(Above: Argentinian-Spanish artist Ana Alvarez-Errecalde’s self portaits.  She is currently showing her work in Zagreb, part of a festival called “Extravagant bodies, extravagant age”.)

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A few months after Felix was born, I received an email from a Belgian artist, who asked my permission to use some of our birth video footage in a collage film he was making on the divine feminine.  Although I didn’t have any details about his project, I let him know that as long as Felix and I and my family were treated respectfully, that this would be fine.  The artist sent me a copy of the film which you can see here, and I absolutely love it, and I’m totally honoured to be part of it.  Despite my emotional and familial connection to Anglicanism, and my long-standing interest in, and involvement with the Buddhist tradition, my spirituality draws on myriad sources none, I admit, more potent and influential than birth.  Birth is my highest spiritual state and has given me a glimpse into divinity like no other experience.  Heartwulf’s film “Future Feminism” is such a lovely, weird, and haunting exploration of spirituality and gender, and I was shocked, actually, at how accurately the film describes my own feelings about spirit.

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In a culture as repressed and disconnected as ours, honest, primal, and female representations of birth are often feared, vilified, hated, whereas the “normal” birth scene, featuring a woman lying in a hospital bed connected to her life-saving technology via wires and tubes, with her baby several feet away in a glass cot, is somehow more pleasant or acceptable.

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Artist Ana Alvarez-Errecalde, in describing the gorgeous series of photographs she made of herself giving birth,  (you can see a video interview with here here) points out that the sanitized stereotype of childbirth that dominates in our society “imparts from heterosexual masculine fantasies, in which exist the duality of the mother/whore”.

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“Women have given birth [bloodied and primal] for centuries, but what happens is that there aren’t images representing it.  Much of art history has shown these maternal women because it was heterosexual man’s vision: Mothers have to be pure and sacred and clean.”  Alvarez-Errecalde says.

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I noticed a little meme the other day, circulating on Facebook that went something like this:  “if birth isn’t sexual, then it wouldn’t involve a baby coming out of a woman’s sex organs”.  I laughed, because it’s true.  But I also believe (and feel and experience) that birth is bloody and primal and sexual and *also* extremely wholesome and beautiful.  This is my reality.

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I helped to present a workshop on home birth last weekend in which I spoke a little bit about my experience of family birth, and specifically of giving birth in the presence of my older children.  I talked about how I think that witnessing the birth of siblings can help to assuage feelings of sibling rivalry, and can connect families.  But I regretted afterwards not mentioning how strongly I feel that my children’s presence during our birth experiences has, and will have a positive and healthy impact on their future sexuality.  Horus and Treva, in witnessing Felix’s birth, have received a potent message that bodies are powerful, beautiful, and that birth is a joyful event. And that sexuality is not a stark duality, but a force that permeates all of life.  Like most parents, I am deeply concerned by the widespread incidences of sexual abuse, especially inflicted on children, and I am also increasingly of the opinion that pornography can be very damaging.  I am very conscious to create an atmosphere in our home in which bodies and privacy are respected, and I am also open to answer any questions my kids might have on any subject.  Birth, as the culmination of the sexual experience, is anti-porn: powerful, dignified, female, gorgeous.

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It was initially quite upsetting to me to read some of the horrifying comments made online about our birth video, and it saddened me to receive gossip from friends and acquaintances about the ignorant things that people in our immediate community said about me (but not to me) regarding Felix’s birth.  I feel so sorry for these people, who, as Ana Alvarez-Errecalde points out, are simply “exposing their own prejudices” in their disgusted/disgusting reaction.  And it really is none of my business what anyone else thinks about me, but I can’t help but think what a paucity of love these people are expressing about themselves, and how depressing it must be to be so stifled in our human experience on earth.

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In many ways, my experiences of giving birth have really pulled me away from the Judeo-Christian perspective, or rather, birth has brought to my attention just how prevalent the mythology of Eve’s suffering is, in our collective consciousness.  I think it is absolutely brilliant that more images and representations of what birth has *actually* looked like since the beginning of humanity are starting to finally creep into the common imagination of our culture.