toward a theory of life
Sep 18 2009
by LJ Martin - janesearing.wordpress.com
I just wanted to acknowledge that I haven’t written in a while. It’s been a productive time, but one in which I have not found much space for the formation of ideas into good words.
That is shifting now. I can feel the wheels turning and the ideas starting to flow. I’ll be back here shortly.
Sometimes it’s good to pause.
Jul 22 2009
I’ll admit - when I hear people talking about their epidural labors, or their breastless baby feedings, or their down-the-hall-in-the-crib sleepings, it makes me queasy. Literally. When it happens I often quite like the person and want to communicate nothing but loving support of their parenting choices, not moral righteousness or judgment.
But what comes up for me is a pure visceral emergency response, like I’ve been kicked in the gut.
It strikes me that this is because of how much my own parenting is learning that lives in my flesh. I gave birth at home, without drugs, felt every exquisite inch of it. My youngest and I nursed exclusively for the first 6 months, nursed after work and through the night for the next 2 years. I also nursed my older son (from my partner’s womb) for a short time finding a few quiet moments with toddler and infant simultaneously at peace. We co-slept with both of them exclusively the first year (thus fostering the nighttime nursing). After that we put them to sleep in their own beds - though they continue to find their way to our bed at various times of the night even now (they’re 6 and 8).
So parenting is lodged, like our sense of smell, in the deepest parts of our primordial brain.
I think all parenting lives there, regardless of how it comes to you and manifests. And I think this at least partly explains the tensions that arise between people with different parenting styles and experiences. And how those tensions then, also find their way into moralizing from courts and communities.
These are deep issues, childbearing and family making, informed by culture and belief but ultimately rooted in our most basic senses and impulses. Our closest relationships are learning that lives in the flesh too. When we are confronted with difference in these intimate places it’s as offensive as a foul smell, a rotten memory from the “emotional brain.”
In fact, the inspiration for this post came when I realized that I have a similar visceral response to people who have never experienced great sex. To consider the thought makes me woozy and erects a wall between us that I must fight to transcend. Similarly, some of my spiritual experiences are so embodied that the doubtfulness of skeptics blinds me with a fight-or-flight fury.*
My point is not that you should have great sex, nurse your baby, meditate ecstatically, or have a natural birth (though I highly recommend it!). My point is that these experiences live so reactively within our flesh that we should question our reasoning abilities when it comes to them, question all ideas formed in response. (Consider this recent court decision to terminate the parental rights of a mother who refused an unnecessary c-section - reasonable?)
We shouldn’t deny reason, just put it in perspective: so we can try to understand ourselves and each other more fully, so we can reason through our reaction to difference like we can reason through our reaction to bad fumes - without making moral or legal judgments on that basis alone. (Consider this post about sniffing).
Ultimately, acknowledging how our spiritual, familial, and sexual learning lives so limbicly within us might also build new alliances where there are now mostly hostilities. So the devout might better appreciate the sex-radicals and the queers, and the queers might better appreciate the devout and the breeders, and the wisdom of those on the edges might finally find voice.
*Notably, sexual and spiritual experiences are less public than parenting, so these incidents happen less frequently, but no less acutely. In fact, often, the silence around sexual and spiritual learning/living also feels like an affront.
Jul 15 2009
One of the things I respect most about the midwives I have seen in action is their ability to listen deeply to birth and discern whether things are ok, or not. This is notable, because a lot can seem ‘not ok’ during birth, and because what is ‘ok’ is not necessarily what is desirable. It’s not an easy task to keep an eye on birth like this. I think discernment is an apt description because it’s more like perceiving clearly without judgment, than it is about knowledge or certainty.
With this in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the hard parts of life. Sometimes, the hard parts are deeply empowering, as I discussed in my post “Birth as an Opportunity for Life Not Just Survival.” But other times, the hard parts erode our sense of ourselves, disempower us, diminish. Naturally, we want to protect ourselves from that which diminishes us.
I write from a place of deep gratitude for the discernment of people like my midwives, and my dad, who helped me experience the empowering hard parts of life when I might have otherwise, turned away. And I write from the position of abundance and protection that comes from having said yes.
