The Origin and History of th Family Life Center

and the Matrix Birth Center

 

From my Memoirs, chapters 34, 5 and 6:

My narrative about the school continues: 

 

By 1974, we had became a community of some thirty children and seven full-time teachers plus two or sometimes three part-time or student assistants. This was the height of the national preoccupation with "free schools," and what we lacked in expertise and experience, we made up for in excitement. … we were [even] able to offer a small weekly supplement to eke out a fairly decent rate.

 

Our challenge now became, and has continued to be, to become fully relevant to the families of the neighborhood who had only the public schools of the ghetto as an alternative to us, not just or primarily to the families of the children we had begun busing in from other parts of the city. The popular preoccupation with the idea that school can be a place children love for its own sake was secondary in the minds of these folks to a clear insistence that their children learn to read, write, and cipher. One thing we discovered early on was that it is a lot easier to recognize what is wrong with schools and even what changes need to be made than it actually is to do it successfully yourself with all comers - and since we now had a lot of pre-schoolers and elementary school children whose parents would be judging us solely by our educational success, we knew we had to do a far better job than the public schools - and our group was certainly as diverse and multi-problematic as theirs.

 

The goals of our parents all too often clashed head-on with those of their children! We found ourselves spending far more time teaching kids to deal justly with personal conflicts of all sorts than with the three R's, although our arts and crafts program was always excellent. We understood how educationally relevant this effort at the learning of self-government was, but on the other hand, we did not want to lose kids, and parents had begun letting us know how dissatisfied they were with this emphasis. Since we actually agreed, it was a struggle, because the kids themselves had natural priorities which were perfectly valid in their own terms, and had to be respected - and yet, we needed to teach skills as well as work straightening out tangled feelings and beliefs!

 

Our council meetings at this time sometimes took several hours out of the day. Trying to mix social classes and diverse racial and ethnic groups on a genuinely peer basis is more difficult than it might seem. Or so we discovered. My approach to this issue included a strong belief that teachers themselves need to be very clear and straight in their thinking and stable in their emotions in order to deal with the demands made upon them by kids with great needs, and yet we could not afford to hire therapeutically trained teachers, nor did we wish to! Part of my belief was that our school had to be open to all comers, and that this needed to include teachers as well as families. This policy had its painful moments, although I believe it has worked very much in our favor over the long run. I remember one teacher we had early on who suddenly "broke" and picked up a black boy of around eight and slammed him onto the floor in great fury! Fortunately, the child was not hurt. Yes, there had been provocation, but such a reaction was intolerable - to him as well as to everyone else.

 

Thinking about how to resolve this issue of fitness to teach in our school without losing our freedom, I saw that what I had learned from my Reichian work - both the bioenergetics with David Boadella (which he now called "biosynthesis") and the orgonomic therapy with Mort Hertskowitz - were potentially useful skills I could use to improve the lives and the personal balance and functioning of school personnel who might wish and/or need it. I wrote asking each of them if they thought this was a responsible thing for me to do, and they both gave their assent.

 

So, using my little house at 4 Elm St. as an office, I began offering individual sessions to school members on a voluntary basis, as well as to a few others, local hippies who had heard about this variety of therapy and had become curious. Forming a weekly group as a context for personal growth seemed only one step further. As the years went by, we were to discover what a powerful agency for change such an experience could be. It began casually enough: 

 

In 1974 we set up a personal growth group which began meeting every week for three to four hours, at which time teachers and others who wished to join could work through their hangups. That group was still going strong in 1998, with eighteen members at present, seven of whom were originals. I believe the continued existence of this group was the core of the continuing life of the school and of the community itself, while I was a part of it. It is to be hoped that the school/community will not suffer because of its discontinuance. We also had teachers' meetings, for attending to the working of the school, but this other group was special. We learned all sorts of ways of giving people support to make changes over the years, such as transactional analysis, Gestalt, reparenting, Option, encounter, rebirthing, couples and relationship work.

 

The other benefit of having these buildings was that we began attracting families who wanted an apartment to live in, and who decided to let their children attend our school, usually because they found us friendly people to deal with in a very unfriendly world. In the process of rehabilitating our ten buildings for occupancy, we began to acquire a lot of skills - plumbing, wiring, sheet-rocking, carpentry, glazing, floor sanding, plastering, masonry, roofing, and so on.

 

Since most of our buildings were located on parallel streets, their back yards touched. When we had acquired them, these yards were filled with rubble, so we began clearing them out, planting gardens, and using them for socializing. Our properties had begun taking on more and more of the characteristics of a village, as we enjoyed our barbecues, birthday and holiday celebrations, and generally spending more time together.

