Mother with Child

Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi

Description

A call to women to regain the meaning of childbearing. Fucuses on the inner transformations of the childbearing experience.

"Rabuzzi rejects the status quo, presenting viable, often spiritual, alternatives to prevailing high-tech, patriarchal models of childbirth." —Booklist

"Excellent." —The Reader's Review

"A lovely book. . . . It is a book for anyone wishing to reexamine and reclaim birth's potential for sacredness." —Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

Rabuzzi, author of The Sacred and the Feminine and Motherself, contends that childbearing has been denigrated, denied, and devalued. This book is intended to help women rename, re-ritualize, reinterpret, and reframe childbearing for themselves and their partners.

Preface
Introduction

I. Preconception(s)
II. Conception
III. Miraculous Conceptions
IV. Misconceptions
V. Pregnancy: A Natural Initiation Process
VI. Models of Labor and Delivery
VII. Phases of Labor
VIII. "Delivery": A Time of Potential Revelation
IX. The Postpartum Period

Conclusion

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• Women
• Religión
• Philosophy
• General officer
• Gender
• Woman
• Anthropology
• The Women
• Children
• Religion
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 février 1994
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253115768
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mother
with
Child
Mother
with
Child

Transformations through Childbirth
KATHRYN ALLEN RABUZZI
1994 by Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rabuzzi, Kathryn Allen.
Mother with child : transformations through childbirth / Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-253-34769-6 (cloth : alk. paper).-ISBN 0-253-20827-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motherhood. 2. Self. 3. Pregnancy-Psychological aspects. 4. Childbirth-Psychological aspects. I. Title.
HQ759.R2 1993
306.874 3-dc20
92-45765
1 2 3 4 5 97 96 95 94
Contents
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
I. Preconception(s)
II. Conception
III. Miraculous Conceptions
IV. Misconceptions
V. Pregnancy: A Natural Initiation Process
VI. Models of Labor and Delivery
VII. Phases of Labor
VIII. Delivery : A Time of Potential Revelation
IX. The Postpartum Period
Conclusion
NOTES
INDEX
PREFACE
This book has alternately fascinated and frustrated me, its thirty-year gestation feeling inordinately long. Conceived at the birth of my first child in 1959, it owes its existence to faulty anaesthesia. In the late fifties, spinal injections, known as caudals, were favored for obstetrical anaesthesia because they permit continued consciousness while numbing a woman s lower body. Because my caudal failed, I had an unanticipated natural childbirth, which resembled nothing I had ever previously experienced. As my baby crowned, I felt myself expand infinitely outward. This did not exactly hurt; it was on the other side of pain, where pain is no longer an appropriate word. Possibly ecstasy will do.
By whatever name, my unusual feeling simultaneously contracted me inward with such intensity that I felt myself compacting into a very dense version of my habitual self. A few years later I recalled this strange phenomenon when I read a description of a dwarf star, a star so imploded that, assuming an original circumference of a square mile, it is now the size of an orange. Yet it retains its original million pounds of weight. I recognized in this odd condensation an image of my childbearing experience. How I could simultaneously feel both movements, I did not know. Accompanying them was a loud pop, which seemed to both trigger and form a part of the two opposed movements. At the same time, I was also dying, being born, and giving birth. At age twenty, none of this made much sense to me. Certainly the only pregnancy and childbearing book I had read at the time, the then-popular Expectant Motherhood by Nicholson J. Eastman, M.D., revealed nothing of this sort. Nor did anyone I knew ever mention birth, death, and giving birth converging like this. By late-fifties standards, experiencing childbirth mystically-not that I then recognized it as such-was peculiar; nonetheless, I valued the experience. In the difficult period of adjusting to motherhood, though, I more or less forgot about it. Not until my final childbirth, when I experienced the same pattern of sensations, my middle delivery having been obliterated by total anaesthesia, did my original curiosity return.
This repeated experience of infinite outward and inward expansion accompanied by the popping sound and simultaneous sensations of dying, being born, and giving birth initiated a lifelong quest for answers: Why did this happen? What does it mean? Am I unique, or have others felt this way, too? This book is one attempt to provide some answers.
In the process of writing, I have received invaluable help from various colleagues: Thomas Moore, Paul Johnson, Ellen Umansky, and Diane Jonte-Pace.
As always, I could not have finished this work witnout the loving support of my family: Daniel, Deborah, Matthew, Yvonne, Douglas, Jennifer, and especially my husband, Dan.
INTRODUCTION
