650. Becoming a Mother in 2020 and Settling into Motherhood

It’s 2021 already and many months have gone by since my last written update on how motherhood is going. I’ll explain why it has taken this long because I owe it to myself since I’ve been having this blog as a self recording public process space since 2008, it virtually holds all relevant details of my life and this process of essential change,  but for several months my oh so comfortable rug underneath me was suddenly lifted and I had to figure out what the hell was going on in the world while at the same time I was fitting my new shoes as a mother and finding out that the “far away” crazy lockdowns in china were suddenly going to  become our reality…. Then everyone going paranoid about the possible harms – Including myself of course – and having to now step up in this new living role while the world had gone absolute bunkers. It wasn’t easy, nope. It was quite the timing I would say to give birth and then suddenly as I was immersing myself in this whole motherhood thing, stuff in the world also grabbed my attention and, being who and how I am, I couldn’t just ignore it and sink into my own newborn bubble.

Looking back I like saying that this is all a blessing in disguise to all of us, a very much needed shake up to wake up to own who we really are. But, I will stick to the topic at hand and so, the story begins.

After my last blog where I shared about the first three months after giving birth, I went into a spiraling experience with regards to what was going on in the world with the whole covid crisis and trying to make sense of where we were and where this all was heading to. This is also a disclaimer on how some of my views here may not yet entirely be balanced out into an equilibrium of testing things out and sharing proven results from it. I will be sharing about decisions I’ve made based on my investigation – knowledge and information – yet, I decided to write about it here because, if anything it may at least open up someone to consider more beyond what may go usually unquestioned when it comes to the medical establishment  and what it has deemed as “care” for newborns and babies.

Many of our decisions and choices as new parents are based on fear or plain compliance to the norm. Part of my responsibility as a mother now is that I had to make informed decisions based on some of the – now in looking back at it – rather ‘usual societal pressures’ on supposed-health-care, such as constant visits to the doctor and getting babies inoculated with aluminum, mercury, animal dead tissues and so called inert “viruses” – read poisons- to apparently develop my daughter’s immune system because… everyone does it and doctors say so. Well, this simple question of “are we going to do vaccines?” Led me to an extensive research that crossed paths with the then ongoing speculation about the covid vaccine and it’s possible harms.

A disclosure here: I understand some parents have zero problems with following the vaccination schedule and their doctor’s orders and may disagree with what I have to say

It’s ok, not everyone will or has to follow this path yet it is my will to share about it since that is part of my living principles of doing what I can see and test to be best for all. Yet, I’m also aware of the social engineering process that has taken place for almost a century to prep people into never questioning what certain authorities sell as “safe and effective” measures for health and especially on newborns.

I will express however, how I can understand If someone else thinks otherwise. I’m no authority on any of these topics and I’m sharing about it because this is an important path in my journey to life, to make informed decisions in a way I can test out to see if that is indeed what I see is best and own that decision regardless of the outcomes, that’s just how I roll. If I find something that may prevent unnecessary shit in someone else’s life, I’ll talk about it and this is one of those things.

Enough with the apologies though!

I consider there is a way where we can step outside of name calling each other “conspiracy theorists” or “sheeple” and come together with common sense to investigate some facts about such proposed “medicine” and decide to walk a certain path to see whether those facts correlate to what’s supportive for an infant’s health or not. You know? Like real science used to do before covid1984.

I am aware that deciding to  not vaccinate our child sounds like experimenting with someone else’s health or even sound irresponsible to some – and that’s why I’ve taken my time to know what I was getting myself into by taking “an alternative path” of not vaccinating and being able to own that decision in whichever way that choice plays out, which for now I’m quite settled with as the best option.

My partner is fully vaccinated and he is probably the healthiest person I’ve known at a physical level, though there are some indices of him not being neurotypical and even if he doesn’t link that to vaccines, I reserve my ability to have a different view based on the research I’ve been doing on this subject. I have had some vaccines too and I’m alright – apparently – even though I have started to consider upon research how some chronic experiences having to do with throat and tonsils since I was a child may as well be related to vaccine injury. This is all conjecture but worth considering when it comes to the path we chose and that I am quite certain by now is the best and how the whole vaccination process is completely unnecessary and formulated within a paradigm that will soon be obsolete: germ theory.

I also understand that part of my “patterns” is to try to save others from walking through tough consequences or “preventing them from evil” type of thing and, that came up quite wildly towards my relatives these past months, until I finally realized I was trying to play savior with “my side of the story” which in fact, yes, stands as a polarity of what’s currently being embraced as truth by the majority of people with regards to the mainstream narrative around the virus and what not. I can also absolutely understand how I might be wrong and playing just the other side of the coin here and not seeing both sides equally, though for now this is my path, my understanding and it seems I will walk this as part of my self honesty and self creation, I including now the responsibility I have towards my child’s wellbeing.

See, I am aware how many of these points are hot topics that may contribute to the already ongoing polarization, but I’d like to consider there is a way to Still make informed choices and walk that talk in a self responsible manner without necessarily advertising it or trying to “convert” others to do the same, which I admit I do have a tendency to do and surely, that makes me another dictator just like the people we are currently “blaming” as the sources of imposing these limiting and nefarious measures, Not realizing that! They are us as well, we are all equally responsible for what’s here right now unfolding on Earth and I have no plans to try and “escape it” since many things might become inevitable and dare I say rather Necessary consequences for us to realize what the heck we have accepted and allowed our reality to become through our tacit or explicit consent.

Having said all this, there is also a necessary constant check of this current stance I’m taking and not making myself feel like “I know better” or “I’m superior” because of it, I’ve done that before within this process and surely, it has led me to plain isolation and alienation from others. I do see I have yet to moderate myself on these aspects and that it is Very easy to fall into the righteousness trap in relation to having a 1certain “position” around this.

Here words like consideration for others and humbleness to understand ‘where others are at’ are necessary, and this is where I see my Achilles heel  exists. Even my partner has explained several times how I’m just playing the exact opposite of what mainstream says and as such, I’m no different to that which I am criticizing and saying No to. And it is so, I can understand that view as well, but I still won’t be “doing as I must” when I am aware those are not best for all rules or decisions.

But! Haven’t we all done that anyways, always? Without a question? Yep! How about not questioning how money works and how poverty and starvation and disease are an Inside job and how we all could change it if we could agree to do so? Yet we haven’t and we keep complying to the value of our made out of thin air money and believe in its “almost divine” source as unique and not ever even flicker to consider things could be different for everyone. Yep! I have and still am doing that. It just happens that currently these – to me- absurd measures are now on our face quite literally and the rest of our acceptances and allowances are just an ever permeating seemingly dormant set of beliefs and interests we don’t really ever question.

This means that we had to get ourselves to this point, a breaking point as humanity to precisely wake up from slumber and perhaps that discomfort of not getting enough oxygen by wearing a mask for several hours a day, makes us question everything we have believed as “authority ” or “truth” or “right” throughout our entire “lives” – I hope so, in any case, this is not all in vain.

Well, looking back I’m grateful that opened up because it got me to understand a lot more about what we generally call viruses, the falsehood of germ theory and got to understand terrain or cellular theory, which actually makes a lot more sense since it places health as a self responsible act of creating wellbeing in one’s body, rather than falling into the current madness where people are believing that some invisible attackers are going to kill us or cause disease = there is zero self responsibility in such paradigm and that is why people indulging in wearing masks (within the belief of feeling protected from a virus while neglecting focusing on creating real health in their mind and body) are losing the sense of real responsibility in their lives, because of not understanding the greater plot of this all and just following the norms. To me, ignorance nowadays is a choice. Most people has a computer in their pockets and information on this abounds in the internet, yes, even if censorship is also rampant.

I won’t go into explaining all details or sources to what I just wrote above here, but anyone Interested is welcome to contact me to provide study material to understand what I’m merely describing in very general terms here.

Getting to understand and cross reference this all took me months – including seeing in real time my child’s first year alive – and they ran parallel to some rather uncomfortable months when it came to settling in with becoming a mother. In fact, I did probably get so absorbed by wanting to understand it all that I neglected my child. That is something I am ashamed of admitting but, it is the only way I can also get to confront myself and my priorities and decide to change that as a self honesty point in my life. What kind of neglect? It’s not that I didn’t feed her or attend her basic needs, but I was certainly disconnected from her, not really PRESENT which is something I had ‘tried’ working on during the first three months. I won’t be hard on myself though, as soon as I finished my postpartum quarantine, the world quarantine began and suddenly the world changed in a way I didn’t expect it would and as fast as it did. I was trying to make sense of the madness and I now know many others went through a similar experience, mostly people like me that want to keep abreast of world events and already know some of the plans laid out for humanity as a whole.

I share this is not to justify my lack of presence though, I would get too imbued into the searching and getting to ‘connect the dots’ that even if I was with her all the time, I wasn’t really Fully with her, I was processing and considering where it all was going to, and I also started understanding a whole new paradigm when it comes to health etc. Which was awesome by the way, since I had a tendency to ‘fear germs’ and with having a baby there’s this whole notion of having to ‘sanitize’ and ‘disinfect’ and ‘sterilize’ everything she eats from and touches on lol, so, by ditching that idea upon understanding terrain theory, I definitely liberated myself from that kind of ‘passed on’ information from previous generations which would have certainly added some extra paranoia upon the existing global one. The results? After a year of her life, she is perfectly fine!

But, I kept wanting to understand what was going on in the world and in the medical realm as a life or death thing – which in a way it is. I still had the benefit of her father being at home since this opened up during month 3 to around 7 of my child’s life that I zoomed into this whole information web and made it my focal point of attention. Yep, went through lots of info on several fronts from medical, to global politics, spirituality and re reading some of the Desteni material and audios on the topic, such as the viruses ones.

The outcome of that? Prolonging my process of actually settling in with doing what I’m now here to do which is to take care and support my daughter in all ways: Be a mother.

How did that go? I will not sugar coat it. I didn’t really develop a genuine or dare I say “natural” sense of what people can define as “love” for her until around her 6th month. Everything before that was a mere creation of habits and integrating care and attention towards her in practical terms. It is ok, I don’t judge the fact that I didn’t instantly “felt love” towards my daughter in the way I have known and seen – or was told – other mothers did or felt. I even recall my mother after many months saying ‘It’s the first time I see you smile.’ I did judge myself for this and have explained a bit of this in my previous blog. To me it makes sense that it took time to get used to her, to know her, to have a new being in our relationship and getting used to redefining “my life” now as a mother, yep, letting go of my old life and really settling in doing that extremely important job in the world and one that I feared the most: becoming a mother.

After her first 6 months, I started to experience more of what many might call “love” as a feeling, but to me it is more like me being able to enjoy more of my expression with her and towards her and this didn’t come easy at first as I’ve just mentioned. I just didn’t have that program ready to run the moment she was born, and it’s just how it was for me. And even if I had the most natural and unmedicated birth with immediate breastfeeding and keeping at it several times a day and having the fortune of not having to leave her to others to take care of her – as I continue doing- that “bonding” everyone talked about just wasn’t there or what I thought I had to be “feeling” –  which now I see is part of the things I had to completely shed off: the ideals, the stereotypes and anything else I’ve stored as “the way mothers feel and do.”

I realized each person has a very unique path and process in their experience and that is how it goes, we can’t possibly compare ourselves in that or to anything really. We can learn from each other for sure and that applies in terms of investigating all things and keeping what’s best. It’s also why I share my experience and it’s what makes our human experience quite rich and dare I say bearable too in knowing how others deal with things or how we process them. So, that’s how I currently do within this new phase and role I have as the mother hehe.

I’m here to learn to live the best of myself now as a “guide” and company to another new being in this world and it is a completely new experience that will always be unique to each one, and as with anything else, it stands just where it should as part of our individual process.

I share this because perhaps more mothers feel like “bad mothers” if they didn’t feel that “immediate bonding” with their child or start wondering if there is “something wrong with them” and who knows? Perhaps it was part of a post partum depression or in my case more like an extended quarantine plus not being able to satiate my thirst to understand what we were going through as humanity and at the same time getting used to and being there for my child 24/7 and being suddenly in a very slow paced life after my very active and “get stuff done” life and mindset. I knew this was my “pause” in life and that it was time to embrace it, but the world context didn’t make that entirely easy.

Let’s say it as it is, it’s hell of a weird time to be bringing a child into this world and many times I keep feeling like the character in the Italian movie “Life is Beautiful” where they make of the whole war and concentration camps a game for their child. Ok, we aren’t that far yet, but it certainly has already been a challenge for Minerva to get to be comfortable around more people and not knowing how to react because of everyone wearing masks and not being able to read people’s expressions. Sigh. It is just part of what she will have to deal with out in the streets – but we are also fortunate to have others on the same boat with us in realizing the importance of our children developing with some normalcy like being able to laugh and see each other’s faces and share hugs and be around each other without fear.