 

Teachers who had come to teach with us as a novelty began seriously settling down and investing themselves in a more permanent and more monogamous pattern of living. The group became a kind of center for this new village which was coming into being, serving both to create a common ground of interest and to offer interpersonal support for dealing with the strains of getting through the hangups which divide people.

 

School families from farther away became attracted to this village atmosphere and began moving closer, either by finding a nearby rental apartment or by actually buying up an old or abandoned building. We found our rehabilitation skills very popular indeed, and began gathering to help one another in weekend "work parties," at which twenty of us would pool our efforts on one place, accomplishing rapid and low-cost miracles of building rescue and refurbishment. More and more, our streets became after-school and summertime "play streets," with the old Italian people serving gladly as built-in stoop supervisors of their activities.

 

.

Other changes were also occurring around us. Several young married women the ages of our own married families, including Linda, Billy's wife, were now pregnant, and looking at issues involving the appalling implications of dependency on the antiquated, male-dominated, technology-driven institution of obstetrician-managed birth. Linda approached me to ask if a group of them might use our basement dining room for regular meetings to offer one another support in daring to ask for submitting "birth plans" to their obstetricians which would pledge them to allow their patients maximum freedom from artificially-chemicalized, fetal-monitored, totally-sedated, bed-based labors, operating-table-trapped (sometimes even held down by body restraints!), anesthetized, episiotomized, totally MD-driven births, and post-operative interventions of all sorts toward both newborn and mother, allegedly mandated both by law and convention.

 

Having had such hideous births myself, characterized by most or all of these features, I was delighted to be asked, and felt empowered by the obstetrical training I had received at the Lying-In Hospital, now denuded of its purely societal, pseudo-religious obstacles to ownership by the pregnant women themselves, and by the couples involved! This group was also a safe environment for these young women to give voice to their anger and fear in feeling trapped in a male-dominated system based on the exploitation of female reproduction to make a comfortable professional living, smug in their assumption of their superior professional knowledge - and convinced that they were in fact the "saviors" of these females! Three of us even went so far as to give a demonstration in a class of obstetrical residents at Albany Medical College of the absurdity and chauvinism of standard obstetrical behavior patterns!

 

The births ultimately experienced by the members of this group did not always turn out to fulfill their hopes for an ideal ending to their pregnancies, but they gave us all a much better grasp of what was possible, and an ideal to reach toward! Everyone seemed to feel that the meetings had been worthwhile - and engaging in them gave me more confidence in my role as a pregnancy teacher and birth coach. Linda's and Billy's first son David was born on August 6th, and Judy and Peter Pollak's around the same period. As you can see from the illustration below, I was delighted to be invited in on the birth process!

 

Sammy Pollak, brand new baby, and me, as "consulting midwife"

 

Throughout the seventies, we were making all sorts of discoveries about the scope of the possibilities of the school as an organizing element for the hopes and dreams of a wide variety of young people working together in community. As Dewey is always quoted as suggesting, we were "learning to do by doing!" - but not exactly as he had seen this learning. Our learning project went much further into the lives of families than he had envisioned, not just the lives of their children. You might say, we were "making it up as we went along" (which is the title of Chris'splendid book about the school - which he apparently used as something he had heard me say!) - together, children and adults alike, finding out what worked, what we felt good about. For the adults in the school this discovery process became an in-depth weekly exploration in the group setting which I had helped to organize along the lines of group rules I had learned as a member for over a year of psychiatrist Bob Mitchell's Transactional Analysis group in Schenectady since Bill and I had begun trying to live together again.

Our policy of buying up old neighborhood buildings for back taxes and fixing them up now played a new role in our extension of community support into yet another area: home birth. This was essentially an unplanned development, but felt absolutely right at the time - and still does! We had worked mightily as a group to rehabilitate the splendid four-story building we had acquired at 20 Elm Street (for $1500), in order to rent out apartments (on a voluntary donational basis, since we were tax-exempt), and thus enhance our school's income. This building, four doors up the street from the school, proved to be strategically important to our survival in more than one way. It took all the good will and expertise we had gathered around us to do the huge job of bringing this building back to life over a period of several years. Even before the work was entirely completed, several hippy friends had immediately moved into two of the apartments on the middle floors.

 

During our growing neighborhood acquaintances, the school community had made friends with a young couple, a young woman named Nancy Austin, her young daughter Rebecca and her lover, Howie Mittleman. Howie and Nancy had been living in a commune out in the small community of New Salem west of Albany, but had recently moved into an apartment higher up the hill on Elm Street. Howie, as a carpenter, was one of the most valuable members of the rehab group that had worked on the building at 20 Elm St.

