I grew up envying people who knew exactly who they were and what they wanted to do in life. I did not know. I took so many personality quizzes, career questionnaires, sat across many school counsellors and the result was always the same: I scored evenly throughout, in all categories. Where most people’s results were a giant triangle and then a few skinny pieces of pie on a diagram that would help them pick a postsecondary program or understand their personality type, my pie pieces are always the same size. I am and like and want a little bit of everything. The common denominator in all I do and all I seek is meaning and impact. I decided to focus on that. I want to do work that feels meaningful and makes an impact in the world. I have not only recently birthed a human but a philosophy of living that strengthened my belief in what I call preparenting and validated that my work on this Earth is to guide others through this process. In a world where there is so much hate, divide, propaganda and where we constantly fear people policing our bodies, rights, freedom, choices and humanity, rob us of our individuality, squeeze us into boxes where we are forced to play small, follow rules and many other lies, I have come to believe that there are really only two ultimate truths: we are all born and we will all die.
As I approach the start the my thirtieth year on Earth, I can sum all the research, spiritual work and healing I’ve done in my short life to this realization. The only absolutes are birth and death. Everything else in between is invented by humans: conditioning, culture, society, teachings, laws, doctrines, trends, peer pressure, intergenerational patterns, cycles and circumstance. Very few of us, it seems, actually live their lives outside of the box. That’s where freedom of self, true happiness, collaboration, connection, expression, acceptance, creation and belonging really exist. Outside the box is where we are all welcome. Outside the walls we are confined in from birth based on our gender, our religion, our economic class, our parents’ trauma, our parents’ beliefs, our parents’ mental and physical health, our societal role, our education system, healthcare system (every single system) is where the party is actually happening.
This made me realize that the work I want to do during my time on Earth must lead people towards healing and ultimately, outside the box. And if there are only two absolutes, surely dysfunction in those truths needs to be addressed. If we are all born the same way, and die the same way, that is, truly, the root of our interconnectedness. Death is complicated. In my experience, we are not supported through grief as we should. We are not encouraged to explore death and talk about it. There are so many people we know and love who have died and on the anniversary of their birth or death, we don’t even say their names. We don’t honour the dead. We don’t speak of them by fear of making people sad, upset, or uncomfortable. Our collective discomfort with death disconnects us. There should be honour, celebration, ritual and love, in death. I believe we should never stop talking about the people we have lost, not to remind ourselves that they died, but to remind each other that they lived. And not only did they live, they were loved, and they shaped who we are through that love. It fascinates me that no matter who we are, what we accomplish and where we identify on the spectrums of gender, sexual orientation, economic class, status, professional accomplishments, social status… we were all born through the same portal and will all die. And deeper than that: we don’t know where we came from and we don’t know where we’re going. I saw both my grandfathers die. One suffered a long, painful and slow death. Week by week we watched as cancer took over his body: his organs shut down one by one, he stopped eating, eventually stopped drinking, then was unconscious, until finally he took his last breath while I held him. The other decided to end his life with medical assistance to prevent us from witnessing what I experienced with my maternal grandfather. He did not want to suffer a slow, long and painful death and decided to choose when it would end, not knowing what was waiting for him, where he was going and facing what he feared his entire life. He waved us goodbye, shed a tear, looked at his family around him and said: “I lived a good life,” while the doctor gave him a lethal injection and he fell into a final sleep. Every person who witnessed these deaths were impacted differently, grieved differently, understood it differently. But every single one of us have no idea where they went. All we know is that we are all going to die, too, as we were all born through the same portal: the womb.
If death is such a mystery to me and I find solace in gathering on the anniversary of their death to keep them alive in our conversations and rituals, I will continue to do that until my time comes because this brings me peace, closure and joy. And ultimately, that’s the work I want to do in the world. I want to do meaningful work that brings peace and joy while manifesting between the two absolutes. But so many of us are suffering, and perhaps it is that suffering that leads us to fearing death and unconsciously spending our lives living within these boxes to make sure we are good humans and get to heaven. How can I help alleviate that suffering? I have come to find that the biggest suffering comes from the childhood home. The home we are shaped in, developed in, encouraged to become our fully-expressed self or encouraged to suppress who we are and live within the confines of the boxes that were chosen for us. If the only other absolute is birth, if the only other truth is the womb, then perhaps I can make an impact there. Most of my suffering came from the dysfunction, abuse, neglect and trauma from my childhood home, or from my parents’ unhealed childhood wounds. I have found that, in my healing, I have released so much trauma and patterns that I was able to give myself the gift of reinvention, reparenting, a trauma-free birth, a deep connection to my daughter and a postpartum period filled with safety, secure attachment, love and a bond that the women before me did not get to have. Looking into people in the world who have done terrible harm and caused irreparable amounts of pain, it jumped out at me that all share a traumatic childhood, traumatic birth or toxic relationship with their mother and father. It made me wonder how much pain and suffering we could prevent if we healed the birth, postpartum experience and childhood home? If we can set women up with tools, if we can grant them their right to choose when is the best time for them to procreate, if we can encourage preparation and education before parenthood, if we can support women through pregnancy and birth efficiently, if we can put other women in the form of midwives and doulas and birth workers in their process to ensure the best possible outcome, if we can bring nature and belief in our innate capabilities back to birth, if we can protect the mother-baby bond and encourage connection, skin to skin, breastfeeding or breastmilk feeding, if we can give mothers everything they need to promote a trauma-free experience from their child’s first breath, and if we can build our workforce around mothers and their presence at home in children’s most important developmental stages… what would this look like long-term? What kind of foundation would that set for mothers and their children? What would this baby’s childhood look like with and without all this help, support and education? If it all stems from childhood wounds, and we repair the childhood home, if it all stems from a broken, toxic relationship with unprepared and unhealed parents, and we repair the parent-child bond and heal the parents, if it all stems from the boxes we force these children in, and we choose to live outside of the box and raise them there… what kind of global impact could that have?
