The Life Giver
Nine months is a lie.
The total weeks include the intention,
and the mutual participation takes a secondary role.
Its untruth continues for the duration of life.
The child is forever. The mother mothers always.
The father, sometimes, is a ghost.
But average,
Two hundred and sixty-six days.
And it all comes down to the dance,
between the woman,
and the being yet to be revealed.
The little one shifts,
muscles expand and contract
to the contract: I push and you cry.
Now you exist.
Birth is the bread, isn’t it? The life giver certainly should be the most highly rated of all those among us.
Except she isn’t.
Before our lives begin, she nurtures and grows us. Feeds us and keeps us safe. Pregnancy, a topic I will cover in the future, is its own intricate and complicated process.
But birth, well, birth is The Show. It is sometimes a marathon, sometimes sprint. But it always is most definitely labor. Women’s bodies are amazing and interesting feats of Divine science. The amount of work and hormones firing and events lining up like a chorus to make birth just happen is nothing short of a miracle.
(This is not to say that there are not other facets to being a woman that make her a woman, or that if you identify as a woman and are lacking the requisite parts, that doesn’t take away from your womanhood. I’m trying get down to the nitty gritty, biological, Freudian, birth envy of it all.)
According to Statista, there were 3.66 million births in 2021 in the United States. Thirty-two percent of them were c-sections, and the overall birth rate is down by nearly half a million since 1990. Sadly, there are no stats on unmedicated versus medicated births, which interest me greatly. Only the separation of home births, which are usually unmedicated. (Less than two percent of births are home births, according to the CDC.)
The way we look at and think of birth has evolved as much as our country’s history. We’ve gone from women being closed off behind a door with a midwife to the rise of medical interventions like c-sections to the wave of Lamaze and alternative pain management.
In the Mad Men Season 3, Episode 5 “The Fog” Betty gives birth to her third child, a son she would name Eugene after her late father. The birth scenes are both frightening and realistic of the time (1963). Betty is alone during her labor, save the nurses and, eventually, a doctor. She is drugged, delirious, and connected to what is happening to her, not the labor itself. The doctors are the ones to determine her birth experience, or lack thereof.
She wakes up from the twilight sleep with the baby in her arms, as if she had dreamed it (during the delivery, Betty does actually have dreams of her parents). Once she returns from the hospital, her friend and neighbor, Francine, asks Betty, “How was it?” Betty smiles knowingly and replies, “You know.” She shakes her head and then says: “It was all a fog.”
This antidote about birth strikes me, not only because of the changes the birth industry has undergone, but also because of the brief, but accurate, sisterhood in that scene. Just a short glance toward her friend and “you know”—because they all knew. The comradery of these collective birth experiences was simplistic and strong. Francine knows more about Betty’s birth than Don, father of little Gene, even though neither of them were in the room.
Women since then, and before then, have reclaimed their birth experiences. I did the same. After a not fantastic experience with my OB during my first birth, I chose a midwife practice before I had my second. Women now can lean on doulas, birth at home, and reconnect to their bodies and the process of birth as a natural and instinctual one. Mothers can elect to have c-sections, request epidurals and show up to the hospital with pages and pages of birth plans.
Birth stories (just go pop that search term into YouTube) have become prolific, and each one is different and unique. I have birthed four babies, all vaginally and with as little interventions as possible. Each birth I had specific exceptions that weren’t always met, and each baby had its own journey. I do recall, though, lying on a gurney in a hospital hallway—waiting for the OR to open up because my high-risk, vaginal, unmedicated twin birth required me to give birth on an effing OPERATING TABLE—and a contraction lifting my body up off the bed and thinking to myself, “This is not for everyone.”
Sidebar: Don’t Denigrate Birth
A secondary note: It is, without a doubt, the most significant pet peeve in my world, when someone degrades the art of childbirth. When they refer to it as “popping out kid” … ooh, baby. That makes my blood boil.
Birth is labor. Birth is work. It is physically and mentally one of the most challenging events in a woman’s life. Our bodies quite literally shift organs to prepare for it. Labor itself, under ideal circumstances, is designed to begin and end ON ITS OWN. Women of the past didn’t choose their due dates, their bodies simply knew when it was time. Think of ladies from the Victorian Era that were not taught about their own bodies or about sex also not knowing about the labor that was to come.
There is no denying it: Childbirth is painful. But like anything that is painful, there are medications and techniques and options that can help guide a woman through birth and alleviate some of that pain.
In Christian theology the pain of childbirth was explained by God cursing Eve. There is a sentiment among goddess-based religions about the Christian creation myth, that mankind indeed was not made from the earth, and certainly that woman was not made from the rib of Adam, but that mankind was birthed into the world. That take is especially interesting when you look at the words God says to Eve, that her pain in childbearing will be very severe, marking that this birth of mankind would be a punishment to her, this gift of being the life bearer. (The husband ruling over the wife is its own book, yes?) Along with Adam giving Eve her name, and Eve not taking a name for herself. I wonder if this is because Lilith went so awry? It does, however, say her name was Eve because she would become the mother of all the living. Chavah, in Hebrew translates to “life” or “living one.”
Sidebar: Genesis 3:16-20
16 To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
It strikes me how this foundation, cursing man, woman and serpent separately, allowed the secrets of birth to remain amongst women. It remained this way until the Victorian Era, when male doctors started poking around in the business of mothers and midwives. It started with the upper class employing doctors that had more medical training, and the next thing we know, childbirth is now classified as risky and dangerous. There are many books written about this evolution, and the increase of interventions, such as cesareans, and the business of birth.
All of it really, speaks to the oppression of women. To real-world birth envy. We, as biological women, are the ones that bring forth a human being into existence. We are life givers. We need to celebrate that as the miracle it is.
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