anyone as much as I love you. 

This is the part in the essay where the writer always says that despite all the ways that things are messy and imperfect, they wouldn't change a thing. I'm not going to say that. There is a lot that I would change if it were up to me. I would make you a lighter sleeper and I would make support a million times easier to come by so that we wouldn't have to choose between prioritizing ourselves or each other. But one thing I wouldn't change is that we're in this together. The thing I wouldn't change is doing this with you.

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Thanking the Saints

Last night I made L’acqua di San Giovanni. I went into the garden and cut little bits of all the plants I’ve been growing - wormwood, oregano, lavender, rosemary, yarrow, chamomile, lemon balm, fennel, calendula. I left it all in a bowl my father made, covered in water, outdoors underneath the moon. This morning when I woke up I pulled the plants from the water, shaking and dripping the water off their leaves and onto my body, my face, my hair and I scattered them in various corners of my yard. Thanking the saints, my ancestors, the land I live on and the land I come from, for leading me down this path.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this ritual and what it means to me. Last year was the first time I ever made, or even knew of, L’acqua di San Giovanni. I made it the night after taking Kara’s first class on Italian Folk Medicine. For me, that moment was such an initiation. I had been waiting for so long for someone to reveal to me the magic of my ancestors, and then there it was and the whole world changed. I began to see things differently, things I had noticed before but now they had a name and a place. Fennel growing on the side of the freeway, rosemary spilling out of my neighbors yard, the medicine of my ancestors everywhere.

This year, I took the same class again and we talked about L’acqua di San Giovanni again. This time I asked “Who exactly was San Giovanni? I know he was John the Baptist, but I don’t know what that means. What is his significance?” Kara gave me a simple answer that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured out on my own. John the Baptist is the one who baptizes. The one who baptized Jesus. Of course. 

On this day last year, I came home from Kara’s class and I followed her instructions, put the herbs she gave us into a bowl of water and the next morning I poured it over myself and became someone different. It was a baptism of sorts. I was baptizing myself. Initiating myself onto a different path and a different way of life. Learning how plants connect me to my lineages has given me so much more than knowledge. It’s given me ritual, connection with the land, daily practices, a new lens through which to view the world, another trail of crumbs to follow on the path back home. 

That is where the root of this ritual lies for me - in the honoring of that moment and of the change that took place within me. And in honoring those who made that moment possible, my ancestors, Kara and San Giovanni himself. Thank you for showing me a new way.

On Being Pregnant during COVID

I woke up way too early this morning. This happens to me a lot at this time of year, when the sun is just coming up and the birds are chirping. Our bedroom window was open and I could see the sky changing colors. And I just laid there and thought. I thought about all the other times in my life when I couldn't sleep, and how most of those times occured in the year after Sylvie was born. I remembered how my body stopped wanting to eat and sleep, and how deeply wrong that felt. I thought about how my bodies needs for food and sleep make me feel human, connected. And I remembered how disconnected I felt at that time. 
And then, the clearest, loudest thought of all. That was the worst time, the worst thing, I have ever been through. 
I carry a lot of privilege in this world, but I have also been dealt a fair share of trauma. Most notably a truly fucked up family experience, an extremely violent relationship in my late teens and a handful of reproductive tragedies. But my experience in my pregnancy with Sylvie and in the months that followed her birth eclipsed all of that. The way that it felt to be disconnected from my very own self will haunt me forever. 

I just got off of a call with my therapist where we spent a lot of time talking about grief. My constant, never ending grief about the ways that this pandemic is affecting my pregnancy. And then I realized, maybe for the first time, that the grief I'm feeling now is not just about this pregnancy. It's about the pregnancy before and the postpartum that looked nothing like what I wanted or expected. It's about the pregnancies I never got to carry to term, and the ones I chose to end, and the circumstances in my life that made those decisions necessary, and the ways that other people treated me as a result of those decisions, and all the obstetric violence that came with every single one of those experiences and all the ways that we treat birthing bodies like shit in this time and place. And I wonder, really, truly wonder, how deep, how far down our collective well of reproductive grief actually goes. 
We live in a culture that completely fails to honor and acknowledge the sacredness of reproductive health. We've twisted the narrative around childbearing until it looks nothing like the truth. We've drowned and suffocated and murdered the soul of what it actually means to build and birth a human life. 

Towards the end of my struggle with postpartum depression, I went to see a healer. After a few sessions together she sent me home with a question: what service is your soul being called to in this lifetime? It was in the answer to that question that I finally found healing, that I finally found purpose and meaning to my suffering. 

Since then, I have poured myself into birth work as if my life depended on it. In some ways, it still feels like it does. And at every turn, I've felt grief. Grief for the ways my experience could have been if I had known how to get the support I so desperately needed. Grief for the wisdom I did not have access to. Grief for every birthing person who has found themselves in the middle of a process that they were completely unprepared for, different in every way from what they were taught to expect. I have vowed over and over again to tell the truth about my experience and I have vowed over and over again to do it differently if I ever got the chance.
Now is the moment when I get to do both. 

My truth right now is that even after a year of working with clients and telling them over and over again that birth and pregnancy and the entire reproductive process are entirely out of our control; after urging them, over and over to surrender and let go, I still had expectations about how this would look for me. I still have a 10 page document that is part birth plan, part maniacal Virgo spreadsheet on every detail that I thought I could control and even after I hit publish on this rant I will probably still continue to edit and obsess over it. 

My truth right now is that I can't bring myself to actually feel all that scared about coronavirus because I'm way more scared of the postpartum anxiety that I have spent most of my energy trying to prevent for literally years of my life now.
My truth right now, is that the thought of still being in this mess and not having childcare for my toddler when my baby is born fills me with such a deep rage that I couldn't even type this sentence without dissolving into hot, angry tears. And a part of me feels that this is selfish and entitled but it doesn't stop me from feeling it so so deeply.
My truth right now is that I thought it would make me a better doula if I could "fix" my own experience and have a perfect, supported pregnancy and postpartum, and I can't and I feel like I'm failing. 
My truth right now is that I want so so badly to control this, even just a little bit. But I don't get to. And now it's me who has to listen to my own advice and just fucking surrender and it's really really hard.
My truth right now is that the only thing I can do is tell my truth, acknowledge my grief, and maybe, hopefully, a little bit of our collective, human grief. May it be a healing for us all.