 

Howie and Nancy now came to me during 1974 looking for advice. Nancy had become pregnant again, and the couple were trying to decide whether or not to keep the baby. After thinking over all the pros and cons with me, they mutually agreed that they wanted the baby! Howie (especially) wanted the baby to be born at home, planning to deliver the baby himself. They asked me if I would be willing to act as backup for the birth, along with another friend who was a nurse - Barbara Volks, who had two kids, Billy and Bridget, in the school.

 

In order to be closer to their source of support, Howie and Nancy moved into the middle apartment at the building at 20 Elm St. Kaylana's birth was difficult for the couple, but went well anough, although very slowly. Nancy's prolonged second stage finally moved into the last phase - which also proceeded very slowly. During this process of "catching," Barbara seemed content to observe, and Betsy, whom Nancy and Howie had asked to photograph the birth, took a lot of snapshots, and seemed fascinated and deeply moved by the process.

 Howie, whose fantasies of doing the catching himself were not unfolding as he had hoped, finally realized that this process was one for which his proper role was support, and the task of delivering the baby went faster after Nancy finally asked him to stop trying to "manage" her labor. I acted primarily as coach and cheerleader for this strenuous, exhausting process of pushing the baby out! This birth turned out to be only the first of several home births attended by both Betsy and me. Betsy had become fascinated by the birth process she had photographed during Nancy's birth and had now decided to take on what proved to be a very successful career as a midwife - by apprenticeship as my assistant.

 

I resume my narrative:

 

By 1978, so many young couples who were connected with us in one way or another were getting pregnant and coming up against the up-tightness and cost of obstetrical care that we decided to move the ad hoc pregnancy and childbirth support group that had been meeting in my basement at 196 Elm Street to our (now almost completely) rehabbed building at 20 Elm Street. Because the two of us were nurses, we were able to do a lot of labor coaching in the hospital as well with various school families, and a few home births - mostly with community families. During the 80s we decided to formalize this fact, and announced the opening of an actual birth center - which we called Matrix. This was a birthing center for which we found medical support among the few doctors who were willing to act as backup for midwife-guided pregnancy, with the prospect of good, midwife-managed birth - whether at home, in the hospital or at the new Center - as the principal attraction.

 

A few of these new couples even bought up old buildings to rehab, in order to live close to the now coalescing little community around the school. Over the years there were four community weddings, and ten babies were born to families in "the village." The babies in the school between the ages of birth and two years, many of them born into the community, have seemed to us a breed apart, so alert, outgoing, playful, active, and affectionate that it has been a joy just to watch them together. ...

 

Betsy's and my awareness of the scope of what we were doing expanded throughout this period and into the mid-eighties. Having seen a description - or a picture - of a portable birthing stool (perhaps at the Manhattan Maternity Center, which Betsy and I visited early on), we decided we should have one to offer pregnant women who chose to labor at home. Howie Mittleman and Frank Houde, Connie's new husband, had recently organized a small business which they called North River Boatworks, in our garage at 6 Elm Street, next door to the school. We showed them the picture of what we had in mind and asked them if they could make them for us. They said they could, and a new mini-indistry was born which lasted for over ten years - until, in fact, North River Boatworks finally disbanded. I'm not sure how many we sold to birthing mothers and clinics, but it was well into the hundreds!

 

 

Initially I felt some trepidation at my temerity at having just taken on the role of midwife solely on the basis of my affiliation as a student nurse at the Boston Lying-In Hospital plus finding encouragement from the work of Ina May Gaskin and others who had become "lay midwives" during the seventies. But I gradually realized that this role, like that of therapist, was one of knowing my limits - knowing when it would not be prudent or safe to play the role - and, in the cases of those for whom it was appropriate, letting the natural process proceed to its conclusion with as little intervention as possible, and with the shared knowledge that we knew the birthing mother could do it! It worked well for the few women whom Betsy and I began attending.

 

My confidence in my ability to make a difference in the field of birth was enhanced by a trip to the southwest during the summer of 1975. I had came across an ad for a "spiritual seminar" being conducted by a man named Dick Sutphen, in Sedona, Arizona, and decided to go. I flew to Tucson, rented a huge old Buick from a firm named "Rent-a-Wreck," and drove to that picturesque, somewhat flaky but very popular resort town. Motels rates were so high in Sedona, which is known for the number of millionaires that had chosen to live there, that I ended up sleeping in the back seat of the car! The seminar was interesting, but not life-shattering for me &endash; until the last day, when a friend of Dick's, a Brit named Alan Vaughn from Los Angeles, gave us a channeling session. His contact was a Mandarin Chinese man, and it was fascinating to see Vaughn's long, Germanic-Anglo face change from a clearly Caucasian one to one that was almost as clearly Chinese! He had agreed to answer twenty people's personal inquiries at the end of the session, and already nineteen had come forward when I decided, oh, heck, why not? - and joined the end of the line.