We were worried about her not getting enough social interaction with other kids and adults beyond us and my parents, but luckily during the summer we did meet up with other two families and have been seeing each other in the flesh regularly and it’s been great. I never appreciated social gatherings as much as I do now, and sure I guess we all had the same kind of experiences of craving social contact in times like these and now we do with more mothers and kids and that’s been quite a new phase for me as well of having something in common with new people and all of us craving social interaction for ourselves and for our children.

Back to the main topic here, to me it made sense that I simply had to get used to the whole life change over time and deliberately paving my way with living the words unconditional love and care. I also see that it’s easier to start bonding with your child once that they start to interact more with you and you get to see more of their expression when being with them, which is something that doesn’t really show when they are newborns and it’s all just diaper change, sleep, eat and carry around – or perhaps it was me that didn’t see the subtleties at the time due to the same shock experienced of becoming a primary caregiver to a newborn. Holy cow. AND! Then bam! Lockdowns, mass hysteria and people stopping to kiss and hug as usual – along with the rest of the paranoia that ensued in 2020.

So, overall,  I did question myself about me not having such “maternal flair” so to speak, but I realized this was just me trying to compare or fit into ideas of mothers I’ve seen around me. I kind of went… “F… It! That wouldn’t be me” and embraced myself as a mother, as how I wanted to be with her which is something I did by focusing on My expression  first around her and then, by default, my relationship and expression towards her unfolded in a more natural, carefree and genuine way. This was liberating and this is an ongoing process where even more so when being with others and my daughter I have to let go of feeling observed or judged etc. Because I’ve seen how this becomes the primary concern for mothers when allowing other voices, comments or opinions to become their guide to assess “how well they are doing as a mother” which is quite normal to go through for a novice in any job or position. And! Adding the layer of not doing what could be defined as normal or traditional parenting but going more into the current alternative routes that can be defined as radical parenting, so yeah! Not an exactly easy path in my context but! That’s just how we roll as a couple and now as a family, yay!

I decided to embrace me and my expression, how I decide to raise my child and owning it. That doesn’t mean being arrogant and not taking others’ words into consideration, but not immediately going into “panic” if I find out about something I haven’t been doing or considering.

To me and to us as a couple, Minerva is our parameter and if she is alright, growing well, healthy and being in general fine then, we’re going in the right direction. As simple as that.

I’ve been also learning to let go of some cleanliness attitudes because well! Babies! They eat and get everything all over the place and that is OK lol. So in general it’s been awesome to accompany her in discovering the world and watching myself to not become a control freak or impose something or do as others do – or did as my parents in their time and context did.

Instead, I practice learning to listen or see what she needs and being patient about her sudden desperation about things she wants and place myself in her shoes and understand her position of having everything be new to her and having no way to communicate with words what she is experiencing, that’s just some humbleness right there for me to learn.

Personally, I also had to let go of my antsy ways of wanting to “be productive” all the time and do a lot of “stuff” to feel like I am doing something or “getting somewhere”. Being with a newborn became a perfect excuse to test myself out with that and I kept my doings to the basic while still saying to myself it is ok and I can let go and enjoy the simplicity of the life we have, which I am quite content with actually.

Now she is one year and one month or 13 months old and I am more at ease and used to it all and more focused with what I’m here to be and do, which is to be a mother and raise a child within the context of – or upon the foundation of – being that change that I want to see in the world in one of the key areas in this reality to do so: parenting.

So, this comes from me as a person that many times tried to fit other people’s shoes, ideas and idealized version of people I thought were “better” or “greater” or more “normal” rather, and I only got to love being in my own skin when I embraced the uniqueness in me – which involves some weirdness or being not of this world like my partner says – that’s why he married me hehe. Sure! I’m Definitely not your regular kind of person here, but I wouldn’t want me to be any other way at all either.

One of the things I like about me is my authenticity and well, that’s what I’ve been around Minerva as well so, in the context of dipping my toes into motherhood. I didn’t fake attitudes when they weren’t coming from a genuine source within me, and I still check myself every time now that expressions of care are flowering like in spring so to speak. Little kisses, hugs, massaging, letting her know I care for her are now things I can genuinely say and do and it’s great! No faking and not asking anything of her either, all about me and my expression.

I’ve also been enjoying getting to know other mothers and having our meetings for our babies to be around other babies and kids and that’s been awesome too. Lol, I laugh because I never thought I would do things like that and hey! I actually enjoy it, even more so after this whole lockdown hysteria and finding people that are not paranoid or afraid to meet and share meals and spend time together, that’s been awesome and I’m really grateful for everyone I’ve met now as a mother.

It’s also been cool to be able to relate to for example my sisters as well as fellow mothers and understand them better from that common role and experience in life, and that’s something I’m grateful for because it has opened up communication about more in depth experiences we can go through as mothers, such as that idea and sensation that “we are not doing anything with our lives” and we might not be reaching certain financial or professional “success” and I’ve also opened up this whole topic in Spanish in my podcast here https://anchor.fm/encausarte/episodes/Encausarte-88-La-Maternidad-y-Poner-Nuestra-Vida-En-Pausa-el7qrh (for those that can understand) where I explain how we have been essentially brainwashed by currents of feminism and the ideals imposed of “modern women” that become successful business people or in certain professions and job positions that take up most of their time, while also raising kids. I don’t intend to judge anyone being a mother and being a full time working person here, but I speak from my observations on how it goes for the kids that don’t have their mothers at home because of work and how that eventually affects the whole of our society as well, based on the lacks these kids develop by not having their mother or both parents at home with them and barely get to BE with them. Its insanity and we have learned to see the staying-at-home mothers as “less than” those that choose to work.

Read me out though: Choose your priorities, because! We unfortunately do exist in a society and system where financial need does get the better of us and sometimes it is inevitable that both parents have to work to get to survive. And that simply obviously sucks. Let alone how it goes for single mothers, I honestly cannot imagine how hard it can be for them, yet, it is a very common situation as well and I would say isn’t ideal for anyone this way.

Here, a massively important topic opens up and that is MONEY. Because honestly, I don’t think many mothers would be that eager to work if there was a form of Living Income as an unconditional support for mothers that by the sheer outcome of having kids, requires money to survive – considering they are agreeing and willing to spend all their time with their kids to accompany that process of raising them and perhaps why not? Taking some courses and gathering support to become an effective father or mother if one has no idea of how to actually raise a child.

Here I’m also mostly talking about the essential first 7 years of age, but I’d even double that amount until the teenage years to have a solid certainty of having raised a child to the best of one’s ability to have them be a well grounded self responsible person that can make sound decisions with sufficient awareness and considering their lives as a contribution to the betterment of our society in every thought, word and deed. Not perfection reached by then! But surely being so in the making, as we all currently do in our lives within this Desteni Process.

I would not be able to be here pleasantly typing this while I breastfeed my daughter – that happens to also eat while sleeping-  if I didn’t have the financial support from others to do this. I don’t have to worry about going homeless or having to go to work somewhere to make money and leave my child with someone else, nor am I in constant anxiety about lacking my next meal and having an empty fridge has never been a problem to me. And nope this is not about feeling privileged, this is about the Russian roulette that exists as our current system and society where this is not something Guaranteed for every mother out there, and children, and fathers, and everyone else because, guess what? We all well know what would make us have a sense of security and support and have time to be the best versions of ourselves if we so decided to be so.

Becoming a mother has completely re-sensitized myself to consider and wonder “how other mothers do” when they lack the money and support from others to effectively care for their child? How would it be to have a child and having to breastfeed but not having even eaten yourself first!?

It really shocks me to what extent the whole world is able to be “lockedowned” in a matter of hours  for as long as it “apparently” takes to apparently “protect people” from getting Ill or dying – but we haven’t yet done anything similar to ensure that every single person alive is well fed and has a dignified living space – especially those with children! It baffles me, every single day to see the amount of money that goes to bs pseudo science and “studies” and f…ing so called “vaccines” – which should be called injectables btw- to apparently protect people from their own fear of dying while we haven’t realized that we don’t even know what it is like to truly be Alive! We don’t! If we knew, none of this absurdity and nonsense “rules” would be happening in the world because we would have learned how our bodies operate, how to best nourish ourselves, how to coexist with the environment and every single living part of it. We would have overthrown our so called authorities that are currently misleading towards a dictatorship because we would have learned to be self directed and be responsible for ourselves.

We would not be fearing a coming pseudo technocratic totalitarian governance because we would not have a reason to be told how to behave towards others or commit crimes against other ME’s for money, because we would have already cocreated a way to live our lives of mutual support and in consideration of the environment and other species that we share this realm with. These are just the basics to have a fulfilling Physical life, such as the principles embedded in the Equal Money System.

We wouldn’t be having a massive crisis of gender identities and races and nations, because we would be already living and loving others as ourselves regardless of skin colors, religions, nations, political affiliations or sexual preferences and we would all leave aside our individual beliefs to focus on that which makes us enjoy life and sharing our experiences with each other, learning from other, sorting out our messed up inherited world and create a common ground to thrive.

We would not be fearing to send our children to concentration-work-indoctrination-camps currently called “schools” because we would understand what it means to assist each child to reach their potential by facilitating the support they need to acquire the skills to become that which they want to develop and do with their lives! As an expression of themselves and not as a result of fear of survival.

We wouldn’t be worrying about the notion of a virus because we would have obviously understood the actual origin of these particles inside our bodies and as such, would not be fearing a part of ourselves as waste material that we simply have to learn to assist expelling out of our  bodies. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Right now the world is paralyzed in a fear of dying while we haven’t yet even begun to try Live and be self aware and know how our minds and bodies operate, let alone being able to properly assist a new being to do so for themselves.

I seriously hope more can see through the cracks of this current narrative and ask deeper questions like… why haven’t we all paralyzed our lives until every child is well fed and has a supportive environment to be raised in? Why haven’t we lockedowned the entire planet to install a new economic system that could assist us all to get our means to live well if we so choose to spend our time at home raising our children properly? That would change everything, but we don’t even think that is possible. We are too busy seeing who wins political selections or waiting for some panacea that will shield one from dying, apparently, disregarding the fact that many are too busy dying while alive in fear and failing to consider the play we are embodying until we decide enough is enough with our complacent roles.

Well I got a theory. Things will not get any better until we go to the root cause of it all and economic inequality and the lack of living principles are the points we need to focus on to start sorting this out. That involves getting to apply these tools of self investigation and self honesty as well, to see where and how we are actively contributing to the cocreation of this very evident delusion,  to truly rewire ourselves if we are indeed interested in getting to Live in the actual sense of the word in this world.

Well, this is how it goes with me. Even if this blog was supposed to be about myself and motherhood, I can’t play dumb or be oblivious to the times we are living in. I also understand this Is part of the consequence we have to walk through to finally – perhaps- get it, how hardship and troubles in this paradise won’t cease to exist until we sort out the root cause of our problems, which Is: ourselves, our self interest, our grand illusions that don’t consider what would be best for all.

Critical times we are living in and that also means it is an awesome time to be alive as well, because we are being forced to place the wheels of change in motion, finally moving along whether we are ready or not.

So, I want every mother to have sufficient economic, mental and relationship support in order to have everything necessary to be an effective parent. If we do that, if we made that our next goal as humanity along with an economic system that could cater it, we would witness the beginning of massive changes in our reality. Why not instead of fearing dying we start gathering to rethink the way we live among each other in this equally alive physical world? Sounds far more worthy time wise than living in fear of death and of each other.

Come on! Let’s let this all sink in and decide what we want to focus on and live. I’ve made my choice long ago, and for now I keep focusing on this very living present I got as an opportunity to contribute to this world change we want for ourSelf, because we are all it and the time is ripe to do so

For now, I’ll keep at it educating myself on how to best take care of my child, but also taking it easy around her and enjoying the lightness she brings to our day to day, the laughter, the enjoyment of the simplest things in life. I’m definitely keeping an eye on my spiraling into info worms and creating a balance so as to not go into extremes at times.

Thanks for reading

648. Postpartum and the Beginning of My Motherhood

After giving birth, it was kind of surreal waking up to a new reality where I became a mother and I now had a child to take care of, I had to be there for her all the time, I am her source of nourishment and have to do so as many times as she required. Sounds like an obvious part of becoming a mother, but living it is a whole new reality that I had to get adjusted and used to over time, as I guess most new mothers have to do, and I’ll share more of how this postpartum experience went for us.

 

I explained in my previous blog how much of a shock it was that the very ‘next day’ after giving birth, I was feeling just ‘fine’ and didn’t take time to sleep throughout the day and eat properly and how that second night with Minerva felt like a nightmare where I was ‘losing it’ as in not being able to keep myself awake and feeling as if I would just ‘leave my body’ if I closed my eyes, that was a scary feeling for sure. But fortunately I realized soon enough how I had to truly take care of myself in order to be able to take care of our daughter. And this is then that principle of being the best for me first to be able to be there for others, similar to why in airplanes they ask adults to put the mask on themselves first before doing so for their children, I hadn’t understood why this is so since my instinct would have been to put it on the child first and then the adult, but! Lol if plane loses pressure and adult passes out, then there’s no life for the child nor the adult.

 

I essentially had to eat a lot more considering I started breastfeeding and this is also – of course- entirely new to me and something I hadn’t really considered or integrated in my system so to speak, simply because of how much of my focus was on the ‘birthing process’ and being able to do it, that I didn’t pay as much attention to ‘what comes afterwards,’ which I realize was a form of shortsightedness on my side.

 

During those first days I sure was sore in the whole pelvic area involved in giving birth, fortunately I didn’t tear but still, all the genital area is swollen and even if I wore those iced-paths after birth to ease the pain and swelling, this lasts for a couple of days and it became uncomfortable to be sitting on the bed, which I did for most of the time.

 

To me the most challenging thing was starting to breastfeed and finding a posture for it and being able to have a good latch as well. Sitting on my coccyx was very uncomfortable as well and that’s essentially what I would do to breastfeed, I was getting the hang of how to carry Minerva – and I can say, I am still earning –  and it was overall challenging how to position her and she was very demanding of wanting to eat all the time, which became also something I couldn’t really fathom at first, I thought it would be once every few hours but there were days when she was stuck on my breast for hours without end. We found out there are these growth sprouts where they eat more or suck more to prepare the breasts for a larger milk demand and so production, but this was quite a load on me at first. I kind of pictured how my days would go with having to constantly feed her. This isn’t the case as much for now,  but she sure demands it quite frequently and I’ll explain why.

 

It was quite frustrating the first days when I only had colostrum and it seemed she was already demanding more and that’s the first time she cried in fact – after her first crying at birth – which made me feel quite powerless about being able to change the situation and my partner resorted to soothing her with the swaddle technique and sleeping with her on his chest while I was still recovering from lack of sleep.

 

Then another uncomfortable thing emerged when the milk started ‘coming down’ as they say and my breasts got very full and my nipples were really sore from all the improper latching which was Minerva just biting them a lot, even if she doesn’t have teeth. So yes, I had some minor scabs and I was worrying if this would be the way my breasts and nipples would feel for the rest of our nursing – which I intend to do for a couple of years at least. Thankfully it wasn’t like that. I was advised by the midwife and my mother and sister  to give myself some really thorough and rather painful at first massage on my breasts during the shower with hot water to unclog the milk canals so to speak, and that worked. It sure was painful every time that Minerva would start eating and I would eat my pain out because nipples were sore and at the time I would still feel contractions while she was eating – this is due to the uterus going back to its original size and position and the sucking assists with that – so, yes, it wasn’t a comfortable or easy time, but I kept at it with knowing that this too shall pass, and this became quite a helpful point to be aware of, which my partner would bring up every time I would go into despair about this kind of things happening.

 

Another challenge is that it was quite a shocker to me getting out of my usual ‘routine’ where I enjoy getting things done and had my schedules and things I would have ‘gotten to’ by certain time in the morning, and… of course the first days this is just mostly impossible to do. With going to sleep either super late or waking up throughout the night to feed Minerva and also with the times when she just didn’t sleep for some hours during the night, I would wake up ‘late’ – in my terms – as in 9 am or so and then it would be a thing to just get to have some breakfast, while feeding Minerva most of the times – yes, it became a food chain so to speak where my partner would feed me and I would be feeding Minerva, and then she would fall asleep after eating and I recall those moments where I was just wearing my pajamas the whole day and having Minerva on my lap – well she is on my lap as I type this, well, half of her since she is 2 months old as of today – and me having this worry and sense of ‘life passing by’ and ‘not getting anything done’ and having this desire to be ‘doing stuff as usual’ while actually realizing and telling myself: “No Marlen, that phase of your life is gone for now, life has changed for you, your most important job is to take care of Minerva.” This was also reminded several times throughout the days by my partner, who became my emotional stability support in this time and I’m really grateful for him being by my side all the time.

 

To me, those first days felt eternal where I was just waiting for some sleeping time,  being able to take a shower and toilet and hurry to get out to a hungry Minerva once again. I couldn’t fathom how much she would be demanding to eat, which was a constant thing for her. We decided to apply the free demand way based on understanding that it is about feeding the baby but also creating the bond with the mother and having that physical contact and connection through breastfeeding. So, with this, of course doing anything else became a challenge as well, and so my life was  ‘reduced’ to doing the basics like eating, going to toilet, showering and mostly staying connected to the world through the phone because, yep, being at the computer is still a complicated thing to do for the most part.

 

This is where I had to realize that this apparent reduction was in fact the most important thing I had chosen to do and it became a challenge because I’m mostly this constantly moving ant that wants to “be productive” and “be doing stuff all the time” and this became a complete halt to most If not all of that, considering I didn’t even have to do the usual chores because of being recovering. My partner became my helping hands and body, along with my mother and father so, I’m once again grateful for them and making my time easier. I sure would have done things differently as I look back into that quarantine. I would let go of my anxiety to “be doing something” and just surrender to just Being with Minerva… I sort of would do it but my rather sickening sense of “duty” became a mental obstacle for this.

 

At times it was even like hard to comprehend that this wasn’t a temporary thing, motherhood. I had to go assimilating during those first weeks the fact that this is a lifetime commitment and this wasn’t going to be ‘something I do’ but something I Am now, which is a mother. I even had a hard time to say “Now that I’m a mother” out loud for the first time as well. But, as with any new thing, any new habit or new relationship, it is a matter of time to get used to it 🙂 and I consider I’m doing better at it.

 

I had to often remind myself that I chose this, I decided to own the decision to have a child as I’ve explained in past blogs, but of course I hadn’t really probably considered to what extent it would ‘permeate’ my life – perhaps this was some nativity for me, but I embrace it since it’s part of how I also give myself the courage to actually do things or take on challenges as well – and now I understand it is a complete point of focus and occupation in that sense, a wholeness, a becoming. Whenever I felt overwhelmed by it, by being constantly ‘demanded’ attention by Minerva and having to feed her all the time, I stopped saying – when my partner would handle her to me- ‘she wants to eat more?!’ to simply saying “come here to eat!” because my question was coming from a starting point of disbelief but also of just not wanting to do it ‘again.’

 

Now, here what was also playing out is that I hadn’t fully ‘surrendered’ to my new place and occupation in life. I was still kind of ‘hoping’ to have some time for perhaps writing or doing some recordings or going to the computer etc.… and it took quite some time – and perhaps I still am working on this – to not be having the ‘next thing I want to do in mind’ while I have to be with and feed Minerva, because that’s what creates the ‘suffering’ so to speak. I was reflecting on that this morning and it reminded me of Buddhism and how they say that desire is the origin of suffering, and in this kind of situation that falls into that definition. If I am constantly desiring to be ‘doing’ something else or going somewhere or having my shower or wanting to go to swim etc., well that creates a constant un-fulfilledness that does affect my ability to be truly HERE and embracing my time with Minerva fully, which mostly means a complete slowing down and halt, something truly challenging to me to be honest, but working on it as well.

 

Another thing that added the sort of experience of feeling ‘trapped’ is that I couldn’t go downstairs for over a week, so it was mostly a stay in bed type of situation right after birth, going to the toilet – which sure is painful the first days- dealing with the bleeding, the soreness in the nipples, having some constipation as well and on top of that being sleep deprived, yep, a recipe for disaster in my body, but then also kept in mind this is part of the process, it’s not forever and this too shall pass.

 

I am eternally grateful as well for the support that my parents gave us during the quarantine. I was also apprehensive about this, I wanted to ‘help’ and do house chores or clean or whatever but nope, I had to once again and for the first time just be grateful for the support and embrace it, accept it and I had to kind of brainwash myself about this, that it was ok for me to essentially ‘do nothing’ because of having devoted a lot of my time to assist others…  yep, I am aware this was perhaps unnecessary, and I could just decide to embrace and be grateful for everyone’s support, from my relatives and their visits with some presents for Minerva, my aunt’s food, my mother’s food and place to stay as well as my father who is the real powerhouse behind it all, and my partner becoming like a personal assistant to hand me basically everything and giving me belly massages and checking out the healing of my sore genital area etc. This whole time made me realize how difficult it must be for single mothers or mothers that don’t have this network of support either physically or financially and this became one of those thoughts I would dwell on, realizing how much support every woman that gives birth in fact needs to be able to Fully be there for their child, and in  stable emotional state as well, which is super important for the child as well.

 

I bring this point up as well because it is at times very easy to say ‘I can do this alone’ and I realized I couldn’t, not this time and it is in fact one of those times when we do need ‘a village’  – as they say – as support to walk through this initial time of getting acquainted with one’s child and walking through the body discomfort that motherhood starts with.

 

I also had a hard time being able to ‘feel happy’ as such for most of the time. Sure, I felt in moments quite grateful for being able to hold our child in hands, to the point of tearing up a bit. But I also cried at times for feeling inadequate, feeling as if I lacked the ‘motherly’ attitude that I would watch, read or hear other mothers express when talking about their own post partum or motherhood experience, I couldn’t really relate. Also with various situations where I would feel that my partner was more ‘apt’ at taking care of Minerva than me, being more ‘up for it’ and caring or tenderly doing so and how I felt that I lacked that. Well, I talked about it with him and he once again expressed how this was a perception of mine when comparing myself to others, that I should rather embrace my unique way of expressing love to Minerva which maybe isn’t with acute voice talking and that sort of thing, but with a genuine sense of care and disposition to be there for her and with her. I am still walking through this and embracing this aspect in me, as well as continuing to create that point of expression with her which also comes with more ease now that she interacts more with us in the sense of laughing and blabbing and understanding more of our gestures. It sure is nice to see how she smiles when waking up and knowing I’m there ready to feed her.

 

This also reminds me of how relationships are built and how to me it makes sense to get more into this new relationship in my life as time goes by and how it is OK if it isn’t an immediate ‘click’ as they say. My mother also pointed this out how I only smiled several days after she was born, I did feel like a zombie for most of the first week due to the physical strain and tiredness, but also because it was still hard to assimilate the fact that my life had completely and totally changed for real this time. This is also a key point for me in my life and process, to realize how ‘selfish’ in fact I had been when it comes to doing MY things, MY life only and yes caring about others and supporting others but ‘at specific times’ and then being able to do and be wherever I wanted.

 

Several times I had to be reminded that those times were, well, over and gone and that this was a new phase in my life. Yes, I I had to be reminded this, that perhaps ‘should have been obvious’ to most or many, but not to me in those moments where I felt as if the world was just going to ‘pass me by’ as I was laying on a bed feeding my child for endless hours and just hoping to get some proper sleep in the night. It sure doesn’t sound fun and I don’t mean to scare anyone because this is entirely MY experience. It sure isn’t easy for most people to get used to having a newborn at home to take care of, but I am also sure that some may have a better attitude about it than me, lol. I know because my partner is that kind of person that was super happy and laughing at having to change the diaper after we just had put a new one, or having to wake up at night and get her to sleep because I was just ‘out’ by the time, and washing her dirty clothes and doing all of those things that, well, perhaps a lot would see as a chore. I learn a lot from him, still am, and I’ve been realizing how we experience things based on how we decide to Perceive them.

 

He decides to perceive what I would think as a nuisance or a chore with humor and enjoyment, and that surely lightens up everything when in perhaps in a different situation, having a partner with my ‘similar character’ probably would have been a recipe for disaster and perhaps I would have sunken deep into some kind of depression. But thanks to him I didn’t sink that low.

 

I probably felt depressed for all of the reasons I cited above, it mostly had to do with saying good bye to my old life – yes, even that of being pregnant which as I explained before, also became a ‘comfort zone’ to me because I could still be out and about and do whatever I wanted to – and embrace this new phase which I knew was a definitive out of my comfort zone situation, and one that I know is the one I actually needed in order to further my personal development, which to me translates into personal expansion and growth, and that comes with challenges, obstacles, difficulties, etc. So, I focus on embracing this new life now and not reacting to it with frustration, but embracing it as part of the process that it is. My partner explained how this is the moment she will need us the most in her life, how she totally depends on us and how later she will become more independent and no longer require us to be there All the time with her. Again, as obvious as this can be, it was supportive to realize this as well in moments where I sure felt trapped.

