Do you know where you come from..?
My granny had all her children at home, on our farm. In the good room. I only know this because she said it out loud one day, not long before she died and the look on my mommy's face told me everything. She had no idea. Nobody had ever said it. It was one of those things that had simply been unspoken, assumed to be unimportant?!?! 🔥
That conversation has stayed with me, because here is a woman who carried and birthed her children in her own home, in her own space, on her own terms and her only daughter grew up never knowing. A whole chapter of their shared story. After my uncle was born, the GP told my granny that if she were to have any more children, she would need to go into hospital. She never had any more. Whether that was choice or circumstance, I'll never know. But I think about how that must have felt, the moment when her experience of her own body became an inconvenience for the doctor and not about her own choice🤯
That shift wasn't unique to my family. In the 1950s, the Cranbrook Report was actively encouraging the move from home to hospital birth, touting it as progress, as safety. However the evidence for that safety wasn't a bit murky. Birth moved into institutions and something moved out. The knowledge. The stories. The women sitting with other women💫
This isn't a protest for homebirth (tho IYKYK). However you arrive into the world, what matters is this: we are mammals. Connection between you and your baby isn't a preference or a wee nice thing. It's physiology. It's biology doing exactly what it was built to do. When we mess with that through fear, through noise, bright lights, medications, through unnecessary intervention, we are not just an observer. We are participants in something that ripples out🌊
One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given in the run-up to birth was simple: watch primates give birth. Not other people's births, as beautiful as some of those videos are. Not animals in captivity either. Primates, in the wild. Undisturbed. Watch what happens when a mammal is left alone, held safely, in their instinct. It's extraordinary, totally cool AF. Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it✨
So what does any of this have to do with you, right now, wherever you are in your own journey? IMO. Everything, because your mother's experience of birth shaped her. Her mother's experience shaped her. And all of that jazz, spoken or unspoken, conscious or not it can shape you too. It shows up, it bubbles over, it sits in the room with you at your own appointments, in your own decisions, in the questions you're afraid to ask or the ones you didn't know you could💖
Maybe your mother was frightened. Maybe she was left alone. Maybe she loved every minute and wishes she could have told you more. Maybe she never talked about it at all. All of it counts and all of this matters 💪🏾
Find out where you came from. Ask the questions while there is still someone to ask if you can ⏳
Sam ✨