 

When it came my turn, the channeler bowed to me with his hands in the eastern prayer position, and said in his Chinese voice, "It is an honor to speak with you." Huh? I was startled, but spoke up anyway, saying, "I have begun working with mothers and babies lately, and I wanted to know if this was work I should be doing." He thought for a moment, then answered. "Yes, it is. And you will be assisted in your work by a French doctor, who will be very helpful to you." I thanked him and went back to my seat. I thought to myself, "Hmm - wonder what that was about!"

 

Betsy's and my work in the field of birth was to assume even wider implications and proportions during the 80s, as I detail in chapter 38.

 

By this time I had also become fascinated by the female Godhead, and had begun having dreams and moments of rapture over my awareness of female divinity, and had begun to write poems about it, like my "Love Song to the Irishwoman"- strongly influenced by my childhood reading of romantic poems, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and of stories by George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, both of whom write eloquently of archetypal Woman as Goddess. Here's mine:

 

LOVE SONG TO THE IRISHWOMAN

 

Where was it I saw you first, dear Lady?

Was it in my mother's dark and shining eyes

As she looked down at me, swaddled, newly born?

 

Or later, when she read to me that lilting poem?

Did I see you there, down in the cellar,

Dancing with the potatoes, the Irish potatoes?

 

Or was it trotting by the bogside that I saw you,

Following the cows home at sunset glow,

Their full bags swinging?

 

Or following young Tom the sweep

Who wanted so much to be clean

And didn't know how -

Following after him unseen over the fells,

Your kirtle turned up obove the knees

To give bare legs and feet their freedom?

Are you Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by

Or Mrs. Be-done-by-as-you-did?

And how could you be both?

 

Or did I stand in the twilight road with Curdy

Gazing raptly at your golden moon hanging there in the night,

Lambent in the gathering dark,

Knowing what was to be yet always had been? -

The white-hot fragrance of your glowing bank of rosefire

From out of which my hands and arms would one day emerge

So coolly pure, so newly cleansed

And fitted now for what they had to do.

 

Or did I peer, tiny, safe, unfrightened,

Huddling with little Diamond,

From out the dark nest of your woven hair,

Even as you swept the night sky with your besom,

Roaring away above, uprooting trees, flattening houses,

Raising the ocean waters mountain high

To engulf mens' ships and scour the earth

Of its manmade dirtiness?

 

Your grandeur fills my being!

Your tenderness opens my heart.

The awesome beauty of your terrible wrath

Bows me to the ground:

Clothed in the dark and flowing robes of night,

The moon and stars your crown,

The sun your heart,

The earth your body,

Rain and wind your tears and your breath,

Lightning the fire of your anger -

 

You are the Mother of life and death alike,

Beauty Herself in all her forms.

And of ugliness?

Yes, even with ugliness you will treat,

Take on that form if you must,

Knowing the teratoid to be earth-spawned,

Not of yourself, yet still to be encompassed!

Still to be taken in,

Transformed by your rosefire.

 

Even as our monstrous offspring ravage the earth,

Can you yet forgive the blind and savage appetites

That spawned such as us in the days of our youth?

Turn not away but teach us still at this late hour -

And may I ever remember as I look at them joined in prayer

That my hands carry your very shape and function,

My clasp, your presence.

 

Oh, Lady, Lady!

All these years

I've been singing to you,

Yet knew you no better than Tom -

Still only catch a glimpse now and again -

These songs are for you.

Always were.

--July, 1984,,,,,\,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 

Reading Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman and Christine Downing's Goddess created in me a sort of passionate longing for actually seeing and dowsing Goddess sites in England and Europe, including stone circles in England, Cornwall and Scotland, and ancient altars and sacred sites in France and Greece.

 

Wondering which specific sites would be most fruitful to visit, a Sufi friend, Ganesh, who had become a member of our weekly growth group, suggested that I visit a woman acquaintance of his named Alice Howell, who was a Jungian astrologer and had done this kind of sacred travel, especially in the outer Hebrides and the ancient and sacred isle of Iona of Scotland - and in India and Greece. I visited her and jotted down her suggestions about places to visit, all of which I determined to try to get to. In fact, Alice's information was so rich and persuasive that it took me several years of trips to visit them all! The first of these was a pilgrimage to England, Scotland and several places in Europe about which I have written in an account I called Rushing to Eva, a Pilgrimage in Search of the Great Mother. What I learned on that trip has had a lifelong influence on the course of my life since that time.

