Categories: Birth StoriesBookGuest PostMotherhoodPregnancyTraditions

Mother-texts

For today’s “guest post” I’d like to share our book’s Foreword. It was written by Lynn Clark Callister, a lovely BYU nursing professor we had the privilege of meeting the summer of 2010 in the early stages of our book journey. She is a beautiful soul and was very supportive and encouraging of our project. We are deeply grateful to her for her support. -Lani

Foreword, The Gift of Giving Life

By Lynn Clark Callister, PhD, RN, FAAN

It has now been forty-six years since I joyously gave birth to my first daughter, Carolyn, four days after Christmas. What a rich physical, emotional, and spiritual experience that was! That day and the subsequent births of my other four children are indelibly etched in my mind and heart. I lived through my first pregnancy in two distinctly different worlds: that of a nurse caring for critically ill patients in a highly technological medical center, and the growing world within me that I could visualize in my mind’s eye. My own mother had died of breast cancer when I was seven years old, and how I longed to have her describe her feelings about my birth. How I yearned to listen to other women share their feelings about giving birth. Where were the mother-texts? Where were the voices of childbearing women?

Because of this paucity of mother-texts, I began my professional life-work of collecting birth narratives from culturally diverse women, from the highlands of Guatemala to birth houses in Russia, from women espousing Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religious traditions and those espousing no particular faith. It has been my experience that women are eager to share their perspectives and demonstrate a desire to articulate their birth experiences, to rehearse the details, to define its meaning.

Childbirth has profound emotional, cultural, and spiritual dimensions beyond being an intense physical experience. Women make meaning of giving birth. Meaning is the subjective significance of a pivotal life event such as childbirth. Women construct their own realities as they are given the opportunity to share their understanding of the spiritual dimensions of their lives which gives purpose and meaning to life experiences. As women make meaning out of giving birth, they emerge with a sense of spiritual growth, a new outlook on life, new priorities, enhanced appreciation of life, a sense of coherence with life, and a sense of understanding of themselves.

I have learned, during over two decades of listening to women’s birth stories, that childbirth is an ideal context in which to enrich spirituality. From my research on spirituality in childbearing women, themes generated include childbirth as a time to grow closer to God, the use of religious beliefs and rituals as powerful coping mechanisms, childbirth as a time to make religiosity more meaningful, the significance of a Higher Power in influencing birth outcomes, and childbirth as a spiritually transforming experience.

I have gained tremendous respect for the strength and wisdom and courage of women who have chosen to bear and rear children. For example, one Orthodox Jewish woman spoke of giving birth as one way to transcend herself, “I finally did something worthwhile in this world. I, everyone, comes here for a purpose, especially the woman. She comes here to continue the generations.” A Muslim woman said about giving birth, “During childbirth the woman is in the hands of God. I felt like a miracle might happen—that there was something holy around me, protecting me, something beyond the ordinary, a feeling, a spirit about being a part of God’s creation of a child.”

The diverse and profound perspectives of childbearing women are detailed in this remarkable book, The Gift of Giving Life. These narratives were collected by a group of amazing young mothers who edited this book. The narratives are alive with the richness and creativity of “meaning making,” shared by childbearing women experiencing one of the most profound experiences of their lives. These mother’s perspectives demonstrate how birth is shaped by deeply held values and cherished dreams. Sue Bender, writing in Everyday Sacred, invites us to know that each step in life’s journey, including bearing a child, is miraculous and that it is the small acts that make our days sacred.

As you read this book and reflect on its contents, you will never view giving birth as you did before. It is my hope that this work will inspire you to collect birth stories, writing about your own births and interviewing your grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and grand-daughters about their births: generations of women over time articulating the meaning of having a child.

More about Dr. Callister: