Feeling Empowered

(OK, honestly, I'm not feeling very empowered at the moment, I'm feeling rather exhausted, but I wanted to put up this post anyway.)

I had a baby just over a week ago. She's a little doll. I chose to have this one "naturally," or I'd prefer to say unmedicated -- natural just doesn't sound quite right to me. My #3 was also "natural," but that was by accident. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be that time, so I thought I'd try it on purpose this time (I did get nervous about the choice and semi-seriously considered getting an epidural). There was just something about feeling the birth of a baby that is so real, so powerful. It made me feel so incredibly strong, so incredibly sacrificing.

After I had the baby, I typed up the entire birth story, embarrassing things and all, and put it on Facebook. I was shocked. I must have felt pretty good about myself and the whole experience or I wouldn't have done it. I suppose I'm over being shy about the whole birth thing. There's nothing to be ashamed about. It's birth! It's life! It's sad we don't talk about it more and teach women what a beautiful thing it is -- all the details. I'm happy especially now to see efforts such as those in The Gift of Giving Life.

Another thing that actually made me feel proud of my post-pregnancy body was an image someone recently posted on Facebook of a woman's middle, including stretchmarks. The caption was: "Your body is not ruined. Your a ... tiger who earned her stripes" [profanity omitted]. Heck yeah I am. Now if we looked at it that way, we all might be a little more content with these bodies that don't look like teen-age anorexic model bodies.

A last thing that made me feel pretty empowered about being a woman and bearing children was triggered by something I saw on PBS. I turned the show on while nursing or something and it was about the early Puritan women who helped settle our country. I wish I could remember the name of the show or the woman/women it was specifically about, but it's a bit fuzzy. The show mentioned how these early women were valued for their ability to bear children. Children were critical for the survival of the colonies -- both to help with work as well as to be a propagation of the species. The woman the show was mostly about had borne 10 children and was highly valued for her ability to do so.  I think there's a lot to learn here.  Imagine if we valued women for their abilities to reproduce, and also valued children for their ability to help out and be productive, not to be a drain.  Interesting.

(Look!  Becca made me a quote!!)

Update 4/5/12:  If you want the whole story, it was posted on The Gift of Giving Life blog.

Birth on on the mind

No, I am not pregnant, if you were wondering. . .

After reading that last article, I was reminded of a couple posts Heather had on Women in the Scriptures that I had not yet read.  In one post, she wrote about the Physicality of Birth.  I always wonder what I can do to teach my daughters to value motherhood, and she gave me some ideas:

We do so much to teach young men about the importance of their priesthood callings and we help prepare them for the hard work they have ahead of them as missionaries and as leaders. From a young age young men know that what they are going to be asked to do will be hard but that they will be given strengthen from God to handle it. Why don't we teach our young women from a young age that what they are going to be called to do will be hard, physically, but that God will give them the strength to handle it. Why aren't we teaching them about the symbolism and importance of birth and motherhood? Why aren't we helping prepare them, from the time they are 12, to handle the physicality of bearing children and motherhood? I can't help but think that if we were doing these things that not as many women would be scared of becoming mothers. I think that if men and women really understood the power and symbolism behind birth that the birth process would be treated much differently that it is. I also think that motherhood would be more valued in society.

She also blogged about The Importance of Birth and spoke of our divine roles as compared to Adam and Eve (reminds me of my previous post about birth as well as The Two Trees by Cassler on my sidebar):

This is Eve's gift to us... the promise of birth. That through our mothers, the daughters of Eve, all of God's children will partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and literally become the fruit of that tree. Through the power of God they will be born into this world through blood, water and the spirit and will be given a probationary time. During this probationary time it is the role of mothers and fathers to help their children to become worthy to pass through the second veil, the tree of life, through the water, blood, and spirit of Jesus Christ. This is Adam's gift to us---as the High Priest of this earth acting in authority for Jesus Christ--- the promise of re-birth.

The more I think about being a mother, I can't help but wonder if it's not so much the numbers of children you have (or don't or can't have) in this life, but where your heart is and what your attitude toward motherhood is.  If we have the potential to continue to be mothers in the eternities and WANT that, I suppose we'd better learn to love and appreciate it in this life.

Caretakers of Light

Today Steph posted The Sacrament of Birth on Empowering LDS Women. In her post she references an article entitled The Sacrament of Birth by Analiesa Leonhardt regarding women and their important role as mothers and the parallels to Jesus Christ. I took the time to go read the full article and it was just fascinating!

If you don't want to read the whole article, Steph shares some quotes she liked. Additionally, I liked:

In the human experience, the most extreme bodily sacrifice for another’s life is childbirth. A renowned obstetrician commented that birth, “has the potential to transform the ways in which we think about ourselves. As one patient said to [her], ‘I felt powerful and in touch with something within me that I never knew was there. I took my place among the lineage of women as mothers." This empowerment is not only a subjective experience. Neuroscientists have determined that hormones released in a woman’s body during pregnancy and nursing contribute directly to an increase in brain power. With a permanent and quantifiable increase in dendrites and glial cells a mother has a greater capacity to store long-term memory, develop increased motivation and empathy, increase multitasking and prioritizing skills, and decrease fear. Just as the Savior’s atoning act increased his capacity to love us, so a mother’s sacrifice increases her capacity to fulfill her great role. . . .

Motherhood and birth are so obviously saturated in sacredness, why is a mother’s work so often dismissed as common-place, tedious, and even dirty? Perhaps the answer is simply in the very commonness of it. It was the every-day familiarity people had with Jesus Christ that led many to dismiss him as simply the son of Joseph the carpenter.