 

Since one of my reasons for making this trip had also been to see for myself if what I had read in a book entitled Entering the World, and then another, Birth Reborn, filled with many pictures of birth, both by a French surgeon-turned-obstetrician/midwife named Michel Odent, was indeed true! Odent had a clinic in a little town named Pithiviers, some kilometers south of Paris, to which couples were coming from all over Europe and America to give birth in a "birthing pool" he used to allow them more emotional and physiological support for the birth. I wrote about this visit (in part) as follows:

 

My first efforts to make contact with Dr. Odent seemed hopeless. The woman at the desk sent me upstairs to the obstetrical floor, but the attendant there was adamant in asking me to leave at once, even holding the door to the stairs open and gesturing with her head. The nurse working with her seemed less sure, seemed to think she should tell the midwife about me, and ended taking me to her. The midwife seemed friendly, and called Dr. Odent on the phone and told him about me. Evidently he said she should bring me down to his office. She did, and held the door for me to enter. Dr. Odent was talking on the phone in English, telling someone about his recent trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had just given a talk. He gestured me to a seat. As soon as the call was completed, he reached out with a smile and shook hands with me, and began asking me questions.

 

I mentioned having read his article in David Boadella's journal, which seemed to please him, and gave him greetings from David. I told him I had also read both his books, that I had had some experience with midwifery, and had spent some time in London with Meloma Huxley at the Active Birth Center, and that I was interested in bringing home a better understanding of both principles of birth. Dr. Odent seemed struck by the fact that he had just been talking with a woman from the United States as I came in, and that he had just returned an hour or so before from his speaking engagement in the United States. The conversation flowed effortlessly. He seems a totally natural person whose feelings come out as they need to, and thoroughly benevolent. He asked if I enjoyed singing. I answered that I did, very much. He invited me to go and see the town and to come back at six in the evening to join them. I said I would, and left, walking on air. ...

 

Finally, quarter of six came, and I headed for the hospital. The young midwife (the French term for midwife is "sage femme," which I like!) met me at the top of the stairs and ushered me into the room where we were to gather. There were already four or five couples there, some with small children. There was a small upright piano with its back to the front of the room, a blackboard on the wall behind it, and some twenty folding chairs set up facing the piano. Beds lined one wall. More people kept coming in, and then a jolly, energetic-looking young woman holding a little girl of four or five by the hand, and a young man. He sat down at the piano, and she began speaking to everyone in the room. The first thing she had us do was to come up and place the palms of both hands flat on the wood of the piano while the pianist played octaves and arpeggios with the pedal down. She asked us to notice the vibrations in our hands. Next she had us place our palms against the wooden panels that lined one wall of the room while he played his octaves and arpeggios again, so that we could feel the vibrations there as well.

 

Then she had us sing various vowel and consonant combinations in ascending scales, over and over, allowing the vibrations to open up our sensibilities and the muscles of the scalp, face, neck, chest, diaphragm and belly. Sometime during this warmup period, Dr. Odent came in, and the little girl who had come in with the leader ran over and sat on his lap. She seemed a member of his family, and I decided the woman leading us must be either his wife or his daughter [I was wrong there!]. Now more couples came in, the women in dressing gowns with their tiny new babies in their arms, whom they kissed and crooned over repeatedly. Not one of these little ones cried throughout the entire evening, even though we continued for several hours! ...

 

The leader handed out a mimeographed sheet of traditional French folksongs, many of them the ones I used to sing as a small child! I felt delighted. She asked us to choose our favorite, and I chose "La Mère Michelle," which I have always loved, about the lady who has lost her cat, and is calling out the window to tell everyone. Actually, it has been stolen by the evil Monsieur Lustucru ("L'eus-tu cru? - would you have believed him?") who has sold it for meat!

 

In between songs, while the one we had just sung was being collected and the next one handed out, Dr. Odent introduced me to a German couple. The husband understood French, and seemed fairly at ease, but his wife did not. I spoke with them in my rudimentary German, and it seemed to please them to discover that someone else was to some extent an outsider. The wife was clearly at term, and they seemed delighted to be about to give birth there at the clinique. After a few more songs, Dr. Odent introduced me to an American couple, who also seemed pleased to see another "stranger" there. The wife was actually in mild labor. Knowing that these two couples were there felt like a bond to me, and heightened my pleasure and satisfaction at having come.

 

Dr. Odent disappeared some time during this part of the singing, although I didn't notice until the midwife tapped me on the shoulder and whispered to me that he wanted me to come with her. I rose at once and followed her. She led me through a room with buff-colored walls and a terra-cotta colored floor, cream-colored drapes over the window, and a large, square platform bed covered with a white sheet set off by a heap of intensely-colored cushions, a low table with an indirect light, and not much else I can remember.

