Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Jacobik
					, Gray

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering         205 
For three years, whenever he messed himself, 
like an obedient child, he rolled on his side away from her, 
thin hipbone and shrunken buttocks gleaming,
unflinching as she wiped and washed him, 
and when he didn’t wake to ask for the bedpan, 
she woke to the smell of urine 
which carried out the night and carried in 
the bleached blank abandonment of day. 
Cancer ate at his spine, yet she, too, as if minnows worked thousands 
of small cold mouths against her flesh, was devoured. 
How to account for a sweet nature, his to the end? 
Or how his silence before the world’s stern reductions, 
his humor even in pain, moved her with a force she could not 
explain, love deepening, and that love, no minor recompense.
Yet how brown and dank and illimitable her exhaustion is. 
Does she have shoulders, breasts, a face? Anything to touch 
below her waist? Is she the one dead?
After Last Decisions
Gray Jacobik
206         Volume 10, Number 1
Everything smells of rot, his sheets, pillow, even his false teeth.
A woman who is salvage, who is picked clean, places his clothes 
and shoes in plastic bags and heaves them into the cavity
of charity’s white dumpster.
What meadow can she wake in with desire restored? 
What manna can feed such hollowness? 
Gray Jacobik


English

After Last Decisions

Editorial Masthead

Caragata
					, Lea

Good Welfare Moms: Stories of Caring Labour

Lang
					, Sharon

Bonds of Bereavement: Care and Caregiving Among SIDS Mothers

Gamber
					, Cayo

For My Mother

Russell
					, reviewed by Dominique

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering        277 
Book Reviews
Birth as We Know It
Elena Tonetti-Vladimirova.
The Sentient Circle. Educational DVDs. 24 mins.; 40 mins. 
Reviewed by Dominique Russell
These are the educational versions, twenty-four and forty minutes respectively, 
of Birth as We Know It, Elena Tonetti-Vladimirova’s fascinating documentary 
on “conscious birth.” Tonetti-Vladimirova was a co-founder of this ground-
breaking movement in Russia in the eighties, organizing workshops and births 
in the shallow waters of the Black sea, an idyllic setting where dolphins play. 
Conscious birth involves a process of coming to terms with one’s own birth 
trauma, and of creating a “birthing field” of love rather than fear. In the in-
terviews and Tonetti-Vladimirova’s narration, what is emphasized is maternal 
responsibility and power. An expectant mother needs to be supported, but she 
herself must tap into her “innate intelligence and body wisdom.” According to 
Tonetti-Vladimirova, whose spirituality seems to be pantheistic, the most im-
portant thing a woman needs to learn is the spiral, present in dancing, seashells, 
galaxies, and our DNA strands, because “conscious surrender to th[is] vortex 
of energy brings profound grace.” Birth is considered a sacred, transforming 
moment for all involved in the process. Says Tonetti-Vladimirova, “within the 
sacredness of birth lies the pathway to the pure potentiality of life.” 
The film depicts not birth as we know it, but birth precisely as we do not 
know it in our culture: an ecstatic, erotic, and spiritual experience in which 
children come into the world, eyes wide awake and peaceful, under water. The 
birth segments are beautifully filmed, focusing on the moment of arrival after a 
glimpse of labour. Many of the women give birth in clear birthing tubs, giving 
the camera unencumbered access. They spiral and squat, often held by partners 
or friends, through contractions and, what for me was the most excruciating 
moment of labour, crowning—slowed down by mother’s or midwives’ hands 
to avoid tearing. The newborns stay underwater for a few moments before 
coming up onto their mother’s belly, seeking the breast. Most do not cry. The 
most extraordinary sequence is a midwife who gives birth alone, smiling at 
her other young children as she guides her newborn’s head and body through 
her. The soundtrack includes moaning, sounding, and shouts, but these are 
tempered by peaceful electronic music (available at www.birthasweknowit.
com/soundtrack.html); indeed the DVD offers an “instrumental version” for 
those who prefer to dispense with sounds and narration entirely. Skyler Sabine’s 
work, as cinematographer, designer, editor, and audio engineer deserves men-
tion. She no doubt had a guiding hand in the visual beauty of the works, and 
her editing is crisp and rhythmically in tune with the narration (which she 
co-supervised). 
278        Volume 10, Number 2
Book Reviews
As I viewed the forty-minute version with my husband, four months 
along into a “high risk” twin pregnancy, I grew doubtful of its usefulness as an 
educational tool since it preaches to the converted. I identify with the natural 
birth movement, but found myself put off somewhat by the strong statement 
that opens the film: “The quality of this [new] life will be defined by the qual-
ity of birth.” It comes immediately after a disclaimer that tries to temper the 
radicalism, reassuring us “failures,” I felt, that the effects of less than conscious 
birth can be healed. As a reviewer on Amazon.com notes, the film can inspire 
guilt in the mother “who fails to achieve nirvana while giving birth.” My hus-
band was swept up by the film for nearly half an hour, and disconnected only 
after a drawn-out sequence where one of the American labouring mothers 
describes “a sweet, squishy kiss” from her partner that sent her into waves of 
ecstasy. The films are singly focused on heterosexual unions and, like the births 
themselves, these are idealized. 
Despite these caveats, I found myself replaying the images of the calm 
water births over and over in my head, and ferreted out a supplier of birthing 
tubs, though it is highly unlikely I will choose to use them to deliver my twins. 
I showed the sequences to friends and will show it to my daughter, closer to 
my due date. My husband’s resolve to find a way for our babies to enter the 
world without medical interference has strengthened. Despite our resistance 
to some of the “New Age” speak, the film has radicalized us.
The twenty-four-minute version is, I think, more effective for education. 
Dispensing with the contrast with hospital births and circumcision, it focuses 
on the positive effects of conscious birth and, with a shortened narration and 
image track, it distills its principles to the essentials: that “women have access 
to the power of creation,” but that labour “free of drama” is part of a challeng-
ing process of self-examination and spiritual, emotion, and physical practice 
to overcome fear. 
The real strength of the films is the indelible images of fearless, confident 
women giving birth autonomously. Since we are bombarded with media rep-
resentations of birth as frightening and painful, the power of these profoundly 
different documentary images might have an effect on even the resolute adher-
ent to the technocratic model of birthing. For women—and especially younger 
women—vacillating between faith in technology and the wisdom of their own 
bodies, the film should transform the idea of what constitutes “normal” birth. 
I am, in the end, grateful to have seen the forty-minute version.


Birth as We Know It

Riggs 
					, Damien W.

Delfabbro
					, Paul H.

Economies of Care: Remuneration and Recognition
in Foster Care

Pomrenke
					, Marlene

Mothers and Daughters Finding Each Other Through Intercountry Adoption

Skene
					, K.
					 V.

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering    259 
In the small hours
when no one else is listening
you feel the shape of your hands
as your fingers open 
empty as the house
when your mother is not home
    is nowhere
she can be touched or spoken to
and you in your second-best dress
cherry-red sandals
alone at the Bechstein
flames playing over your hands
even as you hold note on note
her song
dying.  It is beautiful
and so are you
with your pupils wide open as mirrors
the music inside beckoning.
 
         
 
         
 
      
Pianissimo
K.V Skene


Pianissimo

Toledo
					, Tamara

My Guardian Angel: The Uncertainty of Exile and Memory