Pagan Parenting
Pregnant and Pagan
As I write today I am 31 weeks pregnant with my second child. My body is preparing for the sacred event of bringing forth a baby, birthing both a new soul and a new version of the mother in myself. Making the “mundane” moments of life sacred is part of my spiritual path. Because pagans are nature/earth based in our beliefs it seems that we herald being in our bodies and treating them as temples.
I often wonder how we do at this though. Do we really treat our bodies with the care and reverence that we have for our gods or our sacred places? And when we go through these huge life and body altering phases do we connect them with our myths and legends or do we let the rather institutional approach to childbearing in particular shade our experience of these life milestones?
The energy that accompanies the birthing of a child is primal and connects one to all the women who have done it before. It is a lineage of creation that is reflected in the earth’s roundness and fertility. I believe that, I feel that, but it does not translate well into every day life. Due to the limited time that I give to my personal practice while raising a young family the practicality of communion with deity or even this time around setting up an altar is lacking. There are moments of bliss, moments of frustration and being uncomfortable and moments of fear. The vessel that my body has become to bring forth this new life is overwhelming in its implication and yet so simple in its purpose at the same time.
Motherhood is venerated in many religions but also controlled tightly in the physical and practical sense. So while one might feel empowered by Mother Mary’s birthing story as a Christian or just in general the joy in that story is certainly not easy to translate into sterile hospital rooms or with the use of interventions that the North American birth culture considers the norm.
Having chosen to birth our first son at home, as we plan again with our second son my husband and I stepped outside of the routine many find comforting choosing instead to let the process be as organic as possible. The sacredness was not lost on me in the moments but it is also such a primal experience that it kept me from idealizing the experience too much. So my approach to pregnancy, birth and motherhood is not one that I put on a pedestal, it is rooted in the holy dirt, held by the trees, and blows in whirlwinds with the leaves.
Most importantly we must support women as they endeavor to take these journeys of transformation. Our bodies are ours even when we carry new life in them, or better yet especially because we do. Until you have conceived, nurtured and grown a child from the inside, birthing it and feeding it from your body the profoundness of the process is hard to grasp. The story of Demeter grieving Persephone being away from her is relatable when you count the hours of time, nurturing and patience that a mother gives to her children. I see the miraculous act that my body has performed and will again perform. The fact that it knows what to do all by itself is also incredible. Often when the chips are down we just have to let our minds wonder off somewhere else and surrender to the body’s innate sense of what must happen.
Somewhere between glowy pregnant women rocking their unborn babes as they dance in spring fields and formulaic scientific jargon about what my body is doing this week lies my connection to spirit and my growing baby. I will try to honour the process as the days move on towards their climax and feel the ancestors calmly or sometimes loudly calling the names of all that have been there, done that. It is a good place, a holy place but overall it is a human and animal place to be.