 

One of the interesting realizations was about breastfeeding and getting to see how much of a central piece in this whole motherhooding it is. In our case, the challenge was – and still is to an extent really – having too much milk. So, we couldn’t understand why Minerva would get so frustrated while being sucking my nipple and seeing that yes, I Do have sufficient milk because it’s spilling out all over, so, why is she so upset?

 

Well, after doing some research in La Liga de la Leche or La Leche League we found out that her symptoms were probably because of me having too much milk, having a strong ejection causing her to choke essentially, that’s why she has to come off of the nipple repeatedly if starting to feed from the ‘other’ nipple after having drank most of the first one, which we also read could take up to 6 hours of feeding with the same one to ’emptying it out’, which contradicted a common belief of having to feed from one breast and changing to the other in the next feed, which wasn’t working for us.

 

 I’m still doing the several hours feeding with the same breast and only changing after some hours or after I see that she is truly getting upset from perhaps not getting the amount she is expecting once she starts feeding. As my partner and I would conclude, breastfeeding is quite an art in itself, lol, from the various positions that one can use, the latching, the amount of milk, the ejection of it, the density that it goes having during the different stages of development of the child and of the milking process in itself, it’s quite an amazing and complex thing and I recommend watching the series ‘Babies’ on Netflix that explains more about this as well, but one can dive deeper into breastfeeding topics in La Leche League as well.

 

I am still getting used to Minerva simply getting frustrated and sometimes acting rabidly lol when eating, yes, like getting too desperate or frustrated when the ‘thicker’ milk doesn’t come out yet, or when she sucks with so much force that the ejection is even faster and stronger, and me facing the discomfort of soaking my clothes with drops of milk and sometimes spilling it all over Minerva, all because of at times having too much… yep, I thought this would resolve in some time, but it hasn’t, so, I’m embracing it and realizing that as my partner says, nature might have a reason why things are the way they are with our bodies and so, this is the one feeding challenge I face with Minerva. If anyone has any hacks or tips for this, let me know!

 

So yes, the image of a peacefully feeding baby with their mother is just not my case as much lol, perhaps only at night – a bit because even then she does these funny sounds that lol sound more like a drunk man sipping on his last drink before going home, which is hilarious now, but surely doesn’t ‘fit’ into what I thought would ‘be like’ to feed my baby in this aura of peacefulness where they just with ease fall asleep… nope, this is like a constant push and pull type of situation and yes, it can be hilarious to see her getting pissed at the breast for not giving it ‘what she wants’ but, I can’t really regulate the situation, so it’s one of those things that I have to embrace as is.

 

This is also something worth sharing because sometimes we might have this very ‘angelical’ view related to motherhood or breastfeeding specifically, and then it is then to realize that reality works differently and it doesn’t mean it’s ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ or ‘I’m doing something wrong’ type of situation either. Each child is different, each mother is different, the nature of both is different so, any point of comparison is really out of the window.

 

Another challenge was becoming a mother in the eyes of my mother and doing things that she didn’t agree with. We kind of knew this ‘clashing’ would happen based on how we know she deals with babies and the usual fears around taking care of them, so we went and are going through this and yes, this is also a cautionary tale because things can escalate at times when it can be hard to hear words like ‘you really don’t know how to care for your child!” – or something alike – in one of the most vulnerable moments in  women’s lives when being in the post partum time – or calling us out for being ‘inconsiderate’ for example in the amount of clothes we would attire Minerva with and that becoming a problem for her. We had to stand our ground and it does still happen that my parents think we are deluded about things, but this is part of becoming parents ourselves and if we make mistakes, owning them and learning from them. But following someone’s’ raising ideas out of fearing conflict is just not our style, so this was something to add on to the ‘list’ of challenges I experienced in these so-called quarantine that well, we got to spend at my parent’s house and we are super grateful for the support, but we also wanted to finally get back home to have less of a policing around us when it comes to how we decide to take care of Minerva.

 

This is also cool to share because usually our parents will have different ideas and information on how babies operate so to speak,they were raised in a different time, with different information and so on, so we don’t judge them, we understand them and their sense of care linked to fears, but it then became our duty to inform ourselves on the way we want to raise our child and so have sufficient information and common sense to share our ways and actions that may differ to how they would do things.

 

Slowly but surely, they are realizing that these are different times, new things have been discovered and a lot more has been opened up with regards to taking care of babies such as co-sleeping, carrying them around in our arms for most of the day, allowing them to eat whenever they ask for it, not leaving them crying to make them ‘adjust’ to something, etc.  So, yes, it may create a lot of tension with some relatives – depends on ‘how much’ they are ‘married’ with their paradigm and ideas of how to raise children, but it is also necessary as a breaking point to leave it clear that we will do things differently and that it is not antagonism or some kind of rebellion or a stand off towards other people’s ways, it is simply how we decide to do things whether some like it or not. And sure we are also not blind to realizing we might be wrong, but then we will have a physical consequence or outcome to demonstrate how we were wrong, so that we can change or adjust our current ways.

 

I frankly don’t know how things would have been if I had been entirely alone with Minerva and my partner would have had to be out most of the day. He prepared his finances sufficiently to be able to spend all the time with us for the first months and now with this whole coronavirus thing, it might have to be a bit longer, it depends, but he is so unconditional and willing to be here and support because he realizes this is the most important thing in his life and what he genuinely  likes doing, which is awesome to witness as well and such an example for me where I am still working on that full ‘letting go’ of my ‘old life’ and can be still wishing for that “freedom” I had before, so it is a daily thing to embrace and get used to this new life and appreciate its charms and challenges, but mostly get used to its simplicity.

 

Currently, it is a weird time because I came out of my quarantine and then the world entered its own quarantine, so, in a way it’s ok that I was sort of getting used to being at home most of the time, but I was also already craving to at least go out for some walks which we are slowly but surely doing now with Minerva, but her constant desire to eat is perhaps something that still becomes a challenge to get to do that for longer periods of time, but we will get used to it as we go I guess, or as she settles more with eating more substantially and having more time in between of not eating, we will see, but I realize it’s best to be expectation-less and go with the flow, which is of course a really necessary lesson for me as well with the usual control freak pattern I have.

 

Something I’m currently thankful for is that she does sleep throughout the night, I just have to wake up to feed her which I now do while lying on bed, she eats for some minutes and continues sleeping. I am also now having it easier to fall asleep right after waking up to feed her, which is great, but I still feel like lacking some sleep and I’ll continue to look into that actually since it could be that there are other factors involved. We are sort of getting into a routine, but I am aware that I can’t set it in stone yet because it may still change drastically and I basically have to go with the flow and not expect ‘her’ to ‘adjust to my life’ essentially.

 

Today it was cool because I was able to wake up and do some light post partum yoga practice, which I realized I was missing with all the ‘halt’ of activities that I had due to the quarantine, I am slowly but surely placing myself into more action, which perhaps also played a role in feeling somewhat down during the quarantine, because exercising also supported a lot with my mental or emotional stability and with staying in bed, doing essentially nothing but eat and sleep, it became quite a shock as well to my dopamine levels I guess, along with all the shock that the birthing process was in itself for my body, but hey, it too shall pass and it’s rather important to also be patient for this whole recovery process.

Even if I ‘feel alright’, I cannot really know how my insides are doing, so I had to be aware of that as well and not be ‘overriding’ my actual capacity with a sense of ‘I’m alright’ either.

 

So, I’m taking it easy and it is not like I could ‘do’ much either really, because taking care of a baby truly is demanding, she is with me all the time and even with that, I am actually grateful that my partner is the one that does most of the carrying around because! she is around 6 kgs at 2 months currently so, it’s becoming a challenge for my arms as well, I need to strengthen myself more to feel at ease with that, or find a way that I can carry her around without her feeling trapped and wanting to get out of any sort of wrap right away. We will see with some tips I got from Anna 🙂

 

One thing is certain, and that is that Minerva has come to revolutionize my life in a way I probably didn’t expect and it’s been also great, even if I may not necessarily express it in an open way, I smile and am thankful for having her now in our lives and I am  taking it day by day to also not create ideas or ‘overwhelm’ myself with ‘what ifs’ about our future together and how ‘she will be’ etc. She is already showing us or rather confirming a lot of how I sensed her in the womb in fact, she is an energetic tough cookie lol, showing us back some of our most ingrained patterns like being demanding and obstinate, wanting things ‘right now!’ and quite energetic, which is laughable at times to see that in a baby – and a girl –  but lol, that’s what life is like and so I am learning to ride along with it and I’m being tested precisely on my desire to have ‘the world’ or ‘people’ or ‘things’ fit into my life or schedules… yep, that has to go out of my paradigm for good, which I consider was about time anyways.

 

I also read the book by Laura Gutman called Maternity, coming face to face with our own shadow, which is an awesome explanation of how our emotional state of being is reflected back in our children, including illnesses or symptoms that are actually an opportunity to work on our own shadow or dark side or all of those more hidden or kept under the rug aspects that we tend to hide about our nature, our past traumas or memories that resurface back to haunt us in this motherhood time.  Here is where I give credit to the Desteni Process with which one surely gets to walk a lot of these points and could be essentially considered as a pretty thorough preparation process to be mentally more equipped  and fit to become a parent, since one works a lot with this shadow and learns to face it with more stability and understanding as it rears its head in one’s everyday life. Of course this Process is not only useful to become a parent, dare I say it’s a way to give ourselves a new start in life, a rebirth even if we have walked around in this world with some decades already, so I absolutely recommend anyone to consider walking it, specially if you are aiming at becoming a parent or are already one.

 

I’m thankful for all these learning points thus far and still working on them, there’s lots to keep awareness on. Just sharing how these first 2 months have gone by, and celebrating the fact that she is a big, healthy and strong little lady as well, yay! 🙂

I recommend listening to the Parenting series on Eqafe to prepare yourself to handle some of the basic considerations related to taking care of a child, which relate a lot to one’s own self-responsibility when it comes to a state of being and being the best that we can for our children.

Let’s keep walking

 

 

647. The Birthing Process: Patience and Perseverance

After we had made our decision to give birth at home, we continued to get educated on the topic watching documentaries and learning from other couples that had gone through the same process recently, which gave us further strength and trust in ourselves and in our capacity to do it. This is something I consider is very supportive for first time mothers, to get acquainted with other mothers to be and get a firsthand share of how the birthing process was for them. In my case, the pregnant ladies I met that gave birth during the time I was expecting, didn’t have favorable outcomes in their intent to have natural births, which did initially moved me in the sense of thinking ‘what ifs’ but, I have to thank my partner and the midwives that were able to explain why such complications took place so that I could see the reasoning behind it and so, not fear, and get myself back to trusting myself and my capacity to do it.

 

One interesting thing is how upon getting to meet our midwife Minerva and getting more informed, I became quite settled and tranquil within the process and fears dissipated, because I saw how much I had been brainwashed to see birth as something painful or terrifying even. And that was awesome as well, because then I wasn’t fearing getting to the delivery time, I had other resistances that played out as I will share here, which were of another kind.

 

So the story begins… It was January 14th, I had gone to my yoga class that morning and then had a family meeting to celebrate my father’s 70th birthday and I actually was feeling quite alright but already having some of what I had understood were the famously known Braxton-Hicks contractions, which interestingly enough I started noticing in a more defined way on January 1st. That same day at night, I was eating some left overs of the chocolate cake I had made for my father and one of those contractions came and I told my mother: ‘come and feel this!’ and she placed her hand on my belly and she was shocked by how rock-hard it felt and she was like ‘how long have you been feeling these?’ and so I said that I noticed them from the beginning of the year – actually on the 31st to be precise when we were at the movies watching Parasite, lol, Minerva really disliked that movie chair – and she explained how there’s this theory that 2 weeks after these contractions begin, well, labor also begins. I didn’t pay much attention and just said how this was nothing to worry about.

 

The midwife, Minerva, had explained to us how from the 11th on, anything could happen. Well, I was still kind of holding the idea that first time mothers deliver mostly close to the 40th week or even later, I was in the middle of the 38th and I thought I ‘still have time’ and actually was kind of being lax about buying some of the stuff required for the whole home birth experience. Actually on the 10th we were still going to shops to buy stuff and we were foreseeing to start packing and moving things by the end of that week… well, that night we came home and close to midnight I saw that the mucus plug came out. I kind of freaked out even though I knew this was something that would happen before labor started. I also held on to some information of how some women lost this plug and ended up having their child some 2 weeks later, I thought this was going to be my case.

