Imprints across time...

IMPRINTS ACROSS TIME:

We call to us, these life forms from afar…and we are granted 9 short months to allow for the changes needed within us to become mothers of these new universes, for each infant is indeed that, a universe unto it’s own making.

Did Einstein’s mother know during those first days of confirmed conception she was carrying a genius? Or what that might ask of her as his mother? Did Freud’s mother understand her own psyche enough to realize her son was going to father psychoanalysis?

No, we don’t get any blueprints with the infants coming in, they are truly a universe unto themselves, bringing with them their own templates of manifestation. We’ve little to do to guide them, and so much less is often best! From our own manipulated templates who are we to mess with the perfection of an untapped new universe? How would we direct it differently than it knows to do for itself?

This past week one of my mothers and I had a beautiful experience together. Monday she had had another rather large panic moment and hadn’t slept well, so we did another session together, and this one was so beautiful. Her mother and sister were not at all in agreement with her decision to have her child at home in water with midwives and myself. “this is absurd”.

The sister had called her with news from her husband who was a fireman. He’d been called out under 911 to attend a home birth and the mother was having trouble so the midwives called for paramedics to attend, and transport. The 911 called the first response to the fire hall as well. Her brother in law and sister berated the madness of home births and the backwards thinking that would take an intelligent woman like herself and place her infant in this kind of potential peril.

If it had been as tragic and dangerous as they had recounted certainly we would have seen it in the papers and on the evening news. When a woman is birthing in a hospital the staff there don’t report when things go off and a C-Section is needed, it’s just part of the culture in that environment.

We don’t see the evidence in the papers weekly to support the “terrorizing of the new born in a home water birth and it’s ultimate demise” because it doesn’t happen that way at all.

We have the benefits of science and the benefits of big city hospitals and paramedics to intervene and transport and so we don’t have those kinds of stories. We still have the stories of the cab driver that delivered twins in the middle of a grid-locked downtown street, the father who had to pull over and deliver his son, because he just wasn’t going to wait, the paramedic who arrived on the scene and assisted the mother then transported them to hospital.

There are lots of those stories, and so strangely, everyone survives the excitement!

My mother was traumatized -this was just a week before her potential "due in date". She almost wasn’t going to call me, but did and I suggested we get together and revisit the fear, tension and pain that was mounting in her, utilizing NLP & Hypnosis.

I created a visualization of the innocence in all women, we are that virginal innocence until we step into the pool of motherhood. And it’s the unknown. We don’t know who we are in that pool, we’ve been working hard at this one, and some of us, without a lot of success, but here we are now at another gateway, becoming a mother. The gateway of becoming a woman, during our first menses is often managed badly in this culture of the throw away tampons and the negative priming by families, media & the religious sector. It can leave a young innocent girl wondering how she’s changed, and what is happening to her body? Often these questions get answered by the girls in the “bathroom discussions” and those early decisions are formed into beliefs.

Sometimes it’s around pain, suffering and then the witness of how that inner decision becomes the control for deflecting male attentions all the way through a woman’s life if she wants it.

And for mothers becoming a mother again, it’s no different. You pulled off one birth, and now you’ve to face yourself again, “can I do this, twice? And be so lucky? I love my child, will this one be loved too, can I do it?”

I know, it’s strange questions to ask yourself in the moment of another birth, but these are real, and mothers if they are honest, even after the 6th child will acknowledge, you don’t know. You go to the "pool" hoping the gods will be gracious with you, give you a healthy child and one you can manage and that will fit into your life now. One that will not torture your first child, nor take you too far away from it, one that will allow you to love it just as much as you did your first one….

The surface structures is the fear, terror and panic protocols that are out there around birth today.
The deeper inner structure is the woman’s own feelings around her personal power, herself and her self knowledge.

It’s a negotiation. As we meet ourselves in that pool of becoming a mother, we will grasp at mom’s pool, “let me back in yours, help me do this” or our sisters’ as we scramble at the side of our own pool endeavoring to pull someone in with us. Often new mothers will grasp at the hand of their husbands, but he can’t do this for you either! This is you…and your baby….and your body!

The birth pool is the metaphor for change that a woman is about to experience, because coming out of her pool as she emerges, she is now a mother. Her maiden self is gone. She is no longer single in the world, she is no longer separate, she is a mother with all the rights of passage through that gateway, and that pool are now hers for the keeping. She’s earned them.

It’s a metaphor for how much we trust ourselves. How often we remember this infant is half my husband, half me…and will be very like our other child….and yet it’s own little being self just like our first!

So this mom and I had this wonderful metaphoric trance together, and she saw her sisters pool, and her mothers, and knew it would be ok to step into her own now. She found her own strengths, like another one of my moms – remembering at the last moment, she could always trust her body, and another, remembering her strength and personal power, and another finding her own rhythms and trusting them so completely…and no matter what birth it’s finding that inner trust in oneself to accept you can do this. You can become a mother, you can accept that motherhood is a vast unknown on this side of the great “tummy”, however, going through the gateway to becoming that mother, you have only to trust yourself, and know in the moment, you know exactly what is needed and will give over, what is needed from within you for your infant.

One of my mom’s, who did all the work and at the very last moment, had to say goodbye to her efforts and dreams of a natural birth and go with a C-section, was sad and regretful, feeling she was somehow now as good, didn’t pull it off, couldn’t cope – she was a failure and probably a failure as a mother too. As mothers we forget, the birth itself - that is only a small segment of the journey into motherhood…a moment in time, a passage way with a different door, and it’s all good, and so thankfully, we have these options today!

Birth is a transition in the psyche, as Joseph Campbell says, “where ever there is something coming in look at what is going out” In the birth pool, our virginal self is going out, our motherhood self is being born.

On a very deep level the woman is saying goodbye to herself during this transition, and if the previous life before the infant was rocked with guilt, sadness, victimization, or trauma, then what are the chances she’s going to be reliving a least a little of this during this rather momentous shift in consciousness?

Often a new mother remarks how she’s so deeply shocked at how much she loves this little one. She didn’t know she could love this much, and the surprise, the changes in her, evolve over the days weeks, months and years ahead as she endeavors to allow this little one to grow and continue to leave her. For the infant is always moving away from us, out of us, taking it’s first steps before we were ready, saying the first words, sleeping through the night, turning on the musical toy….we look at each other and smile…"that was the baby!"

As the infant lives from the mothers blood in the first months of gestation, she then feeds on the mothers milk, then the mothers energy streams and essentially is an ever flowing transition for the mother who time and again must let go so her child may go on from her.

When a mother is caught in fear during birth, the shocking transitions may cause her to fear all the stages of her son’s life. His first tooth, his attempts to crawl, all steeped in fear modules that distress her. Injuries, which are part of life, transition through however, not without hard won battles to secure those injuries as recoveries of self for the young boy.

Empowering our infants is a challenge. We both want them to be “leading the pack” in their age groups, and we also fear their independence as they move away from us and gain their freedom from us.

I’ve heard parents arguing “he’s going to university”, and the mothers response “no, I so want him to follow you in the business, why does he have to go away to university?”

A Mothers stress, “she will have at least two degrees like I have”, father saying “no way is my daughter going to university and have a degree when I don’t”.

The baby is laughing away to itself, a little universe unto it’s own reasoning, and as hard as they choose to make it, that little one will form itself according to it’s map of the world.