Happy Birthday, Blog - Happy Thanksgiving, Friend

This blog is ONE YEAR OLD this week -- and thanks to it, I am a bit wiser, as well as older (my birthday is this week too).

This blog was conceived and born out of my angst of my son's departure to war and another blogger's disregard for women and natural birth. I found my voice this year, in thanks to standing up to her and starting this blog. Like most women, I was terribly violated in birthing my babies -- three grown and one teen. Since I was violated, so were my babies. It took me twenty-five years to acknowledge within me that my body remembers and my baby's body remembered, and to begin this almost decade long journey of healing to claim my body, soul, and mind. Claim myself from the insidious socially ingrained denial of the impact of medicalized birth on women, on me, and on all of us when we are born.

I had already participated in years of healing at a level that medicine and psychology deny, (because to do so would require they themselves to go within to heal, and it would require they change what they do that is so financially lucrative.) I have studied pre and perinatal psychology since 1999 -- and, I sought to share it here on this blog -- my personal journey and the new science and the application of the logic and science we've know for eons. Women are so disempowered and silenced in their experience of birthing. Their souls and bodies are violated, the baby is traumatized and brutalized, and the father of their baby, if there, is profoundly disempowered. This blog let me get it all out. Oh, mama, did I get it out.

I wrote 600 pages on this blog from November to May ... THREE books worth.

As my son deployed the experience shook me to my core. I had to look at ALL of the fifty previous years of denying my personhood and self. I had to look at my gifts and shadows, failings and successes, and prepare for the next decades --- making life safe; making birth safe. It opened up the floodgates. I found a bottom reservoir of grief ... I cried more tears last year than in my entire fifty before. And, then, like Forrest Gump's marathon back and forth across the country, I just stopped writing one day. I had to get out of "the cave" and walk this path it opened up.

The day after Earth Day, April 2006, I joined the local community radio station and was on the air within two days reading announcements. On Memorial Day I interviewed people and created a montage that is the opening for my segment, Until They All Come Home, a tribute to the men and women who are serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on KOPN 89.5 (www.kopn.org) on the News at 5, sometimes Tues and/or Thursday. (May 28th post). I did the fast track training to be able to "run the boards", do programming, and music shows. If you have a community radio in your community, check it out. In June I joined the Community Access Television (CAT) and I have been working on my documentary about birth ... a film for fathers about their babies experience of birth.

Please watch for a trailer coming very soon .... and an introduction version, hopefully in January, for midwives, doulas, women, and men. The introduction will be fund raiser to complete the documentary.

I am very thankful for all of the blessings of this year ... especially you. Have a blessed holiday.

P. S.

Below is a segment of my first posting on November 23, 2006. My challenge to the physician who stills taunts and verbally assaults women, to the neonatal doc blogger who devoted a post to me to dis' my work (Debunking the Pseudoscience of Infant Memories) www.talesfromthewomb.blogspot.com, Sunday, April 22, 2007 and my April 25th post here), and to the anesthesiologist I just met at the health food store the week after my son didn't come home and who screamed at me, "You've got to pray your guts out" when I said numbly, "I won't ever seen my son again. He'll die there" ("Dude, it's just a stage of grief), and to anyone else in MEDICINE who controls women's bodies ... is SHOW ME THE RESEARCH THAT INDUCTION, EPIDURAL, and SURGICAL BIRTH ARE SAFE ..... AND, that BABIES DON'T REMEMBER BIRTH (it IS the baby's birth and s/he DOES experience it! The unborn baby's brain is "ON" even during labor and birth. DUH!):

It is abhorrent that peer-reviewed, doctor/medical business and drug industry controlled research are medically and socially sanctioned to do decade after decade of medical and drug research on the bodies and souls uninformed, non-consenting women -- and their babies. The generational impact of this to the human baby, male and female is an outrage. It is morally, ethically, legally, and spiritually wrong.

It is obscene to promote the use of narcotics at birth as safe for the birthing human, WHILE "America's War on Drugs" rages on, and while school children (with poor impulse, motivation, and boundaries) are being drugged with prescriptions of narcotics but taught in billion-dollar programs to "Just say no!" It is immoral and negligent to promote cesarean birth as safe when there is no research to prove this WHILE the incidence of every devastating childhood illness goes up.

In pre and perinatal psychology we know that poor impulse control, motivation, follow through, integration, and boundaries are all established in the brain of the laboring and birthing baby. Medical establishment is fighting like hell to prevent this research that PROVES that disrupting by induction, drugs, interventions, surgery, and brutality of the first hour of life. THAT is the problem. A win would mean that women and babies are treated with aware, gentle, safe, and respectful care knowing that every single word, thought, and action is experienced and remembered by the birthing baby's brain.

THE BURDEN OF PROOF IS ON THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT AND THE PHYSICIANS TO PROVE THAT THIS IS INCORRECT, AND THAT WHAT THEY DO HAS NO DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS --- BEFORE THEY DO IT YOU. Otherwise, we are all just human guinea pigs.

SHOW ME THE RESEARCH THAT SHOWS THAT INDUCTION AND EPIDURAL RESEARCHED AND SHOW TO BE SAFE -- and worthy of being now considered routine and normal.