This turning away that has captured my attention lately. It reminds me of Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” where a looking away from shared experience amounts to pornography. Taken broadly, turning away from that which is empowering but hard, ends up demeaning us, and is ultimately a form of abuse.
It’s not that I blame the myriad women who in the face of the challenges of labor, birth, breastfeeding, parenting - turn away. We all have to negotiate our own lives. We learn from our miscalculations, from our turning away. We learn this discernment, this ability to perceive without judgment that which will enliven and grow us, versus that which will destroy us.
The real systemic damage is done when people are deprived of the opportunity to learn that discernment.
This is what medicalization of birth does because it applies science too heavily where art is more apt. Add to that our culture of convenience and efficiency and it amounts to a culture of abuse, diminishing people who give birth, diminishing the wisdom and power of families, privileging the “convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally accepted and the merely safe.”*
A friend of mine said today that it has to do with resources, that sometimes, we have to turn away when we know we don’t have the resources to say YES to the hard stuff and be ok.
We recently got our kids their first pet. Within the first day it became clear that the potential for heartbreak and disappointment was high. I realized how if this experience went badly, they might decide that engagement is not worth the risk, it might shut them down to the point that they turn away.
I guess it’s true that it has to do with resources. How strong are their hearts? How safe to they feel? How adept is their thinking, their discernment. To what extent can they peek over the top of their living and see themselves as part of a bigger whole? But how can they have those resources if never allowed to find that edge?
I also have a friend who is in the first week post-partum. She is exhausted. Her baby nurses constantly. It’s very unlikely that it will kill her. More likely, she will “grow beyond whatever distortions [she] may find within [herself].” But I know it’s hard there, especially if you don’t have support, if you’re alone, if you don’t have the resources to be on your knees and still be ok.
Who is to say what will diminish her? What will empower her? Or my kids. Or her kid. The truth is, no one can say, no one can know in the hard parts of life, what will lift us up versus what will tear us down. That is far too confusing a line for me to see even in my own life, where so often what breaks me down is what lifts me up. How dare I imagine that I could judge for another?
But this is where discernment comes in.
Sometimes, because of our position, or role, or relationship we are invited to peer into another’s life, to bear witness to their erotic power - erotic in the sense that Audre Lorde describes, “the nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.”
In these moments of heightened connection to this well of knowledge (birth, death, sexuality, love, loss) it is all the more important that we do not turn away. It is the witnesses job to hold space, keep our eye on things, perceive without judgment and peer over the top of this living and see the bigger whole. I take this as my duty as a social midwife, helping to give birth to a new way. Discernment is a tool and a remedy.
Another friend was recently describing her experience with domestic violence. She was married for over twenty years to a man who systematically erased her connection to the “nursemaid of her deepest knowledge,” her guiding light, her ability to negotiate her own life. Although he did severe damage to her body, it is this damage to her discernment that was most damning.
It strikes me that the same is true when it comes to childhood sexual abuse. The abuse is not necessarily in the sexual exchange itself, but in the turning away that becomes like a black hole, suffocating child and adult, making discernment impossible. These places where discernment is impossible, where the parties involved no longer have the resources necessary to say “yes” to the hard but enlivening stuff, much less “no” to the self-depleting, these are places where oppression lives and breeds.
Abuse comes from the failure of the witness to honor their erotic power and deepest knowledge, their discernment. It is not that we should deny the erotic power of children, or our own erotic power as their caretakers. Honoring our erotic power makes us more responsible to ourselves and more capable of acts against oppression.
A lot can seem not ok, and what is ok might not be desirable.
In the practice of discernment that midwives and Audre Lorde teach me I know that turning away is riskier than holding space, that we need channels within which to grow “beyond whatever distortions we find within ourselves,” and that connection and joy are better measures than pleasure, safety or convenience.
These are principles that should be woven into our relationships, our parenting, all healing professions, and all systems of human governance.
The abundance that comes from having discerning witnesses, from having said yes, is an abundance that does not require a new budget or trillion dollar debt, but it is an abundance that when claimed necessitates our connection, our shared joy, and our humanity.
* quotes are from Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”