Beth Kruger

What a concept.
I am reading Robbie E. Davis-Floyd’s book, “Birth as an American Rite of Passage”. It is really fascinating. She is a social anthropologist, or at least this book is about social anthropology. Not exactly light reading, and not really one that I would recommend to all pregnant women, but many of the concepts presented here are worth sharing. At the very least it is something that we can think further about.

She mentions in the very beginning of the book, which I will talk further about in this entry “The Pregnancy/Childbirth Rite of Passage”. This is the element which I myself have experienced twice with my two children, as well as the time when I see most of my students in Prenatal and Postnatal Yoga.

It is an engrossing read for the sheer fact that what she talks about here is both universal and totally individual. For example, she talks at length about transformation. The transformation of the woman seems first to occur when she accepts the pregnancy as “real” and then continues within the domains of the personal, public, and medical. She goes on to discuss the domain of Formal Education, and that of your peers. Birth as Transformation is also discussed, as well as the immediate postpartum period, and that time when the baby in several weeks to a couple of months old when you begin to re-integrate into society or when “the haze begins to lift”.

As I mentioned earlier, transformation is both individual as it is happening in its very special and specific way for each individual, but also universal as it happens and is happening to all pregnant and birthing women everywhere.
When you discover you are pregnant, many of us “just know” or “feel” like something new and different is taking place. Almost all women though, wait until pregnancy test confirms that initial feeling, or until the first visit to the doctor’s office has confirmed those suspicions. Then we embark on a wild ride in our birth culture today of testing, screening, talking to other mothers, and this all becomes part of our rite of passage. We wear sexy maternity jeans, or belly hugging dresses, flaunting our rounded shape. This is part of our public transformation. We are viewed differently by others around us. We are no longer simply woman, but we now hold within the mystery of giving life.

To be continued…