Birthing Poem

the woman speaks of birthing
After Langston Hughes’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers
I’ve known birthing
Before creation
And older than the labor of mankind
My womb is the mother of life
I carried Adam when seeds
In the garden were gestating
I pushed the head of Cronos from
Between my legs and swaddled
Him in the sands of time
I was midwife to the moon [...]

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Recent Publications

This has been quite a month for me for publications!
My short article Centering for Birth was published in the International Journal of Childbirth Education (page 20)
My book review of Fathers at Birth was published in The CAPPA Quarterly (page 14).
My film review of Birth as We Know It was in The CAPPA Quarterly (page 15).
And, [...]

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Active Birth Video

Lamaze and Injoy videos have teamed up on a nice new website called Mother’s Advocate. The site has a variety of handouts and a booklet to download based on “6 Healthy Birth Practices” (which, in and of themselves form a nice little birth plan for a normal, healthy birth!). I especially enjoyed their video on [...]

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Two More Birth Transformation Quotes

“Birth is a time of deep transformation. We enter labor with excitement, trepidation and sometimes fear. We emerge with power, confidence and love.”
–Toni Lee Rakestraw, Organic Birth
“Ideally, giving birth is a natural and joyful experience, a holy event in which the energies of creation and transformation can be shared by all who are present.”
–Rahima [...]

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Why I do what I do…

I was feeling a little nostalgic this evening going through my childbirth education training manual. My original certifying organization, ALACE, is undergoing some reorganization and a “rebirth” into two new organizations. So, I was thinking back to my beginnings with the program and how excited I was about it and what an absolutely perfect match [...]

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When birth doesn’t go as planned…

Some time ago I was talking to a mother whose birth hadn’t gone as planned. She said that she knew that she needed a cesarean, but that she also knew she had missed out on a “very cool experience in life.” I think it is definitely possible to accept the need for a cesarean, while [...]

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Pushing

I have previously shared some thoughts about pushing. Today, I came across a helpful resource for first time mothers that really thoroughly explores the pushing stage of birthing your baby and has all kinds of information about “how to push” (really quick answer: with your body!). The technique shared is to “breathe the baby out”—but [...]

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Birth as Maximum Power

I’ve shared quotes about birth and power before and here is another good one. Someone on the ever-fabulous Independent Childbirth group shared it today:
“Today the old images and models of childbearing are giving place to a new model.  There is a growing groundswell of awareness that birth is a point of maximum power [...]

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Trusting Your Doctor

Something that occasionally comes up during birth classes when talking about birth plans is, “well, I completely trust my doctor, so I feel like his judgment will be right for me…” (the reverse comes up more frequently, see my previous post!). I recently finished reading an older book called Education and Counseling for Childbirth and [...]

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Skipping Birth Class?

Yesterday, I watched a short clip on why people don’t take birth classes. The comment that I found most interesting from the expert interviewed was: “The instructors in a lot of these classes –are a little bit doctrinaire about their point of view. They made an issue out of saying  ‘You’re not a real woman [...]

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