Northern Exposure Season 5, episode 11 - Childbirth

All This below is true but I hve to put in a foreword after thinking and say it is no small feat to create a human being! I guess you have to expect some pain and trouble to have the gift of creaation like that. You make a human being who grows up and reads and writes and sings and plays instruments and makes a family and makes friends and has a career and moves on into the infinite future! It i a godly gift. All mythic heroes suffer for their miraculous powers.

In later episodes, Shelly gets to meet her daughter at different ages and I was taken back to the days of my daughter at different ages and remembered the greatest adventure of my life which was being her mother. It is epic.

The Episode I just watched of Northern Exposure is about Shelly Tambo's baby shower. Women tell their horror stories, men make ridiculous comments about things they know nothing about yet feel entitled to lecture on. The truth about pregnancy and childbearing is never told. Too daring? No one ever tells the truth about childbearing. We can't. It is like there is a kind of unwritten law that you can never be honest about that experience. Well, you can neer be honest about your own experience of that event, even though it is your own. It is really a horrible situation. What happens is that you hide that truth from yourself and the rest of the world because it is too much to bear - the truth. Once it begins, gestation, after those first few months, there is no going back. You are committed and you have to go through with it. It would be interesting to r=write The Red Badge of Courage about Childbirth instead of war. Those last couple of months, just think about it, that baby is almost fully grown, you know how big that is, and it is inside you squeezing al your organs to the side, moving around like a little whale or a porpoise, inside you. And those months you have to contemplate that large lump of huanity squeezing its way out of your body.

I saw a movie once that came a little close - Tulley with Charlize Theron (2018). That is mainly about her post-partum depression after childbirth, facing up to the relentless demands of caring for anewborn when your body hs been through an unspeakable trauma. The pain of labor is mind-bending. Fortunately for me, I faced it with Yoga, meditation and breathing. Since there is no escape, you MUST fall back on something and just HOPE it will help you survive this unbearble agony.

Of course there is that miraculous moment when it is over and you have survived and the baby is alive and whole, and you are relieved, you are rescued, and you experience that flood of supernatural love. But it is quickly replaced by the ceaseless demands on your body, your energy and your mind. Your time is never again yours. All of your time and all of your attention and energy is bent towards the demands of the little person your brought into the world. You carry that little burden everywhere until your arms ache. You are grateful for a stroller, an aunt, a playpen, those stolen moments of physical freedom.

I remember what it was like to kneel beside the tub at night and just deeply wish my child would get old enough to shower so I could be divested of this nightly ritual. Most of us are not sorry we did it, at least at some point but equally, at some point most of us are sorry we did it. I am astonished at how many women do it again, and again. I don't get it.

It is another reason I am so against dog breeding - to put some enslaved animal through that pain and trauma over and over for money is brutality at its most basic lack of compassion. It is a basic lack of compassion that allows men to put women through this over and over again, that and the fact that they are never exposed to the reality of it, the agony, the trauma, the soul crushing enslavement of it. Even if they were, they would still do it 0 lust would triumph over compassion.

Thank heavens for birth control that spared me all those years for maturing, educating myself, getting a career so I could be independent and self supporting. Thank heavens for birth control, all the many forms, that allowed me the one experience and no follow ups, no sequels. Thank heavens for time, that allowed me gray hair and celibacy and a release from all that reproductive bondage. That's how I truly feel. And thank heavens my child grew up safe and sound and healthy and independent and self-sufficient so I got my life back.

wrightj45@yahoo.com Childbirth is in a real sense, enslavement.