"For months I would see pregnant women and feel the awful pain again—I would see them, so wide-eyed and innocent, and feel bleak fear drip to my boots in dread of their births to come...."
This is excerpted from Leilah McCracken's full piece entitiled Cruci-section.
I know what she is saying all too well. I havent really gotten to talk about this pity and sadness I have whenEVER I see a pregnant woman, but I do! Just a few weeks ago, while sledding on a dark freezing night with just my 6 year old Mickey, we walked past a house whose curtains were wide open, and saw a very pregnant woman puttering around in her house and I was choked up, I was so sad for her, I wanted to go bust her door down and say crazy things to her! She was so hopeful and innocent...I imagined her to be folding little onesies, finishing up the nursery, and fretting about swollen feet. I imagined all her dreams and plans for her birth and hoped she wouldnt go to the hospital at all. I felt her to be naive and vulnerable, writing some little birth plan in her nicest handwriting, putting things on it like "no I.V." and "no episiotomy" and "I'd like to try laboring in the tub".
I want to see pregnant women as the strong powerful luminous gorgeous glorious life bearing culture sustaining heroes that they are. But for about 7 in 10 of them, birth will involve knives to their stomachs and knives to their vaginas and for about 96% of them, it will involve being surrounded and overwhelmingly saturated with the pathogens and hysteria and vibrations of sickness and despondancy that come with admission to the hospital.
I guess I could look at pregnant women and picture them at home surrounded by peace and candles and warm water and power and integrity and dark dark red/ pure pure pink/sunbeam gold/depths of inner thought black; waves of heat and new life, unparalleled energy and sensuality, strength, power, primal voraciousness and purity...but mostly I just see the near-future loss of this imagery and a whole lot of upside down sexual violations and bodily injuries and psychic destruction.
Garish violating injury bloody red and condescending pale blue and misinformed greyish green and foul stenching straw-yellow and angry crule bile brown and silencing sterile white and authoritarian blizzard turquoise and sharp, sharp disfiguring silver. The hospital colors. Thats what I see.
This is excerpted from Leilah McCracken's full piece entitiled Cruci-section.
I know what she is saying all too well. I havent really gotten to talk about this pity and sadness I have whenEVER I see a pregnant woman, but I do! Just a few weeks ago, while sledding on a dark freezing night with just my 6 year old Mickey, we walked past a house whose curtains were wide open, and saw a very pregnant woman puttering around in her house and I was choked up, I was so sad for her, I wanted to go bust her door down and say crazy things to her! She was so hopeful and innocent...I imagined her to be folding little onesies, finishing up the nursery, and fretting about swollen feet. I imagined all her dreams and plans for her birth and hoped she wouldnt go to the hospital at all. I felt her to be naive and vulnerable, writing some little birth plan in her nicest handwriting, putting things on it like "no I.V." and "no episiotomy" and "I'd like to try laboring in the tub".
I want to see pregnant women as the strong powerful luminous gorgeous glorious life bearing culture sustaining heroes that they are. But for about 7 in 10 of them, birth will involve knives to their stomachs and knives to their vaginas and for about 96% of them, it will involve being surrounded and overwhelmingly saturated with the pathogens and hysteria and vibrations of sickness and despondancy that come with admission to the hospital.
I guess I could look at pregnant women and picture them at home surrounded by peace and candles and warm water and power and integrity and dark dark red/ pure pure pink/sunbeam gold/depths of inner thought black; waves of heat and new life, unparalleled energy and sensuality, strength, power, primal voraciousness and purity...but mostly I just see the near-future loss of this imagery and a whole lot of upside down sexual violations and bodily injuries and psychic destruction.
Garish violating injury bloody red and condescending pale blue and misinformed greyish green and foul stenching straw-yellow and angry crule bile brown and silencing sterile white and authoritarian blizzard turquoise and sharp, sharp disfiguring silver. The hospital colors. Thats what I see.
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