Birthing While Grieving
A time to doula new worlds
My youngest daughter turned thirteen this week, making me the mother of two teenage girls. She’s a kind and funny person, a sporty kid, a great hugger and a reliably fun sidekick for kitchen dancing and singing. Sometimes she still curls up on my lap while I am meditating in the morning, just like she used to do when she was small. It blows my mind that I am here at Teenager Time x 2. I am so grateful that both of my girls are thriving. This is a big deal in a culture that systematically takes children and future generations for granted.
At the same time, on my kids' birthdays I often have memories of the precarious pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirth I experienced years ago. I became pregnant with my 17 year old daughter four months after losing our baby Ella while living in Cambodia. I then spent a lot of the pregnancy on bedrest, diagnosed with an (unfairly named) ‘incompetent dynamic cervix’. The memories of that time are now dulled but for a long time were still visceral. The terror of loss and near loss, the deep ache of a body ready to birth and nurture, only to prepare for growing life again. What remains today after a lot of healing is still some grief. This gets awakened at key times of the year, places or even positions my body may be in. But it is softened by a life tending the lives of the girls I was finally able to bring home.
Transition Doulas
If we grieve what we have lost as love and life moving through us, what is possible?
Just as parenting is a life teacher, gestating, birthing and loss are too. About the universal cycles of life, death and rebirth. That endings can be beginnings. That loss and grieving are universal, if not universally held. That support, intention, patience, humor, surrender and hope as one grieves while supporting life are essential. Many of us (and our ancestors) have had to embody this resiliency at scale.
Recently, when preparing to run a series on grief that explored connections between love, grief and revolution, I found helpful examples of how we can treat grief as a testament to love, a natural and necessary process, knowing our lives are needed too. Paraphrasing a framing by poet and grief worker Malkia Devich-Cyril that I found helpful:
there is inevitable loss (we will all die) and preventable loss (violence, war, deforestation), and
we are not meant to metabolize the levels of loss we are seeing today, in Gaza, the Sudan, and in the many other layers violence.
Witnessing preventable loss is in itself a trauma, direct or vicarious, and here I want to uplift everyone who has not stood by helpless in this time to do something to honor life - even as many of us need rest and for more of us to pick up our right roles without hesitation. I see so many of our social justice leaders and activists struggling to replenish, sustain, and resource their energy instead of succumbing to despair, and I am listening to the many ways body and spirit wisdom tell me this is a long haul. Reminders are everywhere that we need to remember to move with our grief, celebrate life, and trust in the processes of rebirthing with courage even in the face of fear.
The grief and healing justice workers remind us how important the ritual part is - of grieving in community so that we may honor what we have loved and lost and keep moving. We don’t do this so well in this country - or in most of our organizations. Out of necessity, perhaps, my experiences of loss and motherhood have been a foundational (re)orientation of my feminism and my work towards embodiment and healing or transformation. In recent years I’ve been called both a ‘spirit doula’ and a ‘doula facilitator’ in my support to feminist movement building organizations, and I find this more than synchronistic. These are also beautiful ways to describe the work of helping leaders and groups to face the shadows of their culture, embody the soul of their work, and bring new ways of being together to life.
As we individually and collectively face the ‘polyconsequences’ - as Vanessa Andreotti called them - of systems of dominance we did not build yet still maintain, I wonder how we can integrate understanding of these natural cycles of life - as courageous stewards of families, communities, organizations, movements and the world we want to live in. And also:
What hidden pathways on the way to new worlds might we explore with support from the transition doulas in our lives?
Birthing New Worlds
This summer, I had space to breathe, which is possibly what got me started on this micro-to meta-level thinking on the cycles of life! While slower than usual work can be scary, in this moment I found the gift in it. Filling my days with family, friends, music, art and nature I was able to make some sense of my place in this chaotic time of disruptions and endings. I could not help but notice endings and beginnings - endings as beginnings - everywhere. In the swelling and crashing of waves, in the unfurling of a fern, and eventually, in my work itself (see last month’s post on deciding to leave Columbia University).
The ideas that collapses can be endings and thresholds, and that many worlds can exist at once is - or the view that there are multiple, interconnected worlds - was named ‘pluriverse’ by the Zapatistas, and this vision is part of in indigenous African and other belief systems too. I have been enjoying the Courage to Care series on pluriversality, and have dipped my toes a little deeper into Arturo Escobar and Vanessa Andreotti’s writing on indigeneity, decoloniality, the pluriverse, modernity and the complex relationships with technology for some context.
This expansive non-linear vision contrasts with the colonial view that there is just one world, one model of life, one way of being that is supreme (white, Western/European, male, hetero, etc etc etc). Escobar’s summary of a 1951 UN document made this disregard clear : the economic progress of ‘under-developed’ countries requires painful adjustments, the scrapping of ancient philosophies, the disintegration of old social institutions, the bursting of caste, creed and race, and the frustration of comfortable lives.
He proposes an idea of ‘transition activists’, to accompany the shift to more life affirming, less exploitative ways of being. I love even more the idea of ‘transition doulas’ - people who accompany and guide those of us ready to include grieving, futures of repair and rebirth of life giving ways, even when the way is not straight forward. Holding each other as we carry the imprints of love for what we have lost, breathe through the contractions and expansions of change, and shine light on the hidden pathways to these new worlds until they are born.
Of Course Its Gonna Hurt
Are we willing to look squarely at the violent and oppressive conditions that got us here, and own our parts in shifting them as sacred responsibility?
The pregnancy and birth of my thirteen year old was my last. It was also, hands down, one of my most empowered life experiences. Cervical incompetence was handled (so there!), mental preparation was made (shout out to birthing hypnosis!), and a gentle doula and attentive partner were present to support me (yes support!). So when in the middle of labor, the doctor told me to change my position to something they found more acceptable, I indicated with all certainty that he could (instert profane world here) OFF.
Remembering that day from the inside out, I know the pain was excruciating, but also that trusting what was on the other side - and having all that support - helped to get me through. Thinking of this recently, it came to me that If we are birthing a new world, it is gonna hurt. Especially now, as the painkillers of distraction, distancing, and isolation wear off.
As the privilege of looking away is wearing off for more and more of us, embodiment and being able to be with a very large range of feelings is essential. As always, Prentis Hemphill offers inspiration here:
“The body that can engage in building what we truly need, that can sustain action over time, is something different from the distractible, unmoored body manipulated by social media. It is a rhythmic body, undulating, present, feeling, capable of curiosity, awe, rage and love. It is a body that can generate a safety for ourselves and others, that along with the despair can tap into the possibility that if we commit and are willing to change and allow others the same grace we just might win”.