PhD MH
(A ten-minute scene for staged reading)
Setting
A bare stage.
One wooden white rocking chair with white frilly cushions.
Soft light.
JENNY, barefoot and seven months pregnant, enters carrying a small stack of papers and a brand-new turkey red apron still in its plastic packaging.
She tears the packaging open with her teeth, puts the apron on over her clothes, and ties it with deliberate ceremony.
She looks at the audience as if daring them to laugh.
JENNY
I awarded myself a doctorate.
Not from Harvard. No Ivy League for me.
Not from anywhere with a Latin motto and a gift shop.
There is no school that offers a PhD in Motherhood, so I went to Walmart, bought this apron, and conferred the degree upon myself.
Jenny Marie Hatch, PhD MH. Doctor in the Philosophy of Motherhood.
It looks surprisingly official on a name tag.
The thesis is short.
Modern women are standing at a fork in the road. One path is paved by medical science and leads somewhere that feels increasingly… managed and toxic.
The other path is older, quieter, and requires you to trust your own body more than the people who bill your insurance.
I took the second path.
Mostly barefoot.
Frequently pregnant.
And occasionally, according to my husband, somewhat lonely and isolating as we navigated being non-conforming on this and other issues… like vaccination.
Family sovereignty.
That’s the fancy term I landed on after years of arguing with myself in the kitchen. It just means the family that is self-governed.
Husband and wife become one flesh, and then they try very hard not to hand the most intimate parts of their life over to strangers with clipboards.
Birth.
Nursing.
Teaching.
Healing.
The moment you outsource those things, the bond between the two of you gets a little thinner and MUCH more expensive.
You don’t notice it at first.
Then one day you look up and realize half a dozen professionals know more about your children’s bodies than you do.
I learned this the costly way.
My first birth was in a big teaching hospital in Michigan. Fifty percent cesarean rate.
Regional high-risk center.
I was twenty, I had read the Bradley books three times each, and I still believed the system would treat me like a person.
They put me in triage alone. Naked under a thin sheet on a cold metal table.
A woman doctor and a young male intern walked in.
Neither of them looked at my face.
She examined me during a contraction.
Then he took his turn. He stayed in longer than I felt necessary. When I started moaning she put her hands on my belly so he could “feel what a contraction is like.”
I looked at both of them and said, very clearly, “Don’t you ever touch me again while I’m having a contraction.”
They still didn’t look at me.
I gave birth without drugs, without an episiotomy, without the internal monitor.
On paper it was a success. In my body it felt like something else entirely. For days afterward all I could see were that intern’s eyes and his big fat fingers probing my body.
If he had done that in any other setting it would have been classified as a rape, actionable by law enforcement.
My family said, “But you have a beautiful baby. Get over it.”
I did not get over it. I just sat quietly with my feelings, for years.
And then I became much pickier about whose hands were allowed on my body. I have not had a vaginal exam since 1996… thirty years. And I plan to go to my grave never again submitting to that level of intrusion.
By our fourth baby I had decided the only hands that belonged on my body were my husband’s and, eventually, the baby’s.
We freebirthed.
It was wild and perfect and then slightly dramatic afterward because the universe apparently thought my musical-theater background required a plot twist involving a transfer.
We survived. Our marriage survived.
When discussing our need to ask for help after our botched home birth Paul reminded me that we did not have a “birth”.
We had a baby.
Then came four years I now call the Valley of the Shadow of Institutionalization.
After homeschooling for a couple years, sent the kids to a charter school.
We ate cold cereal. I bought some white flour and white sugar and began baking with it.
I bought fruit snacks so my children would be popular when they brought the treat bucket to school.
My husband asked once, “Why do we always have to be the weird ones?”
I looked in the mirror one morning and did not recognize the woman staring back.
All the organic ideals, the tandem nursing, the unschooling, the attachment parenting… gone.
Replaced by Lunchables and permission slips. And my children being taught that the ultimate goal they could achieve was a Pizza party with the Principal.
Where did I go?
It was a trial of faith, the kind the scriptures warn you about.
You receive no witness until after the trial.
Those four years were the trial. When we came out the other side we were quieter, clearer, and far more deliberate about what we chose while making important health care decisions on behalf of our minor children.
Our fifth pregnancy brought the Blessing Way.
I invited ninety-five people.
I made an altar with a picture of Jesus, a jar of Kamut and golden flaxseeds, and a sample cloth diaper.
We asked for cloth diaper-fund donations instead of plastic diapers and baby formula.
The pioneers of the blessing-way ceremony came and did the whole ceremony at an outdoor park close to our home.
We wound yarn around our wrists.
I sang “Come Thou Fount” a cappella while two hawks circled overhead.
My husband and I sang “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”, our favorite duet.
Jenny Singing (Paul can be heard harmonizing offstage)
Reverently
1. Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to thy bosom fly,
While the nearer waters roll,
While the tempest still is high.
Hide me, O my Savior, hide,
Till the storm of life is past.
Safe into the haven guide;
Oh, receive my soul at last.
2. Other refuge have I none;
Hangs my helpless soul on thee.
Leave, oh, leave me not alone;
Still support and comfort me.
All my trust on thee is stayed;
All my help from thee I bring.
Cover my defenseless head
With the shadow of thy wing.
Text:
Charles Wesley, 1707–1788
Music:
Joseph P. Holbrook, 1822–1888
Isaiah 25:4
Psalm 62:1–2, 7–8
It was the most sacred baby shower I have ever attended. And I organized it myself because I knew exactly how I wanted it to be.
My sister informed me that she would be happy to fly out from Michigan to attend a traditional baby shower, but the Blessing Way invite spooked her.
Birth is a sexual event.
The same hormones that allow a woman to open and expel a baby are the same hormones that allow her to orgasm.
Oxytocin.
Endorphins.
The whole chemical orchestra.
When a woman is left alone with someone she trusts, in a dark quiet room, with no strangers watching the clock, the body can do something astonishing.
It can make birth feel… good.
Not just tolerable.
Not just “natural.”
Actually ecstatic.
Orgasmic, even.
There are women who have experienced waves of pleasure during undisturbed birth that they later compare, without exaggeration, to the best sex of their lives.
Now picture trying to produce that same chemical cascade under fluorescent lights, with a stranger’s hand inside you every thirty minutes, a monitor strapped to your belly, a catheter, an IV, and a room full of people whose primary job is to make sure you stay on schedule.
It would be like asking a man to produce semen under the same conditions.
Hooked up to machines.
Poked and prodded.
Told he’s “failing to progress.”
And when he still can’t perform, wheeled into surgery so someone can extract what his body refused to give under duress.
We would never do that to a man.
We do a version of it to women every single day and call it “standard of care”, when it is in fact “a cascade of interventions.”
I am not saying every birth should be a freebirth.
Bodies are complicated.
Sometimes things go sideways and you need the surgeon and you are grateful.
But for the majority of women, the greatest quantum leap of all may simply be leaving them alone with the person they love.
Because when the room is dark, and the hands on her body are familiar, and no one is watching the clock… the same body that can make love can also birth a baby.
A hormonal gush of the love hormones that bond a child firmly to its parents.
(She unties the apron, folds it carefully, and places it on the chair. Soft blackout.)
Three hours after Ben’s FREEBIRTH on Oct 25th, 2002
