The Other Side of the Glass

Part One was officially released June 2013 in digital distribution format. To purchase to to www.theothersideoftheglass.com If you were a donor and want to download your copy send an email to theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com.

The trailer

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

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.

No comments:

"Soft is the heart of a child. Do not harden it."

A public awareness reminder that things that happen behind the scenes, out of our sight, aren't always as rosy as we might think them to be. Perhaps its a restaurant cook who accidentally drops your burger on the floor before placing it on the bun and serving it to you. Here it's an overworked apathetic (pathetic) nurse giving my newborn daughter her first bath. Please comment and rate this video, so as to insure that it is viewed as widely as possible, perhaps to prevent other such abuse. -- The mother who posted this YouTube. How NOT to wash a baby on YouTube Are you going to try to tell me that "babies don't remember?" There is no difference to this baby's experience and the imprinting of her nervous system/brain and one that is held and cleaned by the mother or father either at the hospital or at home? By the way, this is probably NOT the baby's first bath. The nurse is ungloved. Medical staff protocol is that they can't handle a baby ungloved until is has been bathed (scrubbed if you've seen it) because the baby is a BIO-HAZARD -- for them. Never mind that the bio-hazard IS the baby's first line of defense against hospital germs.

Missouri Senator Louden Speaks

Finally, A Birth Film for Fathers

Part One of the "The Other Side of the Glass: Finally, A Birth Film for and about Men" was released June, 2013.

Through presentation of the current research and stories of fathers, the routine use of interventions are questioned. How we protect and support the physiological need of the human newborn attachment sequence is the foundation for creating safe birth wherever birth happens.

Based on knowing that babies are sentient beings and the experience of birth is remembered in the body, mind, and soul, fathers are asked to research for themselves what is best for their partner and baby and to prepare to protect their baby.

The film is designed for midwives, doulas, and couples, particularly fathers to work with their caregivers. Doctors and nurses in the medical environment are asked to "be kind" to the laboring, birthing baby, and newborn. They are called to be accountable for doing what science has been so clear about for decades. The mother-baby relationship is core for life. Doctors and nurses and hospital caregivers and administrators are asked to create protocols that protect the mother-baby relationship.

Men are asked to join together to address the vagaries of the medical system that harm their partner, baby and self in the process of the most defining moments of their lives. Men are asked to begin to challenge the system BEFORE they even conceive babies as there is no way to be assured of being able to protect his loved ones once they are in the medical machine, the war zone, on the conveyor belt -- some of the ways that men describe their journey into fatherhood in the medicine culture.

Donors can email theothersideoftheglassfilm@gmail.com to get a digital copy.
Buy the film at www.theothersideoftheglass.com.

The film focuses on the male baby, his journey from the womb to the world and reveals healing and integrating the mother, father, and baby's wounded birth experience. The film is about the restoring of our families, society, and world through birthing loved, protected, and nurtured males (and females, of course). It's about empowering males to support the females to birth humanity safely, lovingly, and consciously.

Finally, a birth film for fathers.

What People Are Saying About the FIlm

Well, I finally had a chance to check out the trailer and .. wow! It's nice that they're acknowledging the father has more than just cursory rights (of course mom's rights are rarely acknowledged either) and it's great that they're bringing out the impact of the experience on the newborn, but I'm really impressed that they're not shying away from the political side.

They are rightly calling what happens in every American maternity unit, every day, by its rightful name - abuse. Abuse of the newborn, abuse of the parents and their rights, abuse of the supposedly sacrosanct ethical principal of patient autonomy and the medico-legal doctrine of informed consent, which has been long ago discarded in all but name. I love it!

In the immortal words of the "shrub", "bring it on!" This film needs to be shown and if I can help facilitate or promote it, let me know.

Father in Asheville, NC


OMG'ess, I just saw the trailer and am in tears. This is so needed. I watch over and over and over as fathers get swallowed in the fear of hospitals birth practice. I need a tool like this to help fathers see how very vital it is for them to protect their partner and baby. I am torn apart every time I see a father stand back and chew his knuckle while his wife is essentially assaulted or his baby is left to lie there screaming.
Please send me more info!!!!
Carrie Hankins
CD(DONA), CCCE, Aspiring Midwife
720-936-3609


Thanks for sharing this. It was very touching to me. I thought of my brother-in-law standing on the other side of the glass when my sister had to have a C-section with her first child because the doctor was missing his golf date. I'll never forget his pacing back and forth and my realizing that he was already a father, even though he hadn't been allowed to be with his son yet.

Margaret, Columbia, MO

In case you don't find me here

Soon, I'll be back to heavy-duty editing and it will be quiet here again. I keep thinking this blog is winding down, and then it revives. It is so important to me.

I wish I'd kept a blog of my journey with this film this past 10 months. It's been amazing.

I have a new blog address for the film, and will keep a journal of simple reporting of the journey for the rest of the film.


www.theothersideoftheglassthefilm.blogspot.com


I'll be heading east this week to meet with a group of men. I plan to post pictures and clips on the film blog.

I'll keep up here when I can -- when I learn something juicy, outrageous, or inspiring related to making birth safer for the birthing baby.

Review of the film

Most of us were born surrounded by people who had no clue about how aware and feeling we were. This trailer triggers a lot of emotions for people if they have not considered the baby's needs and were not considered as a baby. Most of us born in the US were not. The final film will include detailed and profound information about the science-based, cutting-edge therapies for healing birth trauma.

The full film will have the interviews of a wider spectrum of professionals and fathers, and will include a third birth, at home, where the caregivers do a necessary intervention, suctioning, while being conscious of the baby.

The final version will feature OBs, RNs, CNMs, LM, CPM, Doulas, childbirth educators, pre and perinatal psychologists and trauma healing therapists, physiologists, neurologists, speech therapists and lots and lots of fathers -- will hopefully be done in early 2009.

The final version will include the science needed to advocated for delayed cord clamping, and the science that shows when a baby needs to be suctioned and addresses other interventions. Experts in conscious parenting will teach how to be present with a sentient newborn in a conscious, gentle way -- especially when administering life-saving techniques.

The goal is to keep the baby in the mother's arms so that the baby gets all of his or her placental blood and to avoid unnecessary, violating, and abusive touch and interactions. When we do that, whether at home or hospital, with doctor or midwife, the birth is safe for the father. The "trick" for birthing men and women is how to make it happen in the hospital.

Birth Trauma Healing

Ani DeFranco Speaks About Her Homebirth

"Self-Evident" by Ani DeFranco

Patrick Houser at www.Fatherstobe.org

Colin speaks out about interventions at birth

Dolphins