 

I told my partner, I wasn’t feeling anything after that, so we went to sleep and all I can say is that in the middle of my sleep I was feeling this quite heavy or hard contractions throughout the night, but I kept sweeping them aside as if they were just the Braxton-Hicks ones and nothing serious, however the pain was getting definitely more than the ones I had felt the days before. So, it was at 4 am when I decided to wake my partner up and explain the situation and from that moment on, contractions started happening quite frequently. I downloaded an app to keep track of them and man, it turned out that they were happening every 10 minutes and then, gee, every three minutes! lol the app was telling us ‘you need to rush to the hospital right NOW!’ lol well I laugh because I also knew this could happen and how it didn’t mean that labor is starting ‘right now’ but I still called Minerva – our midwife – at 5 am and let her know about it, she simply said to keep her updated and let her know whenever we wanted them to come to the house.

 

I called my mother and she obviously freaked out because, yes, like me, we weren’t expecting this to happen ‘so soon!’ and my reaction was that of rushing and worrying how I didn’t get to have or ‘leave’ everything ready, I was still expecting to have some time left, some more days to go swimming or to my yoga class – yep! I had such kind of thoughts in the middle of these continuous series of contractions at 5 am on that Wednesday morning. But, in the middle of my disbelief, we started packing everything we needed to temporarily move to my parent’s house where the birth and my postpartum time would be spent.

 

By that time, I really thought that our daughter was going to come in the next following hours, but! what actually happened is that the contractions receded, they essentially slowed down in frequency, oh and I was also having some of the amniotic fluid coming out, but not entirely, so midwife explained how this was a partial rupture of the membranes, so that kept me ‘on guard’ so to speak as well because of having to keep an eye on that and ensuring the liquid remained clear- if not, that means attention, you need to go to a hospital soon.

 

To make the story shorter, contractions kept happening that day, sometimes an hour and a half would transpire before I had another one, sometimes they happened every 20 minutes, and that’s how most of the day went. At night, they spiked and so, I would wake up to manage them – because it’s not particularly nice to experience contractions while laying down in my experience – and my partner would assist me in every single one of them. We would sleep in between the contractions and to make the story even shorter, the same happened in the following two nights which means by the time I got to the day of giving birth, I have had four nights of really bad sleep with contraction pains… not cool, but that’s how it went.

 

The next day on Thursday, we got the first visit from the midwives after me telling them that contractions were still happening just not as frequently to call it an ‘active’ labor phase. So they came home, checked baby’s vital signs and did some acupuncture on me, some massaging and some rebozeo, which is a very traditional technique with what is called a ‘wrap’ in English to help the baby position herself better to give birth and also to assist with my hips and in general also to relieve some tension in my body. That was great, it all was aimed to ‘start the engine’ on the giving birth process. They explained to us how most women go into ‘activity’ at night due to some hormones, and so I was expecting that action would begin that night, but it didn’t. We had another long night with multiple contractions but nothing too painful to call it an active labor phase yet.

 

On Friday, both midwives came home again, this time they gave me a series of homeopathic stuff to induce labor and here comes the most interesting part, they also have a set of questions to check up on some of the emotional stuff that could be clogging or delaying the active labor phase. So when Minerva asked ‘are you ready to give birth to your child?’ My Ms. Correctness answer was ‘yes, as ready as I can be’ but my partner was like ‘hold on, that’s not true’ lol! Grateful for his ever bluntly honest perspectives and feedback because he then explained to me how I was still doing my work in the past days, how i was still doing chores and the ‘regular stuff’ and in essence not really focusing on the birthing process at all. I had to admit that was in fact true and how my sense of ‘responsibility’ was killing me because of not having ‘everything ready’ at the time and still holding on to that idea of myself having to ‘get to do everything’ and not really giving myself that space to realize: you are about to give Birth! How about focusing on THAT!

 

Well, that was my first point of admitting I was preoccupying myself with all kinds of stuff instead of realizing: it’s time, baby is about to be born. And then, there was some kind of question related to the end of pregnancy, and that’s where the nail was hit on the head as well. As the conversation opened up, I realized how pregnancy had become my comfort zone, I was feeling so well and was able to do ‘all of these things’ like going out and exercising and I was sleeping well up to the contraction-night time that I just kind of wanted to prolong that phase because, hey! it’s easier apparently, you don’t have to actually take care of the baby outside of the womb, don’t have to feed them or get to be awake at night, baby goes everywhere with me and I didn’t have to do a thing to care for her… this was my point of resistance and what also delayed my active labor phase.

 

It turns out that I was holding on to the pregnancy and as such, I was holding on to keeping the baby inside me, I hadn’t essentially let go and ‘detached’ in that sense of her. And, as I was sitting cross legged on the mat with my partner next to me and I started opening up all of these things about me ‘holding on to the pregnancy’ and having her within me… I seriously hadn’t realized this if it wasn’t for those questions that led me to find this out. And the moment that I said: “I need to let go, I need to detach” bam! The ‘water broke’ or the membranes were ruptured and liquid started flowing for real this time. I started crying, it was such a ‘magical’ moment, it seemed that’s what I had to realize, to really recognize this time as ‘this is IT! Baby is coming’ and in a way then also embracing that this was the end of this ‘sweet time’ that I made of pregnancy to be.

 

Was it the homeopathy, was it the talk, was it all of the above? I’m not sure or all of the above, but one thing led to another and so this time contractions continued ‘as usual’ throughout the afternoon and then around 10 pm at night on that Friday night, contractions really went up in intensity. I started experiencing them every 20 minutes and I kept tracking most of them. I am eternally grateful for my partner that would wake up with me and step out of bed in every single one of them throughout the night to assist me with coping with the pain, now that was some more intense stuff I couldn’t just ‘laugh’ through as I had done in the previous contractions. I had to be swaying from side to side holding his hand and holding myself from a piece of furniture that was in fact Minerva’s diaper changing zone 🙂 Well, once we saw that the intensity had reasonably augmented and that this time they didn’t seem to slow down in time, we called the midwives to let them know it was time to come home.

 

I still can’t fathom how we managed to do this, we would sleep some solid 20 minutes and like clockwork a new contraction would begin, then we would go back to sleep and so forth. By the time I kept track of the last series of contractions before midwives arrived at around 5 am on Saturday morning, I had logged in more than 235 contractions since early Wednesday morning when I started tracking them. God knows how many more I did on the rest of that Saturday when things got really intense and then we certainly knew it active labor time.

 

That Saturday is kind of fuzzy to me, time ceased to exist and I just remember having a lot of contractions, being on several positions, holding my partner’s hands in each contraction, holding the midwives hands when he had to leave to eat or go to the toilet. I was assisted with many natural means throughout the whole process, I had a heated bag of salt on my back to relieve the pain. I had homeopathy, aromatherapy, essential oils, massage, acupuncture all done throughout that day to assist with activating the process and relieving pain.

 

I was also able to eat whatever I wanted to, this apparently is a no go when going to a hospital. I had my aunt sending me some chicken soup and I even ate a bit of a hamburger throughout that day lol along with all the usual nuts and seeds that I eat, dried fruits, lots of electrolytes and a natural mix of lemon, salt, baking soda and honey to hydrate myself. I had some really rough moments where I thought

I wasn’t going to make it, I felt like fainting, I hadn’t slept in the past 4 nights and I was in pain. I got a tact done by Minerva and got to know I was half way dilated, there was progress, yay, but still had a long way to go. After some more hours of constant contractions, I got another tact done and voilà, I was fully dilated, yay, but I was exhausted.

 

This was a crucial moment because the birth tub was getting filled with water but there was a general concern to use it or not, because as much as water helps to relieve pain, it can also slow down the process and ultimately take it to a halt if one gets ‘too comfy’ in the water. Well, I decided I wanted to do it anyways and give it my all to make it work.

 

Now, entering that birth pool was a heavenly experience to me, seriously, I don’t know what I would have done without that water embracing me in that moment, I am grateful for having chosen this method of giving birth, which also btw can only be used once that one is totally ready to give birth, so it’s meant to be used for a short period of time, but! in my case, I spent more time in it than expected because, It did happen that things came to a halt at some point, I lost focus, I was really tired and I had to essentially be ‘re-focused’ to it through a guided meditation, to essentially give myself the necessary awareness of how close I was to giving birth now and how I had to gather my strength to do it. At this point I was really in pain, I was screaming out loud with all of my lungs and I was also continually directed to refocus it, to not go into the ‘pain’ experience but to channel that through vocalizing it, with my whole body instead of just ‘screaming out of pain’ type of thing.

 

Something else that I got to actually take as a big lesson in all of this is how I am not entirely IN my physical body, meaning aware of how every muscle works and how to direct my body in fact when it comes to something like giving birth where I couldn’t really focus on pushing as such where I needed to push; instead, I would tense my whole body and that of course only prolonged things once again. This was getting everyone’s nerves to the top, to be honest, I could see everyone’s face how they could see the baby’s head and I even was told to stick my finger up to feel her head and I couldn’t believe that ‘this was it’ that it was in fact Minerva’s head, I thought it was some trick to keep me in good spirits and keep pushing, lol, but it was in fact so that she was only a few centimeters away from the outside. Well, those few centimeters took a couple of hours of constant pushing for her to actually come out, yes, it was intense and by that moment I was having contractions like every minute or god knows how often, all I remember was having a contraction, holding my legs up so that Minerva, the midwife, could do some aid with her hands to have the baby come out and then I would go back into the water and drink electrolytes. Yep, I ended up drinking like 5 bottles of it that day, all definitely needed because, I was truly in that marathon experience I had considered it would be, only with some ‘extra’ days added of relative hard work.

 

I was getting desperate by the very end, I kept pushing and everyone kept saying how close I was but the baby wasn’t coming out. I have to admit I said – almost at the very end – I give up, I can’t do this anymore. In that moment, my mother stepped up and reminded me how this was definitely not the time to ‘give up’ lol and how I had to give it my all. She actually had to directly explain to me how to breathe and direct the force of that breathe to push the baby out. It turns out I just wasn’t really ‘connecting’ with that innate way that women have to give birth, it turns out my intellect, my rational mind has more of a hold of me to the point that I wasn’t really surrendering to the process. And that was in fact one of the key words that also assisted me to finally give birth, to surrender to it, I was still trying to ‘manage’ the pain by tensing up my body throughout the contractions, instead of giving myself to it, surrendering to it, offering myself to the process so to speak, fully opening myself up. And that’s something that I finally did in those last moments of pushing when I gave it my all, it didn’t matter anymore if all of my insides would come out in that moment, I just wanted Minerva to come out and end this whole marathon for myself, for her and for everyone that was there and not there that were also stuck to their phones trying to find out any news about the birth, making their prayers and sending me good vibes essentially for everything to go well.

 

The moment came when I did one of those gargantuan efforts to push and with Minerva’s hands as aid, the head was released from my birth canal and a fraction of a second afterwards the whole body just came out like a torpedo in the water. I couldn’t believe myself and as I type this, I still can’t fathom how that was possible. My partner was in tears throughout the last phase of the process because he was seeing how much I was in pain and suffering, but I kept calm in that sort of trance that one goes into when giving birth, I can’t honestly recall if I cried at some point, I probably did, but the moment that Minerva came out it was just this giant relief, because I was just about to be ‘out’ when it comes to lacking energy to do another effort like that.

 

She was finally here, on my chest, spewing some phlegm out and mustering her first crying. I recognized the feel of her vertebrae because it was the same I would feel on my womb, I said how I was glad she was finally here, but I was mostly ‘out’ of myself by that moment. Giving birth to the baby doesn’t mean it’s over yet. Next came the placenta and I wasn’t ready to have more contractions for it to be delivered, I wanted to have some ‘rest time’ lol, but it didn’t quite happen, after some 20 minutes I had another big contraction – though less than the actual final delivery moment – and the placenta came out also with quite a force.

 

The next thing was to step out of the pool, which I didn’t want to do, but it was something I HAD to do since I was already at a very weak state and staying there was only prolonging getting back to the regular pressure of the outside and getting some actual rest. While the midwives and my partner were helping me to get out of the pool, Minerva was carried by my mother, a very happy grandmother that got to carry her first while still connected with the placenta that was kept in a crystal container next to her, that was definitely something new to her for sure as well.

 

As I went out of the pool, I felt the weight of gravity, I felt like the air wasn’t enough for me, I felt pain just everywhere and as I was walking next door to the room where we would be sleeping, I was ‘gone’ for a second. This was very creepy for me as well because that moment where I essentially ‘fainted’ seemed like an eternity for me. I was awaken by Minerva with the words ‘Marlen, wake up, you are here and now’  with a very direct voice and as I opened my eyes and saw her face, it’s as if I had been born myself again, like having that fraction of a second recap of what had just happened ‘Oh god, I just gave birth, Minerva – our daughter – is here, I made it, we made it’ and then after a few steps, same fainting happened and was brought back instantly again with their ‘magic’ lol – and I was awaken.

