Twice
Alive A Spiritual Guide to Pregnancy and the Child's First
Year
Beth Osnes
Introduction:
Expect to feel well-loved by this book,
mother. Expect to be cared for and
encouraged. My hope is to draw your
attention to all the spiritual wonder within as you multiply yourself times two.
As a fellow traveler who has loved this terrain, my desire is to point
out amazing vistas, to share your enthusiasm and magnify your own with my
affirmation. This book is here to
lend a hand when you stumble, firmly demand you watch out for yourself, and
ensure that you reap the most from this great soul-harvest called “birth.”
As you embark on this journey through
procreation, this book travels with you, chapter by chapter, beginning with the
first trimester, through pregnancy, to the optional “over-due phase,” to
birth, and through the first year of the child’s life. Each
chapter welcomes you in by introducing the subtle or, sometimes, the screaming
nuances of each particular phase, lovingly encouraging you to look for the
particular gifts of each development and supporting you through the challenges.
The “One Traveler’s Journal” section is the bulk of each chapter
and reads as journal entries from that time during the birth of my daughter,
Melisande. My intention here is to spark the dialogue of stories about
mothering among mothers through the sharing of my stories.
All the best gems of insight are buried beneath a mountain of
circumstances and can only be mined through the telling of the entire tale.
For us mothers, the lessons are embodied within the experience.
As a chance to get out and stretch your legs along your travels, there is
a suggested “to do” at the end of each chapter especially suited to the
terrain and advantages of your particular place along this journey.
Practical, memorable and adventurous, these “to do” outings are
supported with clear and easy directions to make them both fun and rewarding for
you.
The goal of any travel is rarely mere
survival; it is to gain perspective, richness and connections along the way. Traveling into procreation is all this and so much more.
It is a chance to reach unprecedented intimacy with your partner, a
chance to micro-travel into the intricacies of life itself, and a challenge to
your endurance, patience and courage like nothing else.
Procreation is your hook into the most essential act of humanity and your
ultimate justification for taking up part of the world’s oxygen supply.
Having a baby is a chance to fall so deeply in love so as to thrill at a
blinking of your baby’s eyes. It
is your purchase of a stake in the future and your reason to plan for it.
Brace yourself for the journey of a lifetime and expect to arrive
completely transformed.
This book is not a “how to” nor does it
give instruction on how to mother, rather it sits beside you as a friend on a
tour boat pointing out glorious waterfalls as well as dark hidden places of
beauty. As a comfy companion,
it shares the intimate internal experience of mothering that is seldom talked
about but deeply felt. It
challenges you to think more about and get more out of this mothering experience
at a time when it is most intense, fresh and demanding.
This book is a celebration party for your graduation into a higher being.
It is a companion who understands. Most
of all, it is my attempt to validate the bounty of spiritual awareness and
wisdom gained by mothers during pregnancy and the first year.
Within journal accounts, I reserve the
right to be wildly contradictory in my feelings; warm and aglow one day,
nihilistically pondering the parasitic growth within me the next.
Pregnancy and the first year are a roller coaster of extremes in both
pain and ecstatic joy. I reserve
the right to flagrantly change writing styles, from personal and intimate to
scholarly and philosophical. Mothers
are all this. They are not just
fuzzy and cute, but sometimes babies make them feel very fuzzy and crushingly
cute. They are still as smart and
inquisitive as they were before being pregnant; it’s just that now their punch
bowl has been spiked with hormones and they have another passenger on board.
Sometimes they have a sense of humor about being the birthing parent and
sometimes they don't. That's just
how it is, so literary standards of conformity of style will just have to relax
or, God forbid, expand to include an accurate documentation of the “childed
experience” for women.
While speaking of this pregnancy I,
naturally, compare it to previous pregnancies.
Allow me to give you a quick rundown.
First off, at the age 20, I was a birthmother to a beautiful boy child,
Ben, who was adopted by my much older brother and my sister-in-law.
Since I'm the youngest of a big family, I received a lot of help from
many siblings in making a success story out of this unexpected pregnancy.
This birthson was the love child of me and my former French boyfriend,
Luc, who I still love dearly but did not choose to marry.
Ben's doing great. Yes, he
knows I'm his birthmom, as he says "My aunt's my mom and my mom's my
aunt." Yes, I see him pretty often. No,
it's not weird. Actually, it’s a
delicious yet shy love affair. Carrying
and giving birth to him cleared out my heart and my ambition at a pivotal time
in my life. .
Years later after I married J.P., I had our
first child, Peter, my car-seat philosopher.
He's a dream of a boy. This
was when I had the "first child" experience, even though, as I've just
told you, he wasn't technically. Other
than teaching a college class and having a contract to be writing a book on
acting, I was and still am a stay-at-home mom, relying on a few college-aged
girls and my terrific sister-in-law for baby-sitting.
In the beginning with Peter, this was the fussy one, where it was a lot
about me, wanting to be the perfect mother and as being perceived as such.
Not the whole thing, but enough that I cringe a bit on some memories,
such as acting like it was a personal affront to receive a gift that wasn't 100%
cotton. A lot of us remember being
here. It's painful, let's move on.
The next child I bore was a daughter,
Melisande. On this one I threw all
delusions of "Mother of the Year nominations" out the window and
honestly witnessed her unfolding, tuned into her and what the mothering thing
did to me and my understanding of everything,
a subtle inner journey. I was
intentionally aware of the spiritual gifts that came my way. Twice
Alive is based primarily on my writings from my pregnancy with her and the
first year of her life.
In the writing of this book, I attempt to
be inclusive of all kinds of mothers, married, unmarried, or lesbian. Thus, when speaking in generalities, I refer to a partner
rather than a husband. This book is
intended for the woman giving birth to a single child since I can’t presume to
know the unique passage of a woman embarking on twins, triplets or beyond!
Though this book is on spirituality, it does not limit itself to any
particular faith. My own background
is Christian, but I have traveled far in my life and studied much so influences
and examples from many faiths are used. I
do not use the male pronoun to refer to God so some of the prose might sound a
bit strange to the reader. I intend
no disrespect when I refer to God as “it;” and credit my use of that vague
pronoun to the limitations of our English language.
Though father images of God have a beauty all their own and summon
nurturing associations to be savored, I want to leave God open to more
comparisons than that. A major
strength beneath this entire work is the discovering of the mother-like
qualities of God (and visa-versa), such that the masculine pronoun for God suits
neither my experience nor this work.
The spiritual
insights gained through mothering cannot be accessed directly or reduced to a
few statements; they are deeply embedded in the actual, day-to-day adventure of
gestating, birthing and nurturing. This
time in a woman's life stands out as being exceptional and, if attended to with
a listening spirit, can be a time of great spiritual awakening.
She is in such close proximity to the ultimate creative spirit that she
can feel its hot breath on the back of her neck.
Is this God benevolent or using her towards its own means? Is she cared for, even loved by this God-force?
Is there an inherent goodness in the drive to perpetuate our species?
These are the questions that burn to be answered as her being is consumed
by procreation. Motherhood is the
purifying furnace by which our toils, frustrations and heartaches are
transformed into wisdom, compassion and fulfillment. Motherhood is a process through which we are crafted, shaped
and, finally, finished by our ultimate creator.