 

The room beyond was also dimly lit, but otherwise felt different, being cool blue-green in tone, dominated by a sort of swimming pool six to seven feet across and two to two and one half feet high, filled with water. In the pool sat a dark-haired young woman, naked, holding a baby very tenderly in her arms just above the surface of the water, watched over by her husband, also naked, who sat behind her and a little to one side. Their heads were bent over the child, and they seemed hardly to notice my entry. I could not tell at that distance whether the baby was nursing or not, but I think it was. Dr. Odent stood at the other side of the pool, up to his knees in the water in his hospital whites, looking like a benevolent stork. The stillness, the palpable holiness in that room was so moving, I held my breath, nearly weeping. Dr. Odent leaned over to me and whispered, "The baby was just born in the water. Now you should go." I nodded and smiled, thanking him with my eyes, and followed the midwife back to the singing.

 

During the break between songs, I shared my awe and my joy at this sight, first with the German couple, then with the Americans. They both seemed delighted to hear of it. The American couple asked if I were planning to be at Pithiviers long, and if I could be at their birth. I was very touched, and told them that it felt very good to be asked, and that I would love to, but that I had to leave. It felt to me as though it would have been possible for me just to stay at the clinique and take part in their program for the rest of my life! And I should have liked to do it.

 

Soon Dr. Odent came back and we sang more songs. Then all the new fathers and fathers-to-be gathered at the piano and sang a song to their wives, which the wives answered. Back and forth they sang to each other. The theme was one of learning to speak to one another, learning to listen to each other's point of view. The songs from then on were about love between men and women, both joy and pain, about bringing a baby into the world and watching over them as they grew, finally letting them go. The last song was a berceuse with a rocking rhythm.

 

Then we danced! Waltzed. Dr. Odent grabbed my hand, pulled me to my feet, and before I could catch my breath, he was whirling me around and around and around! I really could hardly believe it was happening. How good it would be if all of life could be so beautiful, so simple and natural. We were all very high and joyous with the singing, dancing, and sharing. The leader and the pianist shook hands with me as they went out, saying they could see I enjoyed singing. I thanked them, saying how much I had indeed enjoyed it.

 

As the others filed out, I found myself alone with Dr. Odent, who was beginning to look tired - which is not surprising, considering the fact that he had just come back from a long plane trip! We conversed for a few minutes, he half-lying back on one of the beds against the wall. He asked a few more questions about our program, which I answered. I thanked him for his hospitality, and told him I would like to know if he could come to Albany to speak with obstetricians and other people involved with pregnancy and birth if I could arrange it. He said he could, and that we would work it out by letter.

 

Then it was time to go. Dr. Odent accompanied me to the door at the top of the stairs, and we said goodbye. Leaving the hospital, I felt light as a feather - which was lucky, because I tripped over a low curb in the pitch dark right over onto my nose, and scraped it! I was too high even to care! I let myself into my cold barn, peed, and unfolded four blankets to huddle under. I was asleep in no time.

Michel turned out to be the "French doctor" of whom Alan Vaughn at the Dick Sutphen seminar in Sedona had prophesied! The following year he came over to Albany to give us a well-attended workshop on birth. During the next few years, I also began making trips to England, on one of which I visited a wonderful birth support center in London being run by a young South African woman named Meloma Balaskas Huxley, whose marriage to Francis Huxley had broken up some time before. I believe it was Michel Odent who had suggested I visit the Center. Mel was a most cordial and affectionate person, and I stayed with her for several days, learning about the birth modality which she and her sister-in-law Janet Balaskas had started which they called The Active Birth Center.  

Hearing in 1985 that Mel Huxley was planning an extended stay in America following the return from South Africa of her sister-in-law Janet to resume the leadership of the Active Birth Center, we invited Mel to give a workshop in the Capital District. The notice for this gathering gives a good idea of our concept of our proper role in the area of midwifery:

 

MEL HUXLEY is an internationally-known pre-natal teacher who conducts her classes at THE ACTIVE BIRTH CENTRE in London, England. She is in this country for six months, and will be speaking to groups concerned with the quality of childbirth in several cities both in the United States and in Canada. Her goal is both to acquaint Americans with what is happening in this field in England and on the continent, and to learn from us what is happening in this country.

 

Mrs. Huxley is the sister-in-law of Janet Balaskis, author of the best-selling book Active Birth. Along with Janet and her husband Arthur, Mel's brother, she is a founder of the Active Birth Movement in England. ABM is based on a concept of childbirth which trains couples in a process for undergoing labor and birth which gives the woman far more control of the course of her labor than has previously been thought possible.

The process involves a combination of physical, emotional and educational elements not unlike those promoted so effectively by childbirth teachers trained in Lamaze, Bradley and Reed methods of childbirth preparation, but takes these principles a step further in a manner which gives mothers-to-be an even stronger sense of their own power in the birth process. The active birth process, like the other childbirth methods mentioned, is not one which necessitates birth at home, but is readily adaptable to hospital conditions, given cooperative hospital personnel.

