“Art takes care of people but it doesn’t take care of people the way a mother does. Art also should have the permission to be bad for you. I think mothers should have that permission too, but it’s a different kind of bad for you.” —Sheila Heti

Venue: the Rumpus

“A woman is not expected to go to Burning Man, have an affair with a married man, and leave her well-tended rose bushes for an inflatable mattress on the floor of a dingy apartment. But this is what Sandra Tsing Loh did.”

Venue: Theatrius

After reviewing her show ‘Madwoman in the Volvo’ for Theatrius, I interviewed playwright, performer, and NPR reporter Sandra Tsing Loh. In this live interview for KALX Berkeley 90.7FM, we talk divorce, wildness, and why it is that Berkeley audiences laugh the hardest.

Venue: Arts In Review, KALX 90.7FM, Berkeley

“The new practice of placenta encapsulation has allowed placentophagy to move into semi-medicalized settings where it occupies a liminal space, a melding of biomedical and postmodern health ideals.”

Venue: Pregnancy and Childbirth: History, Medicine, and Anthropology, edited by Costanza Dopfel, Saint Mary’s College.

Maggie Downey (CSW) and I have created a version of Motivational Interviewing that integrates Buddhist concepts of acceptance and non-attachment. We present our workshop on this process to mental health and social work practitioners at social service organizations in the Bay Area, including Homeless Prenatal Program, the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center, and the Bay Area Doula Project.

Here, Lauren MacDonald writes about our workshop at the Bay Area Doula Project.

In addition to my MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, I am a birth doula, certified to support families through birth (and loss) at any stage of pregnancy. I occasionally offer short-term pro-bono counseling to Bay Area families experiencing stillbirth and miscarriage. If this is you, please send me a message. I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Venues: In-Person and Remote Sessions

"As a mother, a birth activist, and a writer, editing birth stories fulfills me. Deeply. Perhaps it’s because no two stories are the same or because they narrate one of the most powerful human experiences. Maybe I like to siphon endorphins off the ecstasy and intensity they describe."

Venue: Birth Without Fear

Birth stories are fascinating from a narrative, psychological, and sociological perspective. I asked members of the Birth Without Fear community to share the things that stopped them from writing their birth stories and the things that helped them. This is what they said.

Venue: Birth Without Fear

“So I wanted to write something about how moms who breastfeed for years are not the devil incarnate. But our baby isn't quite an extended nurser, yet. He's just a seventeen month-old who loves his 'la-las' more than life itself. Also, I just may be the devil incarnate.”

Venue: Mama to Mama online

“Rape isn't exactly something you can have an opinion about. It's not like heavy metal, plastic bags or anchovies. It's not controversial.”

Venue: Mama to Mama Online

“We’ve all heard that ‘all that matters is a healthy baby’. We hear it before we give birth, and we hear it after. We hear it when a mother’s had a cesarean and a subsequent infection, when she has Post-Partum Depression and when she is reeling from trauma. But it’s not true. A healthy baby is not all that matters.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

We’ve started to talk about birth plans. But we leave the post-partum period up to fate, our god, or the will of our mothers-in-law. I’ve got a plan to change that.

Venues: Birth Without Fear Conference, Birth Without Fear Online

“Like our idea of the travail of birth, beliefs about appropriate activity levels after birth are also culturally constructed.” A short review of the May 2012 Dijkstra exhibit at SFMOMA.

Venue: Mama to Mama Online

“Often you only have minutes to meet the patient before almost immediately being in an emotional and stressful situation. You have to get them to trust you and make a connection as soon as possible.” —Christy Anderson, Obstetrics Nurse, O2012

Venue: Mama to Mama Online

“Earlier this fall, a public health campaign in Québec, Canada, ruffled feathers all over… well, all over Québec, Canada.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

How does the children’s classic ‘Frog and Toad’ measure up to the demands of progressive Berkeley parenting?

Venue: Theatrius

“The Anti-Choicers denigrate and pity women who choose not to reproduce, including Norma and her decades-long partner Connie. Am I, in caring for Norma only when she shows her grief at losing her children, doing anything different?”

Venue: Theatrius

“The shame that cloaks women’s bodies in all their reproductive functions was present in my shock and horror at the amount of milk my body was forcing out of me, and how unfeminine(!) it felt.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

“…because low milk production is the number one cause of early weaning in the United States, nearly all of the breastfeeding advice out there is aimed at increasing supply. So you, O Madonna of the Moo, can forget about nursing from both breasts during each feeding, pumping extra milk to store, and waking your baby up to nurse…” I wrote the definitive piece on what to do when your body makes too much milk!

Venue: Birth Without Fear

“I feel that the process of working with textiles is something akin to the process of creating a baby: painstaking in one way and yet so comforting as well; following a pre-determined design but also touching an element of the unknown; and in its cultural coding, entirely feminine.”

Venues: Goddard College Art Gallery; Mama to Mama Online

“But there is so much more to supporting a mother in breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is a personal decision, but the actions, ideas, and social cues of people around the mother are major factors in making that decision. The mother-infant dyad cannot be taken out of its context. Even for the newborn, eating is a family affair.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

“No female ancestor could fight off a saber-toothed tiger while holding a baby to her breast. While only I can decide whether or not I want to breastfeed, my success in breastfeeding requires consideration from other people. When I sit down to nurse Evie, I depend on other people not to insult me, ostracize me, sexualize my actions, or invade my space. You know, to take a turn battling those saber-toothed—not to come running at me shouting caveman obscenities.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

“Even the fabrics are intimate—we cannot hide from their materiality, their softness and texture, their positioning on the floor. This is so striking because although it seems very much alive, it also serves as a reminder of death, or our own mortality.”

Venue: VAV Gallery Catalogue

“The thing I wish someone had told me is that, while my babe would never be hired to star in a diaper commercial; while I couldn’t see straight for the exhaustion; and although his part-time daycare provider had canceled on me four times in a row, like maybe she was trying to tell me something, there are benefits to having a high-needs baby.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

“Much anti-bed-sharing campaigning is not only misguided, but also unethical. It puts ideology before practice, diverting attention away from situational factors that contribute to most bed-sharing deaths, and putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of – who else? – mothers dearest.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

“Some ‘yahoos’ (her word) removed the STOP sign from a busy street corner near our house. I guess they thought it would be funny. Mom survived the accident but the car didn’t. We couldn’t get a new one. Instead of canceling our extracurricular activities, she bought an oversized adult tricycle and ferried us around in it.

Yup.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear

I edited this piece in which the author describes having had a tubal pregnancy that, she believes, migrated into her uterus and resulted in a healthy, full-term baby:

“He looked back at me and almost coldly said these words that still to this day ring in my ears, ‘Diana, you need to stop thinking of this as a baby, this is not a baby nor will it ever be one.’ My heart broke and I began sobbing as the doctor continued to tell me he wanted to hook me up to an IV that would send a cancer drug into my body and as he put it allow the ‘egg’ to leave my body. He acted like it would be quick and painless, no big deal. I knew in my heart I couldn’t do it and told him I needed more time.”

Venue: Birth Without Fear