 

This is significant, this is something that happens to women where there’s like a really big shock after birth, and sometimes there’s this unconscious desire to just not wanting to ‘wake up’ to the new reality of having a child, of becoming a mother, of now having to take care of a child. I do see some of that in my case considering how I had interestingly enough placed ‘the birthing process’ as some sort of an end-goal, instead of taking it as the beginning of a new phase in my life that it actually was.  Fortunately, I am alive to tell, lol, it’s not like I was dying, it felt like a rebirth certainly, a new phase of me and my life of which I still had to go through some more ‘mourning’ because, I hadn’t really placed too much attention into ‘what’s next’ after the baby is delivered… yep, that is correct and so the next phase came with the challenges that emerge when one is stuck with the heroic feeling of ‘delivering the baby’ and forgets about actually taking care of oneself mentally and physically for that which starts right after the baby is out.

 

Fortunately enough due to all the labor done, colostrum came out with ease and Minerva started sucking it up right away with all her might and strength which has characterized her from the moment she was in the womb 🙂 We had a very special moment to cut the umbilical cord, a little ceremony to release her from the placenta that had given her all the support she needed to be born alive and well, which I ended up also consuming right after giving birth  in a milkshake as well as taking it in pills throughout the quarantine to take some of those nutrients back into my body – and some other medicine that was made from it as well as the actual dried placenta, which serves as an aid to restore tissue in any kind of injuries in our bodies. Well, I share about this to be aware of all the benefits of using the placenta, instead of perhaps leaving it to the hospital where they most likely sell it on the black market to companies that make some ‘stem cell’ health or beauty products. Own your placenta, women! I learned to be thankful to it in realizing the essential job it has to keep my child alive in the womb.

 

Once the cord was cut – with an obsidian knife by my partner – I was just wanting to rest, and there is nothing like being able to get out of the ‘birthing room’ – as we now call the TV room hehe – take a few steps and be in bed at the comfort of your own home, not having to deal with any other ‘hassle’ of measurements or vaccines or lousy treatments for the mother or the baby, just pure skin to skin contact with myself and with her father. I ended up sleeping afterwards and my partner slept with Minerva on his chest that whole night. That is priceless when it comes to the first hours after the baby comes out of the womb, to have the warmth of her parents as a bed to sleep on, no need for separate beds or incubation.

 

The next day, I was feeling ‘really well’ like surprisingly well – all things considered in terms of all the postpartum aches and bleeding. I sure would get the usual contractions while breastfeeding and bleeding quite a bit as is normal after giving birth, but I felt well, perhaps some of the hormones still having an effect on me at that time that I kind of ‘forgot’ to eat well, I ‘forgot’ to sleep more during the day. We were just ecstatic about the whole odyssey that the birthing process had been, we were just happy to see Minerva alive and well and have her in our arms and I forgot to do those very basic self-care points even if people offered them, I didn’t quite ‘realized’ that I had to be WELL fed and rested to be there for my child, to feed her, to take care of her.

 

Minerva was born at 6:35 pm on Saturday January 18th, and I went to bed at around 11 I think. The next day I didn’t sleep throughout the day, I have had some bad nights of sleep the previous days but I didn’t seem to care, until the second night where I felt the effect of staying up several nights and I felt so weak that I was losing it, like closing my eyes and perceiving I was going to ‘leave’ type of thing, it was scary for myself and my partner who didn’t know what to do in the moment other that telling me to go to sleep while having a baby that craved to eat but still wasn’t having enough of what she was demanding at the moment, so that was a stressful time for the three of us and got to learn the lesson: I have to feed myself well enough, I have to rest well because I am now feeding my daughter and I have to take care of her and so, I have to be well for myself to be there for her as well.

 

I share this because, it may happen that someone overlooks this kind of basic things and one can prevent such ‘overdrive’ by learning from others’ experiences as well.  After that, I made sure I eat more than the usual because I am breastfeeding Minerva, also resting well even if at times it is hard for me to go back to sleep after feeding her at night, since I have ‘programmed’ myself to ‘wake up’ and be fresh like a lettuce quite easily upon opening my eyes, but that means I start my mind and brain’s engine and then it’s hard to fall asleep again, even if I’m tired, so I’m still practicing breathing at night to be able to sleep. I’ve never had any problems to sleep at night, but I definitely have a hard time going back to sleep in the middle of the night, and that’s been a bit of a challenge because, Minerva is actually really calm, she wakes up at night, eats and goes back to sleep, there’s really no hassle with that, but it’s all now on me to be able to go back to sleep in fact and perhaps it has to do with my constant ide of “having stuff to do” which is also a form of anxiety I have to work with and will share more about in time.

 

Well, up to there the birthing process odyssey. I am entirely and eternally grateful for the two midwives that assisted us – Minerva and Maria Luisa – who were some genuine pillars of support throughout the whole process with their strength, courage, bravery, wisdom and essentially coaching me throughout this journey and life changing moment – a rite of passage in fact – which was giving birth to Minerva and me becoming a mother. Omg, yes it took me some days or perhaps a week or so to actually ‘change the chip’ in my head to realize ‘I am a mother now’ lol, but I’m getting better at it 🙂

 

We are also eternally grateful to our family and friends that were in spirit with us in that moment. We decided to only have my parents present in the birthing process, so my sisters and the rest of my relatives waited some days or weeks to visit us to meet Minerva, which we appreciate in them understanding this decision, giving us time before coming to visit, which is also different from how things usually go when having a baby delivered at a hospital and everyone comes at the same time. This was also something different we did to give ourselves a space to recover and get to know Minerva as well since it is quite a new thing to enter that parenting phase right after the birth process, which I will expand on in blogs to come.

 

The current aftermath is that I recovered quite well and I’d dare to say, surprisingly fast. This is from my experience and doing some constructive comparison to my sisters for example with c sections, I was back on line so to speak with ease. I sure was drained for a week or so to catch up on some sleep and eating more than well too. But I then was fine, had no complications thankfully, so I’m grateful to my body and the organs, tissue and bones that were involved in this process, well, the whole of my body actually. I’m currently quite fine and almost the same as before the pregnancy, which is awesome and another proof of how natural processes take in perhaps most cases less time to recover from.

 

I may also add I was glad I got to do exercise and get a better physical condition during the pregnancy because! It was definitely like a marathon that I experienced and I’m not sure I would have been able to deliver this way without building some physical condition to withstand the amount of effort I had to put in this whole ordeal. However again, I’ve heard of stories of women that don’t really do any physical training and get to deliver with ease, so nothing is set in stone, as I was saying, it all depends on our bodies and getting to know ours is a primary thing to do in any case.

 

Thank you for reading if you got up to here. I wanted to share this as close to the reality as possible to perhaps assist other women to realize that labor, the birthing process can be lengthy, yes, and that there’s no reason to be alarmed and be rushed into hospital if it’s been one or two days of ongoing contractions and nothing happens… it actually takes patience and perseverance to get it done in a natural way without any artificial ‘accelerators’ like artificial oxytocin that’s given at hospitals, which make contractions feel a lot more painful and accelerates the whole process because there it is about hospital time and doctor’s time. In my case, I’m almost certain no hospital or doctor would have had the patience I needed to give labor in a natural way, I probably would have been induced at the first signs of having contractions and most likely citing al kinds of risks (not real in fact) about losing amniotic fluid, having the umbilical cord around the neck (which she had as well) or being too big to fit and probably doing an episiotomy – when in reality I was able to deliver without any tearing 🙂

 

Thus it is also relevant to realize how a lot of the “complications” that may be commonly cited by doctors “at the last minute” while being at the hospital about to deliver – a very, very vulnerable moment for the woman – might just be the usual tricks and ways to get you to agree to “speed up” the process or “just get over with the pain” so as to consent to get a C-section instead. Again, this is in cases when the woman is fit and healthy to have a natural birth and had planned or desired to have a vaginal delivery, which takes time, patience and perhaps not many have it when it comes to, say, 4 days in passive and active labor like I did.

 

Here I also want to say that it is OK if one wants to instead go to the hospital if one doesn’t feel like doing it ‘al natural’ anymore, or if something goes off in the body or if one is seriously too exhausted to make it. It is OK as well to have moments of rest and just keep at it and trust that things will be alright with proper monitoring of the situation of course – like keeping track of baby’s vital signs etc. I have learned how for some women it can go as fast as a couple of hours of labor and having an easy delivery s well, each body is unique and so different and this is then my story with most of the variables that influenced the outcome, so it is definitely not something to measure anyone’s birthing process against.

 

This is a tale to perhaps encourage women considering natural births or perhaps prevent having to be ‘rushed to get a C-section’ for those that do want to have a natural birth or just have unnecessary procedures done onto themselves. Know that there are ways, even with the umbilical cord on the neck or any other seemingly inevitable obstacle. So, consider questioning your practitioner or midwife about any possible obstacles or complications and how they handle them, so that you are on top of things and are aware of every decision made in your birthing process. It’s your body and your child’s wellbeing, so, be aware and use your ability to decide How you want to give birth wisely.

 

I can lastly say that I am humbled by the whole experience. I was able to see how much I have yet to really BE my body, which is something I want to continue focusing on developing. And at the same time, I am humbly proud of myself for this, I turned one of my ‘greatest fears’ into a successful self-empowerment story, and may I say: this is just the beginning 🙂

 

646. Choosing How To Give Birth

It’s been over a month since I gave birth so, it’s time to share about the actual big decision we made when it comes to giving birth to Minerva, our daughter.  I’d like to first of all clarify that what I’m about to share is a very personal process and decision that doesn’t imply ‘is the right or correct way’ to do things or ‘how it should be.’ I respect each woman’s and couple’s choice of how they give birth, and as such I’ll share the story of how we got to choose ours, which we were really glad and satisfied to do after all.

 

From the 5th month or so we started looking at ‘where to give birth’ and few names of hospitals came up, I went to visit one and even if it was an entire hospital just for giving birth, something didn’t quite sit right with me. I had initially considered that I would be having possibly the usual C-section like most of the women in my family and that would be it. However, as I was in the spot looking at the rooms and the list of instruments and stuff that’s used for the ‘birthing package,’ I got calmly freaked out, I couldn’t really fathom myself being at a hospital giving birth, though I thought I had to ‘suck it up’ because ‘there was no other way’ apparently.

 

Well, I kept having such hospital in mind, trying not to think too much about it in the subsequent weeks, but then a few things came to my awareness as I started investigating more about the birthing process that led me to become aware of alternative ways to give birth and by this I mean both in and out of hospitals, beginning with the idea of having a natural birth, which I had sincerely not considered before seriously enough because of the idea of how painful it would be.

 

One day my cousin – who is now pregnant by the way, lol – told me about the documentary ‘The business of being born’ and that opened up my eyes to what actually goes on with doctors and hospitals in terms of how they essentially benefit from sending a perfectly healthy woman to get a C-section by making up all kinds of stories that lead the mothers-to-be into a path of apparent ‘no other way around other than C-section’ or ‘no-other-way-around but to get an episiotomy’ and a bunch of other so called ‘problems’ that are in fact rare in nature that could make a birthing process difficult.

 

Around that same time, we had a chat with my friend who is a neonatal care specialist and she made us aware of all the things we would have to be aware of that are routinely done to newborns in hospitals… there were quite a few things that we got to understand could disrupt the bonding and feeding initial processes that are so relevant to do in the moment right after the baby is born, along with other shots and intervention that I had seen in the hospital’s TVs when my nephews and niece were born, which by the way horrified me and I couldn’t understand how everyone would be so joyful at seeing the newborn being treated like a piece of meat about to be sold while I was shocked and almost cried of seeing how they were being handled by the doctors. I didn’t want this for me nor for our child at all, but this is ‘how things are’ apparently.

 

I also got to chat to my friend Anna and she expressed how she would have liked to have a woman accompanying her birthing process – a doula to be precise- and that got me pondering how is it that I ‘really’ wanted to give birth, because I was just superficially looking at that significant point as if it wasn’t relevant enough, but it all was due to me not being informed about ‘how things go’ in fact at a hospital and the potential of having either natural or C-section there, and the relevance it has for both the mother and the baby. All of this peaked my curiosity and interest to actually try and do things differently than how I had observed people around me would do with their pregnancies and birth processes.

