One of the moments that woke me up to the fact that so much of what we seek through holistic and alternative health, spirituality and earth practices are literally reclamation of connected practices of our ancestors…was in a conversation with my mother as an adult.
I was visiting her in a nursing home where she was recovering. I was pregnant with my first child, and I said excitedly, “Mami, I’m going to have my baby at HOME, not a hospital!”
She looked at me, with a kind but very flat tone, as though to say, “that’s cute dear” and said,
“Si mija, I had five of my children en el rancho”
And went on to explain that she had had five unassisted home births on the ranch because after her very first child was born stillborn, she had lost confidence in the midwives.
She helped the cows on the land give birth, so felt that she and her husband could do just as well with their own children.
And they did.
After this I started to reflect on many of the fringe, “alternative,” outside of the box practices I am drawn to, like homeschooling, healing outside of the therapeutic model, alternative health, herbalism, nature connection, self-reclamation and so on.
I realized this gravitation was not the colonized presentation of ‘discovering something out there’ but rather a deep longing calling me home.
Calling all of us.
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This is all important context for my own birth, which I’ll share in the next post.
xoxo
S