With the simple addition of a birth doula, postpartum doula, midwife, physiological birth coach, marriage therapist before children, couples therapist in the postpartum season, information and resources for adults looking to become parents, we see outcomes far better than what was expected. I am currently conducting research for a project on preparenting, and I am hopeful. There seems to already be collective effort and interest in the world in regards to healing intergenerational wounds. Topics like conscious parenting, gentle parenting and uninterrupted birth, parenting experts like Dr. Becky Kennedy, trauma experts like Dr. Gabor Mate and mental health resources relating to childhood trauma healing, are trending. My research is currently showing from the samples collected that 100 percent of the candidates are making a conscious effort as parents to end intergenerational patterns that no longer serve them and caused trauma in their childhood, while all agree that there is a complete absence or lack of support or encouragement for mothers to prepare and educate themselves before motherhood on physiological birth and postpartum support. I believe in my bones that the greatest impact I can make for future generations is informing people on the importance of healing birth and the childhood home. If I can support a mother through her matrescence and promote healing, self-development, physiological birth, if I can help protect the bond between that mother and her child, empower the partner, strengthen the relationship and co-parenting partnership, lay a solid foundation for a family to grow upon and reduce the likelihood of trauma from lack of education and support, I can make a huge impact on that family’s entire life. What we choose and what we create for ourselves surrounding our birth, and how we choose to respond and heal from traumatic birth, stays with us until our death. Every woman we fail by refusing to make them a leader in their birth, every mother we don’t make the main decision-maker and character in her conception, pregnancy, birth and postpartum story, every woman we convince to not trust her body and fear birth by putting her through a system that thrives on surgical birth profit, and every woman we set up to fail by offering pharmaceuticals over effective resources in postpartum, we also rob their baby from a version of their mother they deserve. Every single time we let a woman down by taking charge of what is hers, we affect the children she will have or already has. Every time we hurt women, we hurt mothers and we harm their children. Women need to be encouraged to take back their power in their birth, because the childhood they create for their baby is also the motherhood they create for themselves. Put simply, as long as women are seen as inferior, oppressed, robbed of their rights equality and safety in society, the entire world and future generations suffer.
The philosophy of preparenting is a form of birth work that aims to, as crazy as it may seem, heal the world. We want to provide our children’s generation with a stronger foundation and leave the world a better place than we found it, with less hate, wounds, trauma, pain and divide, which we can target where it matters and in one area we all have in common: our birth. We can’t protect and heal our birth without protecting and healing our mothers. We can’t do that without protecting and healing women or pregnant persons. And we will never protect and heal women and pregnant persons if we don’t empower partners, promote connection, friendship, education, personal development and belonging for all. I truly believe that if we heal birth, we can all live a little bit less afraid of dying, of not having done enough before our death, of having so many regrets in our final moments, and we can cope better with the uncertainty of what comes after, because we will have lived a life we love, where we were loved and we loved deeply.
Birth work and postpartum support is, for me, the most important work I will ever do because it touches one of the two only absolutes. It’s devoting my life to promoting healing at the root of all and the one thing that unites us all. Interestingly, the more positive the impact I can make in pregnancy, birth and postpartum for a divine sister, the less I fear death. The more time and research I devote to healing birth, the more ease and comfort I experience with the uncertainty of death. The more physiological births I witness, hear about and write about, the more I believe that not only do we all have the innate capability of being birthed and giving birth, but we have the innate ability to die, to cope with death and support each other in death. It is part of our biology to be born, birth and die. And as long as we make birth an emergency we should all fear, and as long as we make natural death an unspeakable tragedy, we disconnect everyone from their humanity and the only two absolutes. If we can’t face the only two truths, we spend our entire lives clinging to lies as truth and certainty. I am confident in the power of healing birth. I believe starting with the first ultimate truth will be the catalyst for better childhoods, better lives, healed humans, and a world that is just, free and inclusive. Where all are born, all will die, and all are welcome.
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