 

So, I avidly started investigating the benefits, the pros and cons of C-sections, natural birth at hospital, the procedures etc. I still couldn’t fathom me going through this at such a place, but I was ‘settling’ for it because I thought there was no other way in hospitals where I live.

 

Then, I stumbled upon the ‘humanized birth’ concept and some doctors trying to sell that for many thousands… well, talking to them didn’t sound like they were totally ‘humanizing’ after all when including all kinds of expenses for anesthesia even if I didn’t end up requiring it. Then I got to watch the birthing process of a yoga teacher on YouTube which really peaked my interest in finding a way to do something similar. I had been following her yoga lessons throughout pregnancy so that’s how I got to see that she gave birth at a birth center and voilà, that seemed like an awesome thing to do: giving birth in a tub, in water. Hmm that looked so nice and peaceful, away from this spooky hospital place. I thought how that would be so awesome and I did further research on it, but I only found some costly services from Mexico City, which seemed like a lot and improbable due to the preparation required for it, and I was already getting to the 7th month by the time.

 

Well to short-cut the story after watching a lot of information on water births, investigating ‘who’ could do it and not finding anything, I went to my first actual prenatal yoga birth class and there I met a woman that, in our 10 minute conversation, told me about her plan to have a home birth with midwives and in water! I was like ‘what? you can actually do that here?’ and so I finally got her midwife’s contact and that changed the course of the birth story and something I am entirely grateful for, perhaps I just hadn’t done a proper search on Facebook for it, lol, but I found the right people at the right time.

 

Oh, I had also known of another friend from my qi gong class that was choosing to give birth at home with midwives, it sounded too ‘hippie’ to me lol, of course this is a  prejudice I’d then clear up with proper information on my side, she was 3 months more advanced than me in her pregnancy, so I got to know about her – also – lengthy birthing process and it turned out it was the same midwife that assisted her 🙂  so that created more confidence in our choice. I also remembered Joana’s birth at home and I remembered her having a tub, so I kept considering that there should be a way to do that here, and perseverance played a role because I got to find the right people to accompany me and actually do the whole process that we both had by then considered would be the best way to give birth to our child.

 

Talking to the midwife -whose name is also by coincidence Minerva -was refreshing in the sense that she explained to us the way she does things and that’s exactly what we wanted,  we were in the same ‘wavelength’ so to speak and at the time we still were going with the regular doctor who would indicate to us – as I have shared in previous blogs – how everything was going just fine and without any complications, which of course then was like a ‘green light’ to pursue doing things in a natural way.

 

Here it is relevant to say that this whole process of ditching the hospital idea and going for the home birth plan is entirely a personal – and as a couple – decision that doesn’t mean ‘it’s the best way’ for everyone. I’ve met women who didn’t feel at all at ease with the idea of having a child at home and went to the hospital because that’s where they would feel most at ease and safe, some others just can’t have natural births due to medical reasons or any other physical complication, even though I’ve also now gotten to know more about the medical tricks used to entice women to get C-sections and so forth, but that’s another story and something each women would have the responsibility to investigate to not be, essentially, tricked and fooled into believing they can’t give birth in a natural way, The reason for this? Easy: money.

 

To me, choosing to give birth this way was like a 180 degree turn again, where I went from being very vague about a birth plan and sort of brushing off the idea of having to go to a hospital to give birth and postponing looking at those – gory to me – details because I actually didn’t want to, and circumstances led me to find other ways with which I was definitely more comfortable with. And this to me was also a revelation, because… the idea of giving birth without any ‘painkiller’ is probably something I feared the most in my life, the sole idea of giving birth was one of the reasons why I didn’t want to have children to begin with. However with sufficient amount of YouTube testimonies on natural birth, several documentaries about midwives, births at home, births in water, learning about the multiple – horror – stories of obstetric violence at hospitals and women’s accounts of their terrible experience at hospitals was enough for me to realize that this would be the best way for us, and that we’d have to work a bit hard on it, since it wasn’t going to be easy, so I set myself up to have this ‘mountain-hiking’ like experience that giving birth resembles, according to Minerva, our midwife.

 

The most interesting part of this is how ‘uncommon’ and ‘dangerous’ and therefore feared this way of giving birth is for a lot of people.  When we talked to my mother about our home birth decision and asking her if we could use their home – specifically their TV lounge – to be the space for our choice of birthing process, man, it was very difficult, she reacted a LOT and it’s all because of fears and misinformation that we’ve gotten throughout the past decades about a birth process being some sort of ‘illness’ or ‘complication’ that needs a whole medical team to do it… this is of course in the majority of cases false, however, as with everything, we have been brainwashed to think the other way around and have forgotten the thousands of years that women have given birth without the ‘clinically sanitized’ hospitals, when in fact there’s a lot of evidence on how counterproductive this can be for both mothers and children – yep perhaps not in everyone’s case, but there’s still a lot to fine tune when it comes to giving proper aid and support to a birthing mother in hospitals to prevent a lot of the mistreatment that causes emotional stress and many times even influences the infamous postpartum depression.

 

We kept this plan under the radar for the most part precisely because of considering how most people would be fearing the worst by us doing it this way and possibly talking us out of this ‘crazy’ idea, so, it was our first choice anyways, but always also kept a plan B in case anything could possibly go wrong, and that’s also very relevant because there were certain conditions that ‘in the last minute’ could in fact be sufficient reasons to go to a hospital and get a C-section. I am entirely grateful that wasn’t my case, but I will detail as well in the following blog how the whole birthing process actually took place.

 

So with this all, the learning point is to not settle with what the majority of people do around you even if it doesn’t really ‘sit right’ within you. Once I asked my mother about how I’d like to have some ‘freedom’ in the positions to give birth. and this was way before our choice of home-birthing – and she was like ‘no way, you are doing to be in one of those beds where you put your legs up and that’s how you deliver a baby… that in itself already sounded like an unnatural ‘must do’ where my palms would start to sweat just by the thought of seeing myself in that situation with all the white bright lights and screaming my lungs out without being able to move… well that was enough motivation for me to look at doing things differently.

 

Secondly, to not back down with making this kind of choice even if multiple ‘worst case scenarios’ are presented to oneself by different people in an attempt to ‘do the safe thing’ according to their views, perspectives and experiences. It’s also understandable how a lot of people do this out of actually wanting the best for oneself, but, it’s also important to consider that without having proper information or education on the subject, any idea that goes out of the ‘norm’ may simply be feared because of not being the most common thing to do or having misinformation about it. In this, we learned to understand people’s fears and concerns, but we also take them from ‘where they come from’ so as to then investigate their claims and truly make sure that those fears are addressed with proper directions of ‘what one would do IF’ this or that complication takes place.

 

Thirdly, realizing that the thing one feeds throughout one’s life as ‘the thing I feared the most’ is probably something that one needs to actually do to then come through on the other side and say ‘hey, I made it! I’m alive’ and yes, this by no means down-sizes the actual rough process this was, but I also see how my disposition to stop just fearing and instead looking into a better way  – to me- to give birth, making an informed decision and choice and preparing myself for it – not having anyone telling me ‘what’ to do – empowered me to own my decision, in a way, knowing that yes, this will probably be hard but hey it’s my absolute choice and decision, and that actually helped me to get rid of fears of ‘not being able to do it’ and instead, entirely trust the process and trust my capacity to do it, along with the indispensable help of professionals to do so of course.

 

As a result of this, I actually felt a lot better in the last weeks and days leading to the birthing time, because I knew I wasn’t going to a hospital, I wasn’t going to go through surgery, I wouldn’t have to worry about extra expenses and charges that these places usually do – and doctors – and instead pay a round fee for it which included the whole attention and support needed throughout the whole birth labor process. This also was a settling fact, because I’ve heard also the stories of how hospitals kind of take advantage of couples being in this ecstatic moment of giving birth to their child and any ‘extra’ expenses are just unquestioned because ‘well at least my child is here and safe’ and bam, there goes some 25% or more of the cost on top of the initial expected fees… yes, yikes, there’s a LOT that needs to be changed in the medical realm and specifically in birthing processes, but that’s just my perspective from what I’ve researched so far.

 

All I can say for any woman expecting a child or looking for alternative ways to give birth or just having a regular plan at the hospital is to get informed, at least on the basics of how you will be ‘handled’ and how your baby will also be handled from the moment they come out of the womb – regardless of the way you deliver – so that you are the most aware possible of how things will go. I share this because of watching many women having sour experiences after birth because of not informing themselves or being tricked ‘in the last moment’ to do something they didn’t want to initially but believing there are ‘no other ways’ so, going for it without a question. In this I might sound as if I am encouraging people to do it the natural way, to have a home birth or with midwives, and that’s how i would do it if I had to do it all over again – not that I plan to either, lol – but I am simply suggesting to own your choice and decision so that whatever the outcome is, one can be settled with it, embracing the outcomes and consequences of such choice. I guess this applies to everything really, but this is just my experience with choosing a way to give birth 🙂  

642. Pessimism and Embracing The Blank Page

 

As I briefly mentioned in my previous blog, pessimism has been one of the very ‘ingrained’ patterns in me that I’ve become more aware of lately since finding out I was pregnant. I have to say that I didn’t see myself as a ‘pessimist’ per se, but I was able to identify this way of being in me based on the feedback that I got from my partner as a way to describe my focus on ‘the worst’ of the early pregnancy experience and the fears and limitations that I would bring up in terms of how things ‘would be’ for the future and so forth.

This all seemed ‘normal’ to me and that’s where this point begins, because! I’ve seen firsthand how the same event can be approached from a very different perspective, one that sees the inconvenience of certain symptoms as part of creating something that will be a life-change in our lives. One that can see the ‘adding’ of responsibility as a catalyst for change and personal growth, one that can bring fun times even with the stuff I could define as ‘a hassle’ or ‘troublesome’ – yep, this rather constructive perspective is how my partner approached the whole thing and I’ve been certainly learning more from him and learning to see living potential in it all, instead of only focusing on all that I could define as ‘the bad’ which, again, is not the best of me that I want to cultivate, it is the worst of me that interestingly enough has resurfaced again, because! Yes, this is a ‘life changer’ situation and one that I ‘feared’ a lot apparently, so I faced the consequence of cultivating all of those fears for many, many years. But I’m also learning to let go of them as I go facing this pessimism in different ways and in some of the most ‘sneaky’ forms.

This ‘pessimist’ core programming certainly started in childhood and yes, due to other circumstances unrelated to my pregnancy, we’ve been opening this up with my parents considering that these same fearful patterns have been spilling out into the children of the family and causing some consequences. So, confronting the situation is serving as a preparation ground for both of us to get to understand how I got to be quite limited by all kinds of fears that were imprinted from a very young age by my parents and within that, us all getting to see how that is affecting the newest members of the family, consequently to understand how these patterns came to exist in us and how they are still having ‘a hold’ on us.

Here I perhaps point out something that is by now a ‘well learned lesson’ when it comes to parents and getting to understand and forgive the ways in which they brought us up, because they most likely also didn’t know ‘any better’ and they did what they could in what they perceived as a way to care and love their children.  In this, there are no ‘hurt feelings’ for how I was raised, I instead enjoy understanding the familial patterns to see where and how I came to be ‘who I am’ and within that understanding, take a more active role in being responsible to change those very things that I’ve seen have limited me – and are Still showing up as limiting in my experience currently when facing the point of becoming a mother, becoming parents.  

I have come to make sense of how this ‘pessimism’ is therefore rooted in all kinds of fears that led me to ‘automatically’ think of the worst case scenarios, ‘all the worst that could happen,’ and it’s been quite astounding to see to what extent I do this on an automatic and “natural” way – meaning, I wouldn’t necessarily see it as something I had to flag-point and become aware of, because I deemed it as ‘care’ or ‘creating a sense of security’ – which by cross-referencing it with my partner, are more like my own conditioning – meaning, my past being ‘brought forward’ to the present and even ‘into the future’ … and that’s exactly what we don’t have to do, but instead approaching every moment, every day as a blank page where we decide how to live and how to face situations or ‘challenges,’ and to no longer kind of predispose myself to ‘facing all the worst’ because, I’ve seen how prominent that exists as a ‘normal thinking’ in my mind, and it doesn’t have to be that way, I have to actually stop seeing it as ‘normal thinking’ when seeing that I’m actually considering ‘all the things that could go wrong.’

It all really starts at that level of accepting and allowing those seemingly ‘small thoughts’ to creep up, feed them – which means go into them, thinking about them – to spiral them out into personality patterns like ‘the fearful mother’ and! Well, I would not want to become that, but I also see that I may face these fears in reality in order to become aware of what exists within me, so that I can become aware of them and change them. How else would I become aware of them otherwise?

