Heng Ou - Nine Golden Months: The Essential Art of Nurturing the Mother-To-Be

Congratulations! You are pregnant, creating a baby and growing a new life. Your entire being is at its creative peak, and you are expanding in so many ways. Physically, its quite awe inspiring, as your womb stretches from mere inches to watermelon size. Psychically, its equally so. Your heart may feel like it is exploding in every directionfeeling more love and hope than you ever thought possible in some moments, more doubt and worry in others. Your mind may be blown by the scope of the responsibility you are taking on, and your very sense of who you are may be starting to shift, as the woman you have known for decades shakes free of her old foundations to allow a new you to emerge: Mother. (Or as the case may be, Mother Again.)

Being pregnant is a phenomenon unlike any other. When else in your life will you experience three-quarters of a year of such constant construction, the around-the-clock building project that is making a babyand destruction, as old ways of being (in the world, in your body, in your relationship) fall away to reveal the next chapter of you? Imagine reading an epic tale in which the protagonist is pushed to the very edges of her physical and mental capacity and thrust into the depths of devotion and surrender before discovering a bond unlike any other. That person is you, playing the starring role in the most monumental story of creation and evolution that existsit is epic! The changes that you are experiencing in your body, and in your mind and emotions as well, are breathtaking.

But chances are that by and large, the rest of the world is not changing much for you. Sure, at the peak of pregnancywith your gloriously rounded belly telegraphing Baby on boardstrangers may beam smiles or offer their seats on the bus. As your due date approaches, the well wishes pick up, and gifts and hand-me-downs may arrive from family and friends. And ads for must-have baby items or next-level nursing bras might mysteriously pop up in your social media feeds. But, curiously, for such a massive undertakingone human creating an entirely new life-form and birthing that being into the worldyou might be discovering that society at large emanates a strange sense of nonchalance. Pregnancy for the most part elicits a Move along, nothing to see here kind of attitude in our culture. Sure, we will get out the streamers when baby actually arrives, and yes, we will tell you how proud we are of what you have just done when you send the birth announcement out. But until the evidence is front and center (all adorable teeny fingers and piercing cries), lifes pretty much as normal. Why shouldnt it be? After all, women can do it all!

But should we? In many cultures and in many times, and in many families and maternal lineages, the nine and a half months of pregnancy are recognized as anything but a normal time. They are an extraordinary time! And they deserve an extraordinary level of recognition and care. Not just for the baby within, butvery significantlyfor the one doing the heavy lifting, transforming, and growing: mom herself.

If you are setting out, hopeful and hustling busily, on your pregnancy path today, you might be too occupied to consider that there is more to the experience. Before you conceived, your existence may have been anchored in place by daily to dos and goals to be met. Now, pregnancys three trimesters of checkups, tests, classes, and home improvement projects can easily add to the load. If you let it, this essential period of your life can be reduced to a sequence of milestones asking to be met, carrying you along toward the ultimate project deadline: giving birth. And while its true that if you stay on track with the tasks, youll eventually come to an end pointmeeting your baby for the first timeits a shame to let this linear approach be all that you know. Pregnancy is all of that, but it is also so much more.

The thirty-eight-ish weeks of carrying a baby to term is a season of life that contains tremendous, even life-transforming, opportunities. Pregnancy and its zeniththe hours or days of labor and birthwill ask you to tap more strength than you ever knew you had as you face hard decisions, make risk assessments, and navigate monumental physical output. And you may find yourself doing all of this while allowing a vulnerability you may barely have permitted before. It deepens your sensitivity to everything around you, physically and emotionally, and enhances your intuition in almost mind-bending ways. And as many a teary-eyed mama can attest, gestating a child can bring long-stored feelings up to the surface, allowing tensions and fears to fully unravel and release, maybe for the very first time. Pregnancy can be a time of tremendous development for your baby, and great healing for you as well.

And thats not even touching on how pregnancy can be a spiritual initiation of sorts, introducing you to the creative power of the universe that lives inside your womb, and forever altering your sense of what your badass woman-self can do! Society never sees the superhero under their ordinary garb, and its the same with you, clad in your maternity jeans. Most are oblivious to the astonishing force that you are, building a human being from two tiny cells, gearing up to bring another citizen into the world, permanently changing the shape of your family and yourselfall while juggling the demands of your job or meeting every need of your older kids. So while you may win some admiring comments about your slowly changing silhouette, you likely wont be congratulated for being born into the fierce and tender, generous and constant, andfrom the highest perspectivepowerfully enlightening experience of motherhood. Lets just say, pregnancys labyrinthas one of the wise women featured in this book describes itis profound, paradoxical, and one of the most significant rites of passage in your life.

So why are we not shouting this part from the rooftops, or at least conveying it equally as enthusiastically as we do the news on prenatal vitamins and the risks of smoking and drinking, or the latest on how to handle varicose veins and stretch marks?

The answer may partly lie in the way pregnancy and birth have become more of a prognosis, and a business, than a transformative rite. Starting in the twentieth century, the mechanistic model of care for pregnant women took hold. Under this model, largely male dominated at first, medical authorities began to treat pregnancy and delivery like many other medical conditions, with diagnoses, interventions, and standardized, clinic-based care. Swift and efficient, and financially lucrative, this linear model began eclipsing a more holistic approach, in which midwives and other elders in the community helped the natural cycles of prenatal, labor and delivery, and postpartum care run smoothly and a little differently for each mother. And while theres much to honor about this evolutionit has brought a level of safety to many mothers who might otherwise have been at risk, and offered dedicated medical care to families in needit has also reframed things. The push toward ever more profitable medical treatments has forced the focus of care to get smaller and smaller, no longer encompassing the whole of the pregnant persons experience, and now overwhelmingly zeroed in on the baby itself. And the quiet side effect is that sometimes