 

The principles of active birth are presently being practiced in two clinics abroad - one near London, under the supervision of Dr. Yehudi Gordon, and the other in Pithiviers, France, under the aegis of Dr. Michel Odent, author of Birth Reborn. In this country, the Birth Center of the Manhattan Maternity Association offers couples the same kind of active, parent-centered birth promoted by ABM. It is the same philosophy of birth practiced by any really humane and effective childbirth educator, midwife, and/or obstetrician, but the manner of delivering the message of control of labor involves the combining of new ingredients in that process. Thus, ABM could properly be called a philosophy of birth in the same spirit as that presented in books which emphasize the spiritual element such as Spiritual Midwifery,by Ina May Gaskin, Transformation by Birth, by Claudia Panuthos and Childbirth with Insight, by Elizabeth Noble. ...

 

The Balaskas books New Life and Active Birth; a Birthrights Rally attended by 5000 people and two International Conferences on Active Birth have brought about many changes in hospitals in England over the past three years, especially since the work of Michel Odent has come to public attention in a BBC Television film showing instinctive active birth in his maternity unit near Paris.

Meloma has run the Active Birth Centre in London for the past two years and is currently on a 6-month visit to the USA and Canada.

Squatting to give birth is not merely a bodily posture but an attitude os mind. Giving birth in this way a woman takes full responsibility for the birth of her baby. She is not a helpless patient having the baby extracted from her body; but is fully participating in the act of birth.

The sense of achievement and satisfaction, even excitement this brings to the mother is the feeling with which she greets her newborn; and the baby undrugged and alert responds to this greeting. This is the beginning of a lifelong bond; the closest, most intimate relationship of our lives.

Some women given the right environment at birth will instinctively move around during labour and stand, squat or kneel to give birth.

 

Others need to be opened to the possibility of giving birth in this way. We have become stiff and set in our ways and can no longer adopt the positions natural to birth. Stiffness is a psychological habit, an attitude of mind which has become set in the musculature of the body. By practising natural birth positions a woman can regain the range of movement the body is designed to make and change her way of seeing herself, the baby and the birth.This enhances her chances of giving birth actively, even if the atmosphere at birth is not optima, and increases her enjoyment of the birth.

 

With Janet's return to London, the timing for a new international Midwifery Conference in London, England was ripe. Receiving a notice of the conference in somewhere around 1988, Betsy Mercogliano and I decided to go, and invited Cynthia Tomko, a friend who was interested in becoming a midwife, to go with us. It was a huge gathering of midwives and other people with involved with or advoating for natural birth. Everyone we had read about or spoken with was there, including Sheila Kitzinger, Elizabeth Noble, Ina May Gaskin, Drs. Michel Odent, Yehudah Gordon, and Marsden Freeman, the Commissioner of Public Health in the United States whose awareness of the high mortality rate among newborn infants in the U.S. had led him to explore the much more favorable birth statistics for home birth. We also visited Michel Odent in London, where he had moved - now remarried and with a tiny son - who was offering home births to London women.

 

 

We drove around England after the conference, ending up by visiting Elsa Corbluth again in Dorset. She took this picture of the three of us at the top of a ruined chapel dedicated to St. Elizabeth in nearby Abbotsbury.

... I spent most of my time at the school, working with members of the school community at my "office" at 4 Elm St., or, increasingly, as a birth attendant and nascent midwife, The almost completely rehabbed building at 20 Elm Street now became the location for a new service to families. The (relative) success of Nancy and Howie's home birth, and Betsy's enthusiastic new ambition to become a midwife herself led to several new developments. The word got around in the hippy community, and I was asked to do several more home births. I gratefully agreed to let Betsy assist me, and we soon developed a good working partnership as birth attendants. After teaching in the school for eight years, she enrolled in nurse's training at the Nursing School at Albany Medical Center Hospital, at my suggestion. We decided to call it The Family Life Center, which would offer, initially at no or very low cost to anyone who wanted to use us, a variety of services such as medical and legal self-help education. Our main reason for doing this was to try to help solve the problem of the high cost of various kinds of support usually provided only for middle-class families to those with very limited incomes. The interesting thing we discovered as we went along was the fact that the more we worked with families to help them get what they wanted - leaving cost out of the equation - the more we realized how revolutionary our concept was, and also how much it was a logical extension of the concept of a school which belongs to the families who use it.

 

During the year we were still located in the old building at 45 Franklin Street, I had developed an organic foods store (which I had named the Down-to-Earth Natural Foods Store) in the front room of the school, and had moved it to the front room of the new school at 8 Elm Street. This was not really a very good place for the store, and so, when we had finished rehabbing the basement of the new building at 20 Elm Street, the store was moved into the back room. Nancy, who was now working as a regular teacher in our little upstairs day care center, had previously run a very successful natural foods store farther uptown for several years, and agreed to manage the new store for us. The front room of the basement now became the location of our weekly Wednesday group.

