Giving Birth to the Mother’s Voice
In our society mothers are often treated as mere shipping crates for babies, passive and unconscious vessels to be opened at others’ convenience. Many women are ignored and stifled, expected to be silent at a time when they are most connected to truth. Liberating the mother’s voice is a process of affirming the honor of her role in the mystery of birth, declaring her primal and puissant, sublime and sanctified, the Prime Mover. Birthing from Within cites many uses of voice in childbirth, as a form of birth art, to increase the mother’s sense of power in the birthing room, for pain management, “how to lose it in labor”, even strengthening the bonds of harmony within the family after the birth.

Song Midwifery can help women contemplate what it means to be a mother:
   • the complex and paradoxical experience of being inhabited, two beings inside one skin
   • re-evaluating family relationships
   • making sense of dream imagery during pregnancy
   • power and surrender, risk and responsibility, challenges and fears
   • courage and humility, loneliness and community, vulnerability and commitment
   • connectedness to an eternal line of mothers
   • personal rebirth
Music is much more than a mere tool for relaxation when it celebrates this greatest of all intimacies, when it helps us frame what it means to bring life into the world.

The Mother’s Voice, Giving Birth to the Child
In Music as Mother, Margareta Wärja cites I. Matthis: “In the mother-child relationship there is also an assurance, an innate security and a resting in the relationship that carries the child across abysses, that conveys and speaks to the child of a will to live.” There is a tradition of birth-songs in Uganda, where the mother crafts a song that carries her dreams and wishes for her child. She sings this song through the months of her pregnancy, and it is the child’s own song as it is born.
The song that a mother crafts for her child is a cradle, a shelter, a swaddling that surrounds the baby with protection and nourishment. She whispers her promise and wraps her benediction around this precious being that has been placed in her trust. This song can be an eloquent welcome for a long-awaited baby appearing after infertility treatment, a sanctuary for a premature baby on life-support, a covenant made with the mature adult that this child will one day become. A song can carry the thread of family tradition, joining souls to souls over the generations, celebrating the continuity of life. Song Midwifery can also help birth a song from other loved ones: from the father, an older sibling, from grandparents, blessings from family and friends. It can even help birth a song that carries a message from the baby to the mother.

Song Midwifery can be especially powerful in groups. Workshops include sharing of traditional lullabies, individual song-crafting, as well as an exercise in cooperative songwriting --all participants craft a song together to witness and support each other through the birthing process. Every woman receives a recording of this song, which she can then use as needed throughout her labor.

The Common Sense of Nonsense
Women often wonder if their voices or songwriting skills can possibly be adequate to the task of communicating everything they wish to say to their babies. They sometimes stay silent, rather than risk being inarticulate. But we must remember, since the beginning of time, women have cradled their babies with lullabies built on nonsense syllables. There is a semantics of nourishment, rocking, protection and envelopment, all vividly expressed in the tender susurrus and gibberish of lullabies. Song Midwifery acknowledges that babies are not merely pre-verbal, they live in a place deeper and broader than language. Babies do not need sonnets, they do not ask for finely crafted oratorios. But they will undeniably respond to the pure, sweet message of love that is carried in a song from its mother.

Containment
Birth art is a container of containers –sustaining, affirming, bearing the truth of birth. It embraces the womb which enfolds the child, which holds the promise of new life. The mother sends physical and spiritual nourishment deep into herself and into her womb, as she prepares to bring the child forth into the world. Likewise, in Song Midwifery (or any work that deals deeply with the experience of childbirth) she sends nourishment deep into her womb and into her own soul. She then crafts it into a form that acquires a separate identity in the world --a song that can be sung in the open air, and carry on its own existence outside of her body.

In this fashion, Song Midwifery is a mirror to the birthing process itself. It is an experience of giving shape to truth.