I really even once thought that it was a cultural thing to constantly be gasping and fearing for a child’s health and wellbeing… well, nope! It’s more like a family thing that I truly need to become aware of Within myself, instead of kind of only going criticizing it and judging it on ‘the outside’ which in all cases, indicates that there are points I am not yet understanding and so, not forgiving that exist within me as well. This means that as long as I am reacting to it, then, there is less of a possibility for me to actually acknowledge, understand and embrace it in order to see where and how that exists within me, so that I can direct myself in a more flexible, understanding and unconditional way, one that considers the moment, and the present as that blank page and stop ‘re-loading’ all of my memories and fears and past conditioning as a child in my own family.

I noticed this pattern even more so recently where I was looking at a future situation of how people in my environment and their character could ‘affect’ the child and within this looking at it already from a starting point of fear: fear of the child going through the ‘imprinting’ of fears and anxiety that I went through as a child based on interacting with these individuals. And I allowed that to go as far as seeing how we would have to possibly disengage from being around these people to attempt to ‘protect’ our child from that kind of ‘character flaws.’ So here again, realizing I’m still holding a judgment and a reaction, which certainly I allowed myself to be affected by, which in turn I feared could ‘happen to our child’ and then going into ‘wanting to protect the child.’

I realize that as long as I am judging, criticizing, fearing certain attitudes and types of ‘character,’ then I am not yet coming to see ‘who am I’ towards those characteristics and emotions in others so that I can work on stopping my own reactions, realizing that others’ reaction do still create an effect on me – and therefore the child inside – and that it is precisely there where I need to act and apply myself to simply stop reacting and understanding why I get to react to them, so that I can decide in self-awareness to change how I respond in those moments.

It’s very easy to deviate from the point of self-responsibility when attempting to blame others for their character flaws, their patterns, their reactions and thinking that ‘they have to change’ or ‘we just have to avoid them altogether’ instead of realizing how it is only myself that can change how I face those situations and that that will in a huge way determine and be an example of how our child can face, confront and walk through similar situations with people. So it’s not about wanting to ‘prevent’ problems –  because we create ‘the problem’ when reacting to others in the first place – but it’s about being an example of how to best face the situation with stability, understanding and focusing on solutions, not giving space to ‘react back’ to anyone, but to stick to what is practical and reasonable to do. Now this is where the real self-change is at.

This time around again it took a good conversation while walking with my partner to explain to him what I was seeing with this whole thing that I just explained above and get back to Earth about it. I saw how I wasn’t really going to get anywhere with the ‘getting away from’ or ‘avoidance’ plan, I was mostly also ‘trapping’ people in their ‘usual selves’ and assuming how they would behave and be in a hypothetical future situation, which is one of the ways in which we keep ourselves ‘trapped’ and limited in the same personalities, the same judgments of how we believe ‘we are and will be’ and don’t give each other that space and opportunity to outgrow our old selves. 

I also was approaching the situation from already assuming and determining how our child would interpret certain attitudes, voice tonalities, expressions as if he or she was going to already judge it as something bad, negative, etc. when in fact, there is no reaction that is pre-recorded there. It is mostly all learned from the environment and that’s where our role comes in. The example comes from ourselves as parents to stop reacting to others’ expressions in a positive or negative way, but instead keep an equanimity and discernment about things which will in turn demonstrate to the child that one doesn’t ‘have to’ go into fear, worry, anxiety or anything like that if someone else is demonstrating such traits in themselves. This is where the change of character happens, with ourselves as the examples – the rest is then learned from observation and imitation.

Within all of this, I also kept on  ‘scheming’ how to ‘go about’ with certain people or situations in life, where I would most likely end up trying to seclude our child from anything that I would be judging as bad, wrong, negative, destructive. Of course, here I am not talking about some kind of ‘extreme’ unsafe or detrimental environment, I am simply looking at character flaws, which yes, we all do have as well so in doing that, I was ignoring my starting point – which was fear – and not taking these judgments, expectations and future projections back to self, to see what we are now more equipped and have tools to go about facing the reality of the world and the people in it ‘as is,’ without wanting to sugar coat it for our child to ‘be safe from any bad influence’ – but, who determines what the bad, negative, wrong stuff is? I do, through reacting to it.

So, it’s a great point for me to look at and stop reacting in FEAR of ‘what it will do’ to a new being. I also discussed that with my partner and I came to see that ‘the other way around’ is the way to go, to expose the child to various kinds and types of people so that there can be a discernment formed over time about people and getting used to getting along and getting to understand – eventually – why some people are a certain way and make their own decision in how they go about with them.

All of these points have opened up as well in seeing how my family and I are used to handling kids. I may say I am working on ‘debugging’ myself from these thoughts, but in general there’s that sense of having to ‘be careful’ all the time, and having to ‘protect them from anything that could harm them,’ and trying to ‘prevent them from getting sick’ all the time and all sorts of paranoia that I notice has started to ‘kick in’ as the ‘mother/parent’ construct and I definitely can work on stopping it on its tracks at this stage.

Once that I ‘spelled out’ the point – which means talking about it – things changed – but! New points opened up like the ones I have explained here in relation to future projecting how ‘things could be’ – for the worst – and forgetting about rather focusing on ‘what’s here’ and supporting myself to be the best that I can in my day to day, rather than being up in my head fearing and scheming ‘the worst case scenarios,’ wherein I’m not seeing how THAT is actually causing fear and stress within me, which is far more directly affecting the being inside me than any other ‘person’ out there.

Now that’s more of an eye opening perspective that I need to have a clear awareness on, that’s my real responsibility Right Now. Whatever else happens and opens up in the future, as my partner said, then we will deal with it ‘then’ and look at solutions, but no need to start kind of taking the artillery out already and start seeing threats and problems everywhere where there are none for now. So I decide to trust myself in being able to face whatever may come our way with a new perspective.

Something else that assisted me to look at it from a different perspective, is to remind myself how many times whatever I may perceive as something that I could define as a limiting change or something that I fear having to do – yes, stepping out of my comfort zone – are usually opportunities to grow, to challenge, to develop ourselves further and approaching it from this perspective then takes the ‘mind away’ from merely focusing on ‘the worst’ and spending time on scheming only ‘in the mind’ what I would do in such ‘worst’ that is not HERE at all. It is a waste of time and as much as it might be just ‘ok’ to consider certain potentials, I do have to make sure I am not creating a predisposition to ‘all the worst that could be’ and feed that in my mind as if that is a sign of ‘care’ or creating some kind of ‘security’ for our child, because in the end the starting point and origin is still just: Fear.

I had also been worrying about how to go about these let’s say ‘out of the ordinary’ ways – in comparison to how things are ‘usually done’ here – which we are planning to apply with our child, which may stand in direct contrast with, for example, how other people in our family do things and how they approach their own children, etc. So in this, I also realized that there was that same fear of being judged or going through what I ‘went through’ when I started doing some radical changes in my life over a decade ago and I basically had to step-away from my family for some time, because I just could not really ‘get along’ with them.

What I didn’t consider back then is how I was reacting and judging them all the way, that’s what caused me to find it – apparently – ‘impossible’ to be around them, and this also came from a secret desire for them to do things ‘my way’ or ‘do the same process I was walking’ and in general just causing more and more conflict until yes, it was for the best that I simply stopped seeing them as often until I sorted out my own conflict projected towards them and learned how to Understand them and so be able to be around, know our ‘boundaries’ so to speak and still be willing to share and open myself up whenever asked or needed.

So upon realizing this, I have seen how this is one of those situations where I am projecting already ‘My own experience’ onto our child and this is quite the red alert as well, because this would be caused by nothing more and nothing else than my own prejudices, judgments, ‘loaded memories’ that would in turn surely would be super limiting and causing a new being to be conditioned by ‘MY’ experience around certain people. This means: the work that needs to be done is entirely WITHIN MYSELF, instead of starting to project onto others how I believe ‘things will be’ for our child based on my own past, which I now have to prove I can truly let go of – and embrace the blank page that’s growing within : )

Within this, then it was also supportive to have another one of those lengthy talks with my partner about ‘who I was’ in my family and how I came to single-myself-out from it and how I remained in judgment towards them as if that was ‘the only way to be.’ But, I realize that if I apply my own mindset towards the child, the actual consequence would be caused by myself, not by ‘others’ and that I would then be recreating the same problems and patterns I lived through for most of my life.

So, within all of this, everything of course points out to myself, to learn to be more unconditioned, to learn to see every new day as it unfolds as a blank page that we are freshly writing on and that each blank page does represent that opportunity to re-wire myself, to change the old programming of fears, worries, what ifs, pessimist attitudes and bleak future projections and instead, welcome the potential of the new phase that’s opening up. This means stopping feeding any idea of wanting to ‘save’ or ‘secure’ the child from certain things because, yep! That can lead to paranoia of not wanting the child to see the light of day so to speak, which is of course parental abuse as well. This is an exaggeration of course, but I’m playing it out this way so that I get to remind myself ‘what I’m doing’ every time that I go into my mind and start scheming things from a starting point of wanting to ‘prevent’ certain things and realizing it comes from a point of fear that I have to simply let go of.

How can this be practically done? By being able to self-forgive it out loud in the moment as it happens so that I can then lead myself back to realizing how this is not about ‘the child’ or ‘others’ but myself bringing up all of these ‘loose cannons’ as fears that I had not become aware of yet, because yes, this is certainly a new phase in my life and within that, there comes a whole new and uncharted territory that I can simply work with and face as I go with this kind of approach towards these seemingly ‘simple moments’ where I go into my mind and start fearing or future projecting some ‘worst case scenarios.’ That’s entirely possible and in my hands to do, and whenever I may ‘still’ see some of these fears as ‘very real,’ then that’s when I can talk them out, communicate them and cross-reference them with my partner and any other person that I trust their judgment on and create solutions – or simply get to understand a situation to then decide how to best act and approach it.

It may sound as if this point is quite ‘big’ within me, and it probably isn’t, lol. But I do like to in a way create awareness on it as if it was already a ‘big deal’ because it ‘could’ escalate if I don’t see it through this magnifying glass and understand what I am accepting and allowing whenever going into fears, judgments, prejudices, future projecting the worst and so on. Otherwise, I would go ‘brushing it off’ and I have seen the kind of ‘accumulation effect’ that we can create in our minds, where we then end up getting into a point or experience where things seem too big, too heavy, too difficult to change, because we allowed all those small moments of ‘feeding the patterns’ to go unnoticed – and therefore not taking responsibility for them – and that’s where I then go compromising my own standing and self-awareness.

So, all in all it has been cool to open up these points and even get to discuss them with my parents to understand ‘where’ they got those fears from, how they affected their lives with them and yes also get to understand that, to them, some may be quite difficult to change, but that’s where I also then have to see the opportunity that I currently have in my hands to ‘change the tide’ when it comes to those family patterns that have been already passed on to the younger kids in the family. It’s not like ‘they are screwed’ now, because there’s always the opportunity to take self-responsibility and later on as they grow, they also can decide to change – or not.

My point remains in reminding myself that the child to come is a blank page as well and that I have to be of utmost care to not approach that opportunity to raise another being with fears of ‘what runs in the family’ or ‘what has happened in the past’ or ‘what I went through as a child,’ because THEN I would most likely be conditioning all of that and imprinting that through my every move, voice tonality and interaction with the child.  I often criticize – judge – parents that see their children as ‘the problem,’ and still gets on my nerves to see how it seems impossible to look ‘back at themselves’ – as parents – to see that their child came into this world as a blank page – sure some genetics and so on – but most of who they turn out to be is determined by the environment – a.k.a. the parents, mostly.

I consider I am at a timely stage where I can create a big point of awareness within me of stopping projecting my own fears and what I defined as ‘bad/negative experiences’ onto a new being, and rather focusing on understanding my experience – which to me comes through nicely when communicating about it with my partner which always leads me to a resolution, a point of realizing where and how I need to be the change, while also knowing yep! Can’t create a ‘perfectly clear ground’ for another being and mostly being ok with the fact that I’ll face things as we go and that it is OK as well to make mistakes, learn through consequences, etc. Otherwise I’d go into control-freakism aaaand nope! We don’t need that either.

So that’s it, hope that this may be supportive for any of you, not only parents or parents to be, but anyone facing some of ‘the worst’ that exists in our minds in a seemingly ‘normal’ way. I would not have been able to bring myself through clarity without all the Desteni tools of self support and the invaluable self-supportive material available at Eqafe.com, specifically the Parenting series and everything else that you may find there as a way to understand our minds and so understand the ways that we can change that which we see no longer supports a new way of being and living, for the best, that is, embracing the blank page every day.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

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