GOP Signs Petition Against Baby Jesus’ Family

Says Nontraditional Structure Endangers America

By Maria Padhila

It’s coming on time for the annual celebration of the rebirth of the Sun, when those who would destroy any relationships but those among an official man, an official woman, and their official offspring go hog wild celebrating the birth of an impoverished baby to a woman who conceived a child out of wedlock and a guy who decided to help her out and live with her and raise the child even though he knew the baby wasn’t his biological offspring. (What was with that guy? I don’t know. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he was really a woman? Maybe he was just a great guy who loved her and didn’t have a jealousy problem, didn’t have to be the center of attention all the time to feel OK.)

Everywhere there will be civil rights battles about whether depictions of this immoral scene should be allowed in public spaces around America. Some will counter with displays they find less offensive, such as the recently busted group in Leesburg, Virginia, of all the conservative bastions, which whipped up a display of a crucified skeleton in a Santa suit to protest holiday consumerism.

In all the praise of the Baby Jesus, this rather unusual family setup that Jesus had always seems to get sidestepped and shunted off, like the Uncle and his Boyfriend that certain families never talk about. It’s right there in everyone’s face, and yet there’s this persistent insistence that the family ‘norm’ must follow a form that’s comparatively recent and comparatively rare. Hell, even Moses didn’t have an upbringing anywhere close to ‘normal’ — he was given up at three months to be raised by the royal family like a cute little toy, while his mother had to disguise herself and pass as a lower-class servant and wet nurse.

It can even be argued that those from unconventional, ‘immoral’ origin have an advantage. Can you think of a major leader or spiritual figure who came from a nuclear family in Mayberry or its historical equivalent?

With such terrible role models, I can’t understand why so many insist that the model of the past hundred years, charitably speaking, is the one Jesus intends. What’s more mysterious is how many of us have bought into it without realizing it.

There is nothing in the traditional Christmas birth story about the importance of a marriage license, or a ‘strong family unit’. A lot of those around the odd couple that night were probably polygamous, because that was a prevailing model. According to the sparse Bible account, this woman, probably what we’d call a teen nowadays, gave birth like an animal, in an outbuilding.

Eric recently got busted on (and praised) for a link to a YouTube video posted on his Facebook page by a friend of a woman having an orgasm as she gave birth. It has happened, and it has not happened to others. Some commenters argued that it gives a false picture of childbirth; that childbirth is all pain and fear. Others took the opportunity to point out that women now have won back the option of using midwives and other less interventionist methods in childbirth. If you ask “What Would Jesus Do,” well, it would appear that what he did was to be born at the wrong time and wrong place, in a very dangerous situation. Plus, he was surrounded by animals, which really gets Rick Santorum’s knickers in a wad.

When you’re going to have a baby in today’s America, there are all sorts of camps and cliques who will tell you that you simply must do it this way or that way, with the requisite people and accessories around, or you are making a big mistake. My friend, straight and single, recently had her second baby, via donor. I know there is some tsking; some people have asked me prying questions (as if I’d know!) and expressed their opinions. All I do know is that she has two great, beautiful kids, and she’s fine; tired, but fine.

Debating the merits of individual experiences of childbirth is pretty useless; the point here is that women are damned dog tired of being told that they’re Doing It Wrong. I know I am. But if certain political factions have their way, the pressure will be far worse. Everything from how many people you live with, to where the sperm comes from and when and how, to whether, where, when and how you give birth, will be legislated.

There is already enormous pressure from corporations and the financial sectors on how, when and where one gives birth. If you go the hospital route, which is still the major choice in the United States, you will likely encounter revolutionary nurses who will whisper to you that you should stay away from the hospital as long as you can stand it. As long as you’re at home you can walk, rock on pillows or a yoga ball, stand under the shower and, yes, masturbate — or more accurately, do vulvar massage. It can loosen things up, lessen pain, and help keep the vulvar opening from tearing. I stayed away as long as I could, and it was a long 12 hours or so, and got to the hospital six cm dilated.

Once you’re in the hospital, they won’t let you move. On the tour you take when you’re pregnant, they’ll tell you stories about how they’ll let you take showers and get massages and all that, and some women manage to evade the fetal monitor torture, but many of us will, on dire threats, be made to lie absolutely still on our backs so the baby can be tracked by the monitors wired to us, inside and out. This helps keep them from getting sued and can help keep the turnover in the hospital steady; some predictability is important to a healthy business enterprise. It fucks up the birth process, to say the least. Ten more hours, and I never got above nine cm, and I’m old, so there was increased risk of my death, my daughter’s death, and several health professionals’ death by insurance company hounding. So it was a c-section for us. We came out alive, but with a hospital-caught staph infection and a bottle of Percocet of a size that it could have provided for a year in a state university if I had been prescient enough to sell it and invest the proceeds.

Such a terrible entry to this world I gave my daughter. But do I want anyone telling me that I’ve irrevocably fucked up a vulnerable being for whom I’m entirely responsible from their first breath of air — and worse, that I did it in a position where I was entirely vulnerable and unable to stop other beings controlling the process? That while you’re trying to craft with love this momentous moment, the world goes on “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along,” ignoring “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,” as Auden puts it? That the others involved have totally taken control because they’re afraid a mistake will mean titanic corporations battle over their heads and destroy their futures? That you are trying to manifest a miracle while the ones who have to mop up afterwards are outside, smoking, standing waiting for the bus on a few square feet of mud not big enough for that purpose, a bit of stomped turf too close to SUVs slamming by, with their diplomat plates and Landon School window stickers?

I’m not having an orgasm at my daughter’s birth; instead, I’m getting sliced open and asked if I want to save the umbilical cord blood for the stem cells; it will only cost a few thousand to freeze it. (I say no thank you, we’ll donate it.) And I’m doing it wrong, because I should be in hot tub ecstasy somewhere?

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

This is the normal and entirely understandable — to me, if not to you — reaction of any woman being told that her birth experience is less than it should have been. Honey, we tried. We all do our best in the places we find ourselves.

It could have been a lot worse — in-laws wanted to be in the room with me, so they could have told me all the things I was doing wrong, too. I was seen as an uptight, withholding, cold bitch because I didn’t want people I don’t trust in the room with me as I had a child, because I wouldn’t allow videos.

Having said that: I believe in the natal chart imprint on birth and the larger imprint of the circumstances of birth. Unlike my own longed-for daughter, I was not wanted at conception, and the attitude hadn’t changed by the time of my birth. Anticipating the cold reception, I was breech; I would have preferred to die rather than be born into that situation, and I have spent much of my life in that psychic position. (Don’t be sad or appalled — this is how poets are bred, and I consider myself a creature of great fortune.) My mother was in the hands of a Soviet refugee doctor who turned out to be an expert at breech births; I wonder if there were many babies in the same position in his homeland, for similar reasons. In my mother’s position, at the peak of the Cold War, it must have been terrifying, as if a very minion of Satan were her attendant.

“To be merry best becomes you, for out o’ question you were born in a merry hour.”
“No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, but then there was a star danced, and I was born.”
–Much Ado About Nothing

When you know the truths of this moment of birth for yourself, you have a gift. If you have the chance to find out the story, see what you can learn. Failing that, you have your chart. Certain positions of planets will spiral by again, some many times, some only once, but on each repeat the pull will be a little different; you’ll know a little more, you’ll feel it a little differently. Your birth was no less a miracle for any of the circumstances around it, and the configuration of space around you unique and unrepeatable.