2011 - Talk Birth

[1]
Aren’t they cuties?
I think she looks remarkably like my oldest in this picture, but in baby pictures at the same age and to
my eyes in person, she doesn’t look so much like him.
I am enjoying experiencing the symbiosis of the nursing relationship again. I sat nursing her a couple
of days ago and remembered a quote from the book The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich in which she is
talking about male writers from the nineteenth century and their longing for an experience of oneness and
seeking the mystery of an epiphany. She says:
”Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted
to be women nursing babies.”
I am currently reading three different books about spirituality and one of them has this focus on ”oneness”—I
was reading it while nursing her and that quote popped into mind.
1. http://talkbirth.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/img_0581.jpg
Rapturous Acts « Talk Birth (2011-03-21 16:45:29)
[...] Comments « Unity [...]
Rapturous Acts (2011-03-21 16:45)
I had included this quote in my [1]recent update post, but decided it edit that one for length and give this
its own post. From the book, The Blue Jay’s Dance: Growing, bearing, mothering, or fathering, supporting,
and at last letting go…are powerful and mundane creative acts that rapturously suck up whole chunks of
life. –Louise Erdrich
I went to a retreat yesterday and one of my friends said of her own baby that, ”I am his everything.” That
is an excellent description of that mother-baby unity that I touched on in my last post. With Alaina right
now, I am everything she needs. I am her habitat. I am her gauge for the world around her and also for her
own self—I’ve pointed out to the boys before how if she gets startled and her arms go out, she immediately
searches for my eyes, looking for my signal (calmness) that everything is fine and the startle is unnecessary.
She uses me and my responses to her to understand the world (and herself). If she gets fussy when someone
else is holding her, as soon as I take her back, she rides along happily peeking over my shoulder—balance
of her world restored. Her eyes follow me when I am walking around. I feel like I have savored all of my
79