The mother in me

Doug and I were dis­cuss­ing the ques­tion of having a doula the other morn­ing. For those of you who haven’t encountered the term yet, a doula is a birth attend­ant who is not a mid­wife but is there as phys­ical, emo­tional and spir­itual sup­port during the birth. The word comes from the Greek and appar­ently used to mean “woman of service”. 

The astute amongst you will have noticed I’ve been fairly cir­cum­spect in my defin­i­tion there. Usu­ally, people say a doula is “a woman who acts as a birth attend­ant” and say “phys­ical, emo­tional and spir­itual sup­port for the mother during the birth”. This gender spe­cifity is what occa­sioned our recent discussion.

To some extent, Doug would like to be my doula during this birth­ing. Another preg­nant friend’s part­ner has expressed sim­ilar desires. My instinct, how­ever, says that a doula should sup­port the *par­ents* during a birth­ing, not just the mother. A doula, appar­ently, helps to birth the mother in the woman. I feel that a doula should also birth the father in the man (I’m assum­ing here for a moment that we’re talk­ing about a male-female par­ent­ing duo here, because that’s our situ­ation right now).

Why should a doula only be a woman? Doug and I agree that I would want a female doctor for a pap smear and that he would want a male doctor for testic­u­lar issues. Why? Because they have “the right plumb­ing”. An inter­est­ing bio­lo­gical pre­ju­dice. By the same gut sense, I feel strongly about our doula not only being female but having given birth her­self. Logic­ally, though, it does­n’t make a lot of sense. Every birth is dif­fer­ent. Why should one woman’s exper­i­ence of a four-hour labour fol­lowed by a dif­fi­cult crown­ing and a tear, for example, give her any insights as to how to handle a birth that turns into an epic 36-hour labour but with no prob­lem during crowning?

There’s also an odd sense we both have of a double stand­ard of feminism/essentialism over­laid here. We hear the ‘women-centred’, ‘women-power’ tone of a lot of the nat­ural birth­ing lit­er­at­ure and we can’t help but hear echoes of either an atav­istic dream of women’s con­trol of birth­ing in a dis­tant ima­gined pre-pat­ri­archal time (which non­ethe­less excludes men and is sexist in its own way) or a swing past equal­ity towards sep­ar­at­ism that sim­ul­tan­eously demands space for women to con­trol their own lives at the same time as accept­ing an essen­tial­ist notion of woman-as-ultimate-feminine-vessel.

It cre­ates a sense that woman-as-mother is the ful­fil­ment of a woman’s pur­pose and is extraordin­ar­ily prob­lem­atic for women who choose not to birth or are unable to conceive.

At the same time, I under­stand it very much as a reclam­a­tion of birth­ing prac­tice after the inter­ven­tion­ist and dis­em­power­ing exper­i­ences with West­ern medi­cine and male doctoring.

I’ve never been par­tic­u­larly com­fort­able with the god­dess-wor­ship motifs of some neo-pagan women’s groups. For me, the cycles have always been about bal­ance: yin and yang, female and male, the green man and the god­dess. And yet it’s hard not to be swayed by a sense of con­nec­ted­ness through the cen­tur­ies to all other women who have gone through this pro­cess. I think that’s where we often get caught up in this and because men have not been allowed to dis­cuss their emo­tions and spir­itual responses, we have neg­lected to create and allow a space for men to feel that con­nec­tion to all fath­ers through the cen­tur­ies too.

Both Doug and I are very com­fort­able with and aware of both the mas­cu­line and fem­in­ine ener­gies that reside within us both. That he is a nur­turer and I a pro­tector is undeniable.

Obvi­ously, a lot of this is me just think­ing out loud. I have no con­clu­sions as yet. What are your thoughts?