There is nothing more sacred, divine, or as powerful as you. As a woman, you possess LOVE within you that when given light, you can CREATE life.
In today's society, creating a New Afrikan family, nurturing it, and ensuring it thrives and is successful is becoming TABOO in the Western Culture. It is becoming a norm for impregnated women to be single and go through the process of pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum ALONE. To take it a step further, mainstream Western culture has, for more than a century, regarded birth primarily as an event that separates mother and baby.
Viewed from this place, it makes sense that birth as a sacred event has been ignored and forgotten. As birthkeepers, as the mothers of civilization, how do we change this narrative?
The answer: Rites of Passage into Motherhood. It is time that we conjure up the wisdom, knowledge, and power of our ancestors and unlearn and relearn, Sankofa (reach back and fetch), and remember who we are, where we come from, and allow our ancestors to guide our paths back to our culture and knowing of the spiritual essence of childbirth. We must remind our Mother Earth's how sacred she is and the process she is going through. A woman experiencing a life Rites of Passage, specifically Motherhood needs "the village" as she is experiencing another layer of herself and her being.
When a baby is born we need to be meeting the mothers in our families with the "village mindset". She should be surrounded by comfort, love, hands on help, nourishing meals, psychological understanding, safety, space for reprieve and replenishment, and even ceremony.
She needs darkness, candles, bath soaks. She needs songs sang to her, her hair stroked, her very birth recognized, too. She needs hot meals, long naps, the safety to relax in knowing that somebody else will tend to the baby for a moment. She needs prayers and invocations of the highest and best guardians. She needs to be held as her body processes any residual traumas in her birth. She needs thorough support on physical/mental/spiritual levels.
When a mother is born, we need to grant her the space to blossom from a seedling to a rose. It will completely derail our impossible and false expectations of her all together. It will grant her the paved path that supports her Rites of Passage into Motherhood.