Community Birth

Kneeling Woman has a thread on community midwifery...something I have been pondering for awhile. I have been thinking that it is impossible, to be a community midwife in this place of over a million people. The wonders of community midwifery seem to be an illusive dream, that catching my neighbors baby only would exist in a smaller, more intimate space...until recently. I have come to think that there is a strong need for a re-vamping of the definition.

And then yesterday I was at the park with a friend and her children and out of the corner of my eye I saw a father and his two year old bundle of energy. I looked a little closer and there was a spark that I knew this person...Oh my...I had been at the birth of this two year old boy. The dad gave me a huge embrace and we began talking like we had known each other all of our lives.

I don't think this dad ran up to women in the park and embraced them often. The kind of instant intimacy that people develop in birth is mysterious and lovely and lasting. It felt good to see them and later on I stopped by to say hello to the mother as they had moved within 500 feet of our house.

The universe just clunked me on the head as if to say "Take another look Sunshine"
It was so nice to see this little angel running around. This is the 1st time this has happened to me(that I have run into someone in my neighborhood whose birth I have been to). I live in a bubble sometimes.


I have been rolling many ideas around in my head, hoping that they would form a coherent piece of writing, but really as I write the process generally unfolds. It is not edited very much really and tends to come from ...well I don't know exactly where it comes from. Follow me through these next few paragraphs and see where it goes. It is process of understanding my perceptions and working through them. Find out where your truth meshes with mine or separates completely.

One of the things that I try to understand is the basic need for community. I grew up in many places...in Hawaii, where the word Ohana (I know, some of you immediately think Lilo and Stitch) means an extended family, not just blood relations, but those people in your life who are close in other ways.

And then I became an adult in Southern California where I got the sense that everyone leads separate, independent lives, where I didn't know my neighbors. I have followed that model, I am afraid, for a long time. I had trouble keeping friends, had trouble as a new mother, finding and creating a circle of friends. It wasn't that I didn't get along with people, it was that I didn't know how to be who I am, around people that I don't know that well. I was/am terrified of being judged for being out of the mainstream, for being different, for being a teenage mother, for co-sleeping, for this...for that...the list could be endless. At time it is/was heartbreaking, I went through the standard feeling of being isolated, feeling that people were uncaring, cold, flaky...or even worse, that I was unworthy, that there was fundamentally something wrong with me. I also chalked it up to being a loner...I had spent much of my childhood as a only child and spent a lot of time in books and playing by myself.

And then...well last year happened yes, but many other things. I was thrown into a place where any damm insecurities I had were under a microscope. I was in a situation where I had instant community like it or not. (if you are visiting my blog for the 1st time, that experience is documented here)
And I discovered something... I got along with people even when there was conflict, even when I judged and when I was being judged. There were definite tensions, yet my life was richer for it.

So my ideas about community have evolved. I feel a bit sheepish for something that seems to be so simple, yet so out of my reach conceptually. I was so guarded in my life that I missed out on a lot of things.

It wasn't that San Diego had a lack of community, it was that I had the idea that community was something you were born into, that community was a group of individuals that were like you, than a community selected you somehow, to be worthy of being part of it. Sometime when I write things out of my head I think I am an absolute_______ (fill in blanks)

Sigh....

So here is to a new definition of community in evolution. What is yours?