It’s so easy to focus on getting things sorted for your newborn, that its easy to neglect your own needs. In her second article in gsport’s three-part Baby Series, Sharon Plaskitt looks at the importance of taking care of yourself while pregnant.
“Pregnant women … carry the future inside, its contours already drawn, but veiled, private, an inner secret” ~ Ruth Morgan
For more or less 40 weeks each of us was that secret, carried in the warmth of our mother’s womb. This perpetual miracle forms the basis of humanity’s earliest spirituality: That as we are mothered and fathered, so there is a Great Mother or Father who is Creator of us all, who carries us, and brings us safely to life.
Metamorphosis
The word ‘Pregnant’ comes from a Latin phrase meaning “pre-birth”, and also holds the connotation of time filled with great significance or meaning.
Physically, this plays out in the significant shift in hormones taking place three times in a woman’s body: At puberty, pregnancy and menopause; marking the transitions in her life between the ancient phases of maiden, mother and wise woman.
Whilst adolescence and menopause build gradually into being for most women, pregnancy is different. In the relatively short space of 280 days, many aspects of a woman’s life will change completely.
The softening roundness of her body becomes the metaphor for this transformation, as she negotiates the coming changes in her career, family structure, finances and possibly even her friendships.
Great Expectations
It is at this time when she most needs to find her centre and her inner wisdom, that her ability to do so may be tested.
From the time her pregnancy is known or shown, everyone becomes an expert on what the woman should look like, feel like and choose; and everyone has a horror story to tell about birth.
Society gives pregnant women two utterly polarised and equally unrealistic messages. The first, imparted by photos of smiling yummy mummies resting their hands on their bellies, conveys that pregnancy is a blissful, glowing experience.
And of course it is … some of the time. But those perfect images can lead other women, ambivalent about their pregnancy during unrelenting queasiness, numbing exhaustion or stressful circumstances, to experience tremendous guilt about not being appreciative or “good enough”.
The second message is that “pregnancy and birth is a time fraught with great danger and unpredictability… that pregnancy, like our female body, is a disaster waiting to happen,” in the words of obstetrician Dr. Christiane Northrup.
Dr Northrup considered the level of tension created in her patients by pervasive messages of fear as more damaging to the well-being of both mother and baby, than almost any other factor.
Truth and Transitions
The tragedy is that because a pregnant woman is energetically more open and therefore more vulnerable; both messages take her further away from her self, her intuition, and her own power.
She may be lulled into paying more attention to preparing the nursery than she does to getting the rest, nutrition and exercise that she and her baby need; or she may agree to medical intervention that she neither needs nor wants, just because she is afraid.
To change these shadow aspects of pregnancy, each woman’s concerns need to be honestly addressed by her practitioner, and her choices respected by her family and culture.
In this way, the physical miracle of being with child becomes the sacred rite of passage it is meant to be.
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