Birth-Bonding-Death

I’ll admit - when I hear people talking about their epidural labors, or their breastless baby feedings, or their down-the-hall-in-the-crib sleepings, it makes me queasy. Literally. When it happens I often quite like the person and want to communicate nothing but loving support of their parenting choices, not moral righteousness or judgment.

But what comes up for me is a pure visceral emergency response, like I’ve been kicked in the gut.

It strikes me that this is because of how much my own parenting is learning that lives in my flesh. I gave birth at home, without drugs, felt every exquisite inch of it.  My youngest and I nursed exclusively for the first 6 months, nursed after work and through the night for the next 2 years.  I also nursed my older son (from my partner’s womb) for a short time finding a few quiet moments with toddler and infant simultaneously at peace. We  co-slept with both of them exclusively the first year (thus fostering the nighttime nursing). After that we put them to sleep in their own beds - though they continue to find their way to our bed at various times of the night even now (they’re 6 and 8).

So parenting is lodged, like our sense of smell, in the deepest parts of our primordial brain.

I think all parenting lives there, regardless of how it comes to you and manifests. And I think this at least partly explains the tensions that arise between people with different parenting styles and experiences. And how those tensions then, also find their way into moralizing from courts and communities.

These are deep issues, childbearing and family making, informed by culture and belief but ultimately rooted in our most basic senses and impulses. Our closest relationships are learning that lives in the flesh too.  When we are confronted with difference in these intimate places it’s as offensive as a foul smell, a rotten memory from the “emotional brain.”

In fact, the inspiration for this post came when I realized that I have a similar visceral response to people who have never experienced great sex. To consider the thought makes me woozy and erects a wall between us that I must fight to transcend. Similarly, some of my spiritual experiences are so embodied that the doubtfulness of skeptics blinds me with a fight-or-flight fury.*

My point is not that you should have great sex, nurse your baby, meditate ecstatically, or have a natural birth (though I highly recommend it!).  My point is that these experiences live so reactively within our flesh that we should question our reasoning abilities when it comes to them, question all ideas formed in response.  (Consider this recent court decision to terminate the parental rights of a mother who refused an unnecessary c-section - reasonable?)

We shouldn’t deny reason, just put it in perspective: so we can try to understand ourselves and each other more fully, so we can reason through our reaction to difference like we can reason through our reaction to bad fumes - without making moral or legal judgments on that basis alone. (Consider this post about sniffing).

Ultimately, acknowledging how our spiritual, familial, and sexual learning lives so limbicly within us might also build new alliances where there are now mostly hostilities.  So the devout might better appreciate the sex-radicals and the queers, and the queers might better appreciate the devout and the breeders, and the wisdom of those on the edges might finally find voice.

*Notably, sexual and spiritual experiences are less public than parenting, so these incidents happen less frequently, but no less acutely. In fact, often, the silence around sexual and spiritual learning/living also feels like an affront.