What I’ve learned about birth I’ve learned from opening to the genetic encoding of our species… by that I mean, Kitty Cooper and I were allowed to explore, from ages six to eight, as some lucky kids are, in the safety, but not overly supervised safety, of our own homes, and to “create” our own birth scenarios complete with dolls, blankets and leotards.
Kitty and I gave birth to anything and everything that would fit through our leotards: oranges, dolls, pillows… we may not have understood all the mechanics of it, but we got the sound-effects down real good… moaning and grunting and making other such appropriate accompaniment for our squatting, or supine with legs held high, or on all-fours approach to birth enactment.
The collective memory of our species is embedded in our DNA. There is a biological imperative which informs our actions when we step out of the way and let it move through us. This I believe with all my heart.
One night, when my kids were six and ten years of age, I heard a munching in the kitchen. We were the designated family that Spring Break week for the class science project.
Bombyx mori moths, a.k.a. “silk worms” can go through fists full of mulberry leaves in an evening. And they’re real loud chewers! My girls and I got good at sighting their preferred (and only?) food on walks in our neighborhood and even when driving elsewhere in the city. We took the care and feeding of these silkworms very seriously. It had to be fruitless mulberry leaves and they had to be fresh. What if they/we ran out in the middle of the night? Not so easy to maraud a neighbor’s tree at midnight as it was for my beloved to fetch me pickles and ice cream from the all night drug store when I was pregnant… though I never did crave the traditional… I was way into celery of all things! Gotta have crunch!
Anyway, I was watching the silkworms devour leaf after leaf and growing before my eyes from slender pinky finger dimension white eating machines to fat as my thumb girth in short order.
Their emergence from their cocoons a few weeks later was heralded by a turning brown at one end of the white gauze-like enclosure. The caterpillars-turned-moths secrete an acid which burns a hole in one end of the womb/tomb of their metamorphosis. How ever did silk-road countries discover that they could stop the burning and harvest the gossamer filaments? The way they do it necessitates the snuffing of the already short lives of the bombyx mori moths. They’re boiled alive, then the filaments are carefully un-spun to be used by humans in the finest rainments. Only a few moths are allowed to live in order to reproduce. Upon emergence, the female moths’ job is to get fertilized and to lay her eggs.
As a nursery school teacher, I learned the folk wisdom passed on to me by my predecessors that strips of blue construction paper, three by twelve inches or so, made the best target for their egg-laying apparatus. And they lined up their matte-grey colored eggs like dot candy on those long white papers which we used to purchase at the penny candy store.
You keep all the egg lined strips in a coffee can at the back of the fridge until the mulberries are in full leaf (about March in Los Angeles). Then the poor moths flop around the box which has been their entire universe from hatching to laying (or fertilizing – let’s not forget it still takes two to tango – even when flight has been bred out of you) until the “lucky” ones – males and females - die. Then you take the whole mess of spent moths and degraded greens to the compost minus the delicate silk sephulcurs which you ooh and aah over for at least a week marveling with the children at the miracle of life and the many and varied forms it takes.
From the silk worms I learn: Birth is messy and it requires death: Death of the maiden who becomes mother; death of a boy to become a man (though this seems optional in our current culture); death of spermatozoa (Off with his head!) and ovum (She’s blasted apart!)– each of which lose their individuality - merging to become the blastocyst.
Emergence is ‘smack dab in the middle’ of the crossroads. Hecate, goddess of same is there to guide and guard young mothers in their transition from Maiden to Mother. Invoking her is prudent.
I long to be as straight-forwardly useful to my genetic lineage as those moths were. Keep going… make something of yourself – even if it’s only a copy of yourself… a flightless moth that gives beauty to a world which is as starved for beauty as a bolemic beggar at a groaning board.
Moreover, I long to recover my ability to fly and to teach my offspring how to accomplish that defiance of gravity as well. Here we morph into the familiar diatribe against the status quo for women. I loved Hillary Clinton’s unity speech on conceding defeat to Barak Obama in 2008. She said, “We may not have broken the glass ceiling, but we put 18 million cracks in it!”
Women have been held down and back and every which way a body could be held and still live (though some of our sisters didn’t live) until one of us bursts up and out and soars a bit ‘til she’s shot down again. But her striving has opened the prisons and possibilities for many of us; giving us permission to fly as high as ever our wings can take us.
Out on a limb of a Fruitless Mulberry Tree, here, but I hope Los Angeles soon has a woman mayor! May she SOAR!
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