Becoming a mother necessarily alters a woman s pre-existing self-concept. This is so regardless of whether a woman turns into a mother by giving birth following an act of heterosexual intercourse, adopts a child, or becomes a mother through some sort of technological procedure such as in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, self-administered insemination, or the like. Some women, whose sense of personal identity does not hinge on it, may find approaching motherhood disturbing, even damaging, to their selfhood. Others, anticipating it, may find that conception, pregnancy, labor, delivery, or awaiting the arrival of an adoptive child all heighten their selfhood. Either way, motherhood challenges a woman s accustomed sense of self, as these words from an anonymous woman well illustrate: I was eighteen when Krissie was born, and there I was alone, and there s that fear, you know, the feeling of I might die. And of being swept up in a force of nature so powerful that your ordinary experience of yourself is gone [italics added]. 1 This disappearance of the ordinary experience of yourself epitomizes self-transformation. Whether negative or positive or both, such transformation critically characterizes childbirth when it is understood as the deeply spiritual gynecocentric experience it potentially is.
Unfortunately, however, many women miss out on the positive ramifications of their own self-transformation because numerous patriarchal denials, distortions, and appropriations make it into quite a different experience. Unless women can variously reach beneath, set aside, or deconstruct these diverse patriarchal layers, we can neither retrieve nor (re)construct childbirth into the intensely meaningful experience it can readily become when patriarchal obstructions do not intrude. A major purpose of this book is to show how such retrieval and (re)construction are possible.
While retrieval may offend some feminists for its implicit essentialism, the term is historical as well as biological. Furthermore, the ability to bear children does constitute an unavoidable biological difference which, to date, still differentiates fertile women from all men. Thus, despite current deemphasis on biology in favor of social construction as a cause of presumed sexual differences, it is nonetheless wise to bear in mind that historically sexual difference construed biologically has mattered enormously. And to the extent that such thinking still permeates most people s awareness at some level, it makes sense to at least reformulate it: Rather than follow the accepted distinction that separates the sexes into woman and man, it seems more logical to separate mothers from nonmothers as a strategy useful for altering the more traditional polarization. No other difference, it seems to me, so dramatically separates the sexes, as they are usually defined. It is my thesis, therefore, that the transformation of woman into mother is far more disruptive of human sameness, hence of human cultures, than the more usual distinction based on possession or lack of a penis.
Childbirth as Instrument of Self-Transformation
Most traditional cultures understand the deeply important transformational power that childbearing exerts not just on women but on men as well. But modern individuals blithely assume we can make babies without pausing, going right on with our real work almost as if nothing had happened. By contrast, parents in some traditional cultures even change their names in recognition of the great inner change that childbirth effects. In the words of an informant from the Wagenia tribe of Kisangani, Zaire,
after the birth of our eldest son I was often addressed as Isakalimasi, or father of Kalimasi, the latter being the Wagenia name for him. My wife, who had until then been addressed as Mokalaandele, wife of Andre, henceforth bore the name M makalimasi, mother of Kalimasi. 2
What is accepted in Wagenia culture as a positive symbol of self-transformation would surely be rejected as an ignominious reminder of self-loss by many people in our own culture. But what exactly is involved in such transformation? Although transformation commonly describes religious events, especially mystical experiences, its exact nature is rarely detailed. Consequently, the concept often remains abstract-something one talks about but cannot relate to experientially.
Fairy tales provide some useful images, for many portray exactly such deep alterations of self. Tales of swan maidens, mermaid wives, and bear-men, for example, variously dramatize alternative or temporary transformations of self. And stories of cinder children, of which Cinderella is the best-known variant, tell of the deep transformation of self most of us wish for at times. On one level such tales merely depict a superficial shift from rags to riches. On another, they show a dramatic life change, as when Cinderella abandons the selfhood imposed by her abusive family to openly assume her latent princess identity.
Such stories suggest how self-transformation touches the very deepest levels of a person s being; it is no superficial alteration of self but one which, as so many myths and rituals affirm, involves both death and rebirth. Most of us living in contemporary postindustrial cultures find such rituals notably missing from our lives. How, we may wonder, can a young boy living in a premodern context, when separated from his tribe for a three-month period of isolation followed by ritual rebirth from the tribal Fathers, really forget his past life or see it as another existe