Birthwork From My Lens as a Loss Mom and a Doula
It’s a strange tension, sometimes, the beauty of birth. It is refracted through this lens like a prism into a million colors; the fragments all a whisper of what life might be like if babies didn’t die. If my babies didn’t die. And the grief, like beauty, is also refracted a million different ways. I often have wondered if my grief disqualifies me from this work, if my pain means I could never support someone wholeheartedly. If I can have pure joy for a mother while being reminded of my grief. But recently I’ve come to believe the opposite. What if my grief has made me a better doula? What if the sanctity of birth, the beauty of life, is deeper understood by someone who’s had it ripped from her white knuckles? It is commonly thought and the idea promoted that if something is hard, brings up a traumatic event, or otherwise triggers something inside you, you need to protect yourself from it. I disagree with this school of thought. I throw myself into birth be...