I’ve been mulling over this topic for a while now…as a doula, I witness the birth of new families all the time. As an adoptee, I can’t help but wonder how this experience of becoming a parent might carry a different meaning for adoptees.

What is it like to become pregnant when your mother hasn’t experienced pregnancy?  What is it like to look into your child’s eyes and recognize yourself in someone else for the first time in your life?  Does becoming a parent kindle a desire to search for birthparents? How does becoming a parent change your perspective on your childhood and the way you were raised?  Does it make a difference, or not at all?

Read the rest of the blog post here More on Adoptees as Parents | Borders and Bridges.

Hope y’all had a great Coming Out Day yesterday!

I so badly want this book to be created! I want to be able to recommend it to all of my future clients. I want to have copies in my office.

I want us to keep talking about this, it’s so important.

Frustratingly, WordPress won’t allow me to embed this type of video, so go see the video and donate here.

HT to Racialicious for information about this Kickstarter Campaign.

I am so ready to be done with this trope that women who choose parenting, birth their babies, breastfeed, mother, etc. are doing anti-feminist work. That they are actively limiting the options of other women. That they are going backwards. Instead, choosing to birth your babies at home or without medical interventions, seeing the mother and fetus and then mother and baby as a single unit, and, Goddess-forbid, breastfeeding are all actively feminist choices that often take a lot of guts and determination to pull off. But I don’t say it nearly as well as the authors I linked to above. So go read their posts about it all.

In the meantime, here’s a taste of what I’ve been up to besides precepting:

• Kristin Kali of Maia Midwifery started a discussion group about Gender and the Childbirth Professional (see her invitation in the comments of this post). I missed the first call because I was at a birth, but I made it to the second one last week. I felt like I was falling in love for the first time, looking at the beautiful faces of my fellow discussion groupers. Staring at my computer screen and seeing queers of all stripes discussing birthwork and gender? Amazing! It’s already been a really healing experience.
• I’ve been loving Autostraddle’s new series, the Ani DiFranco Appreciation Club. By my standards, she’s one pretty kick-ass woman. Plus, as y’all already know, she had a homebirth and has been using her experiences to promote homebirth in Ina May Gaskin’s new book Birth Matters and elsewhere.
• After reading said book by Ina May Gaskin and experiencing a few complicated postpartum courses of care for some of our clients, I’ve begun doing a lot of thinking about how the dominant birth paradigm in the US fails women in the postpartum period in a myriad of ways. More to come on that later, likely.
• Finally, I read Cara Muhlhahn‘s (you remember the midwife from the Business of Being Born, right?) book Labor of Love on a lark. Then Basil chewed up one of the corners and I had to pay the library a lot of money. Regardless, that book got me thinking a lot about midwives and ego, safety, the role it plays in births, and how it changes the experience of everyone involved.  Again, I’ll have more to say about this later, too.

Jamara Amani: Locally here in Miami Dade county one of the things that we’re really concerned about, and it is a problem across the nation, is the high rates of maternal and infant mortality. And it really does impact Black communities disproportionately. There’s huge disparities. Black women are four times as likely as White women to die in childbirth or in a cause related to childbirth, and Black babies are twice as likely to die in the first year of life as White babies. And there’s several factors that are involved in that. Tamika talked about the generational trauma around birth, around raising our babies. You know, there’s lack of access to resources, there’s the stress of living in a racialized society, there’s economic injustice, lack of access to healthcare, and one of the major issues that we’re raising is lack of access to midwifery care. And we know from research and studies that have been done that midwives can help to greatly reduce these disparities by helping women to stay healthy during their pregnancies, to work through some of those traumas, to develop a relationship with trust and a rapport that is individualized for that particular woman’s experience, to provide her with education that she needs to have a healthy outcome, and then to provide birth support that is natural, that is not full of unnecessary interventions that happen in hospitals such as medications and surgeries. And so what we’re working to do is to raise awareness about midwifery as a solution to these glaring health disparirites…

Anjali Sardeshmukh: Midwives do provide a lot of care afterwards too, and that’s a really important time. So when Muhammed talked about this isolation that happens I think one of the gems of midwifery care is that it really does look at … who is this person and who is in her community and where is she from and to honor that too…

And finally:

Jamara: I want to just say too that some folks may feel like, “Well, this issue doesn’t really apply to me ’cause I’m not pregnant or I don’t have kids or I’m a man or I’m too old to have kids” or whatever reasons but this is really a community issue. It’s an issue of justice. If you were born, then this affects you so it affects all of us. And healthy mothers and healthy babies are everybody’s business. Because at the end of the day if we want to have a healthy community, we really have to take care of our moms and babies and this is an issue of justice, of liberation. Because how we birth has a lot to do with how we live …where do we enter. And there’s a saying that a lot of midwives like to say which is “peace on earth begins with birth.” So if you have a peaceful, gentle birth experience where your mother feels empowered, feels like she can do anything, feels like … her rights are being respected, then how does that affect how she mothers you? How does that affect how you’re raised? How does that affect how she interacts with, you know, other aspects of mothering? I think it’s just … such a initiation point and a transformation point for women … entering motherhood. It’s a place where I feel like we have to have justice.

:: Attending some beautiful, smooth, and perfectly normal homebirths

:: Starting to perform more hands-on skills with clients, and just in general get more involved and enmeshed in this practice

:: Increasing my own confidence dramatically when talking with clients, piping up frequently to share my own knowledge or unique point of view

:: Helping teach childbirth education classes

:: Trying to beat the Austin heat by drinking coconut water, fizzy fruit juices, and delicious tomato cucumber salads

:: Listening to radio shows featuring Ina May Gaskin and talking about birth justice while cleaning my kitchen

:: Bringing breakfast in bed to my sweetie after long nights up with our new puppy

:: Getting opportunities to palpate bellies holding twins and breeches. Increasingmy skills and feeling honored to be a part of these mamas’ journeys

:: Getting more involved in the queer community in Austin

:: Taken on my first client where I will (keep your fingers crossed) act as primary under supervision for much of her prenatal care and at her birth. The first one of many, I hope

:: And finally, trying to take really good care of myself as I gear up for what may well be adeluge of births in the next couple of weeks

Best part of the night? The local midwife who organizes this annual event introduced Sam Beam, explained about homebirth midwifery and MANA, and then walked off stage. Sam goes on to talk briefly about how midwives have been very important in the story of his family. And then he says a little awkwardly, “I want to let you know you have options.”

Someone from the crowd calls out, “I want YOU to be my midwife!”

To which he replies, “Ummm. That would be weird.” And then launches into his set.

Mother’s Day 2011, two mama bloggers swarmed the internet with intimate and loving images of Black Women Breastfeeding. It’s powerful message, creating community and demanding space in the discourse of maternal and child wellness specific to Black women. These images were shared in hopes to encourage and validate our choice as Black mothers to parent our babies as we choose. Something that was once legacy and inherent to Black culture has thus become such a revolutionary act.

And also this:

This book/anthology will be an extension of the viral Brown Mamas Breastfeeding Project. We aim to create discourse on Black women and breastfeeding, to display how breastfeeding is a part of our culture and legacy, to examine the social, emotional, and physical barriers to breastfeeding, to exhibit examples of perseverance when the breastfeeding gets tough, and to provide tips on how to maintain the breastfeeding relationship if you and baby are separated, while simultaneously sharing stories, images and creative works of and by real breastfeeding, Black mamas.

Submissions are due August 1, 2011. Get writing! Complete information and submission guidelines can be found here or here.