In the Family

I realize it's unfair to talk about a photograph on a blog without including it for your viewing pleasure, but maybe later I can digitize it and put it here for you. Meanwhile I have to write this story.

So all weekend I was in an intensive Prenatal Yoga training, which ended yesterday. It was really life-affirming and informative. I feel even better prepared for my own labor and delivery, and even a little prepared (ha!) for the postnatal period. (Which will last approximately 60 years.)

The day before the training ended, I had strong feelings about a photograph I own, a picture of my great-grandmother holding my grandfather on her hip. She was a dark exotic beauty named Eugenie. In the picture, her dress is very Victorian looking, accentuating her voluptuousness. She is also wearing her hair up in a messy bun and has on little round specs. She's looking off to the side and has a Mona Lisa smile on her full lips. She's about 28 in the photo, and my grandfather is a beautiful, black-haired, black-eyed little boy of about five. It's an unusual pose for its time, probably sometime in the 1930s. Unusual because she looks very casual and comfortable, it's really not a posed portrait.

I told the class I was thinking about bringing in this photo to show them, just as a token of my connection to my family and all the mothers back. In fact, I was carrying this picture around with me, in its bulky frame even, and showed it to my yoga students on Mother's Day, along with a picture of my own quite beautiful mother.

So anyway, the Prenatal training instructor, Leslie, mentioned that she wanted us to actually bring in an object for the last day of class, something symbolic or personal that represented birth to us. I loved that idea.

All of my power objects and fertility goddesses are currently in storage, so the photograph was going to have to be "it." (I have a fabulous "Goddess of Connubial Bliss" that my friend Linda brought to our wedding from Africa, where she studies indigenous music with masters.)

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the photograph really was it.

I was in bed, it was late, and I couldn't get the photo out of my head. I knew that Eugenie had been a caregiver in her small Louisiana Cajun town, that she had been one of the people who bathed and dressed the dead for burial, which I thought was pretty cool. And I knew that she had been there for my mom's birth in 1941, because she famously introduced my mom to the family dog -- "Hitler," speaking of joke-y politically incorrect animal names...see "Transcendent Gerbil" entry -- as "Tookie," which became her nickname for the rest of her life.

So anyway, I had a hunch...so I called my mom (despite the late hour) and asked her if Grandma Eugenie had been some sort of...nurse.

Well, gentle reader, you can probably already see where this is heading.

It turns out that Grandma Eugenie, "Ginny," was "kind of a midwife." She helped the doctor deliver babies. Including my mom and my Uncle Bud. When my mom told me this I almost burst into tears.

I have never been around many pregnant women, or children, or birth. I've been decidedly single and sexy and city for most of my life, not one to get into the juicier aspects of femalehood that include children and childbirth. Especially at a young age. It never really spoke to me, and I don't know why. I have midwifed many a woman into her own power as a sexually liberated being, but never have I midwifed another fully formed new being into existence. I'm coming to realize, through my own experience, that this is an important part of the puzzle of being a fully integrated feminist, understanding this breeding and birthing aspect of being a woman. Of being a nurturer, a caregiver, a model or a mentor as a woman. Clearly a woman does not have to bear a child to embody Motherhood. Nor does Motherhood have to mean an end to freedom, or feminism, or enlightened existence.

Susie Bright already knows this; she has an incredible teenage daughter and a great book to show for it. Why did I miss out on that all these years?

Thank God I've become completely narcissistic in my pregnancy.

Children...important.

Sure, I read Hip Mama, and Breeder, and I have slowly become aware of all the Riot Grrrls growing up and giving birth, but I just...had...no...idea.

When the student is ready, the Teacher appears.

That is my son, my greatest Teacher.

So anyway, back to Ginny.

She was a Midwife!!! My own blood. When I told my Prenatal teacher this, she said it was possible, even likely, that her own mother had been a "sort of midwife" too. And you know what a freak I am for my own genealogy.

So now I'm contemplating what it means to be the great-granddaughter of a Midwife. As well as the daughter of a mom who fought to have me breastfeed, who fought to take care of me according to her intuition in spite of all the shit she was getting for it in 1964, smalltown Louisiana.

I come from a long line of female Lions.