Reviving the Spirit of Midwifery

When my father died I was 5 and my grandmother came to live with us at that time. She would have been 69 (about my age now) at the time (she was born in 1892 and her husband, my grandfather, was born in 1873 – that always blows me away). My Grandmother was a fountain of more traditional medicine, what we would now call alternative medicine. I grew up in a household of poultices and other concoctions that I am not exactly sure what went into them. ?

When my Mom was growing up (born in 1913), my grandmother was the town of Wallaceburg’s midwife and when women were going to have their babies they came to my grandmother’s house, gave birth and then stayed until they were ready to go home. I often wondered what it must be like to walk across town, seeing people and knowing that you brought them into the world. At that time, she was the only option. She also worked as what she called a practical nurse and often went and stayed with families that were under quarantine. She was a fountain of traditional knowledge and then was marginalized, especially in midwifery when childbirth was re-imagined as a medical condition that could only be dealt with and attended to by a doctor who most likely was male. Her power and authority were usurped by the patriarchy that came to dominate all institutions, including medicine. I often wonder what went through my grandmother’s mind when that happened, or whether she ever delivered babies even though that would be in contravention I imagine of laws that were likely passed. I am not sure. I wish I had the perspective I have now when she was alive so that I might have asked her the many questions I have, so that I might learn from her wisdom of a life lived fully.

This morning I ventured down to my favourite café—Evergreen Café— for coffee and some reading time. I came across this passage in Michael Meade's book "The Water of Life" that made me think of my grandmother:

“Another role typically associated with women and essential for conceiving the scope of feminine energies is that of midwife. In many traditions, midwives would attend the birth of each child as well as the death of each person. A midwife would be there to assist at birth, wash each newborn, and wrap it in swaddling clothes. At the other end of the road to life, it would be the midwife who washed and anointed each corpse and wrapped it in the death shroud. The midwife handled new life and held the newly dead, thus experiencing the two sides of the Great Mother: she who giveth taketh away.” As midwife a woman would come to know the ceremonies of birth and death and the necessity for each in the course of life.”

“The title of midwife referred to the role of marrying the soul trying to enter the world through the door of birth; but also marrying the soul as it departs for the other side through the door of death. The midwife stands for the Great Mother who participates in each birth and in every death. She represents both forms of wisdom that values life fully and that which knows the shadow of death that follows each life. She stands for the extended mother, the wise old woman who values life because she also knows the darker wisdom of death. In the old way of seeing, the mother resides in both womb and tomb; she is there at the origin in life’s teeming ocean and again in the living tomb of Mother Earth.”

“When a culture denies the presence of death in life, it loses the wisdom of this darker womb. In this loss, it tends to cut the road of mother short and force into biology what would live more mythically. A culture that refuses to study death soon comes to know less of life; what begins as a denial of death becomes a denial of life.”

Perhaps because we now live in a death denying culture, many have lost the capacity to truly live, and we are living our lives, as Neil Postman once wrote, amusing ourselves to death. And while he was writing about television, now with technological developments we have multiple ways of amusing ourselves to death. We are but puppets dancing to the pulling of our strings by the powerful, a misogynist bunch whose greed and lust knows no bounds. To live more fully we now need to cut the strings and resuscitate the Great Mother energy that has been in decline for generations. We now live in an era where there is increasing misogyny and this arises in conjunction with the continued assault on all those “others” and the earth. Failure to resuscitate feminine energy within the world so it might seek its true partnership with masculine energy, will lead to a life that is increasingly empty, devoid of meaning, and difficult. We must harvest with what Riane Eisler identified as the blade—masculine energy— and drink from the chalice—feminine energy— and it is only in the presence of both that we are nourished and nurtured, learning to not only survive, but to thrive.

I think my Grandmother was the last generation who not only knew and truly understood that feminine energy, but were able to direct and live their life through it. ?She was wise in ways we no longer know in our culture. We now need that energy in our lives and I believe it is where hope lies if we are to have a tomorrow. The absurdity of the Trumpian worldview is not one which can be sustained; we must move beyond it or we will all perish.

Sorry for the doom and gloom. It seems, according to at least some people, something I do well.