 

I wrote speculatively about the results of our school's metamorphosis into a community, analyzing the form our little enterprise had apparently grown into with what I felt I had observed about other social institutions:

 

Another interesting discovery we made has been the way in which the form of an institution follows the way in which it functions. One has a goal in mind, and one encounters obstacles in achieving that goal. The question is always, if something in the form of the institution is working to help create this obstacle, how can we change that form to resolve the problem? This is fairly straightforward. But the next question is, what effect will this change have on the way the school operates internally; and will the change in some way change our goal by producing different results from the ones we had had in mind? And if so, what?

 

My surmise is that a lot of schools start out being quite flexible and even experimental, and thus, exciting places for children to go to school, but end up becoming a caricature of themselves as a result of modifying their goals instead of retaining their original insight into how a school can be. They fit the children increasingly into the structure of the school instead of continuing to fit the structure to the child; and the excitement dies! When this happens, my belief is that it is the last thing parents and most teachers are likely to notice, but will attribute the change to the children themselves, and will act accordingly, in the time-honored way of blaming the victim.

 

Another "solution" to such a problem may be to adopt a belief that, after all, schooling (in a formal sense of the word) isn't very important (as Neill seems to have done - at least, if you take his writings literally, which is always a mistake! - at Summerhill). If a child is bright, he can always pick up skills elsewhere when he decides he wants them - and that to insist he learn them in this school would be tantamount to joining the other schools this one was set up to be an alternative to. Hm. True? Not to me. At least, not as a prescription for setting school policy. Let me explain, because it sounds as though I were saying, "But of course you've got to make children learn!" No, no. That's not it, for me.

 

To me "not making them do things" is a necessary strategy for living with kids who have strong ideas about what they do or do not want to do. Yes, I am going to let them "do their own thing," but I am not going to characterize my willingness to let them make their own choices as necessarily indicative of their inherent wisdom or autonomy - because it may not be either of those things. It may be indicative of inner pathology which warrants my deep concern, and ignoring which may constitute gross negligence! I do not want to use the modality of regulatory definition to bury my failures or send them off to other schools, as Neill did, for example. I know, because I asked him and he said, "Of course!"

 

Thus I cannot label as unequivocally splendid everything I chose to advocate and practice in my school. I know the "line" concerning "real democracy," but I can't tout it as a universal container for my own motivation. I'm not that much in command of my own "shadow" side, which sometimes takes on a life of its own. My motivation to pursue real democracy is sometimes absolutely true of me - but not necessarily. I can't turn my intentionality into a generalization! I personally love teaching and learning too much to toss them into the melting pot of "self-regulation" by or for kids. It seems to me a naive discount of myself as teacher to turn this much over to them. My kids love learning because I do - among other reasons. I refuse to leave myself out of the equation!

 

There is, of course, a real paradox involved in such a philosophy of education as I have just expounded. At first glance it doesn't appear to have anything in common with the outlook on total educational self-regulation/choice so brilliantly explicated by Dan Greenberg in all his pieces on the philosophy of Sudbury Valley School nor with Summerhill or The Highland School in West Virginia or Lewis-Wadhams (now defunct), to name a few examples of self-defined democratic alternative schools. Hey! - I'm not doubting that they are truly democratic! That's not what I'm on about!

 

The paradox, for me, inheres in the fact that, with the possible exception of old Neill, who was himself a walking paradox, all of these good people may be leaving out of the accounts they give of their schools the strong bias toward learning and the transmission of our common cultural heritage inherent in their own backgrounds and the backgrounds of other staff in their schools and thus brought to the children in the form of intangibles such as their personal impact as models, their school's educational/cultural facilities, initial selection of teachers and so on - and thus of fascinating alternatives subliminally available to children.

 

This marriage between the ideological Spartanism of their words and the Athenian cultural wealth of the environments they provide for their kids creates a strange but wonderfully paradoxical environment which must be for these kids inherently fascinating and exciting - but to subsume all of this under the rubric of "democracy" strikes me as (unintendedly) obfuscatory. And it gets expressed at the expense of a lot of other alternative educational programs which may actually be equally good for kids but just not "do" it the same way!

 

My belief is that there may indeed be a large gap between such an ideological-cum-experiential mix and many run-of-the-mill middle class alternative schools - as Dan Greenberg insists there is - perhaps, as he says, even most such schools! If so, I would surmise that these alternative schools may have, as it were, fallen inadvertently into a false position, perhaps in one of the ways I suggested above of gradually modified policy-making in response to unresolved problems - as seems to have happened to Lu Vorys' Metropolitan School in Columbus, Ohio (see Lu's account in Challenging the Giant, volume I), and to another Coalition member school in a New York downstate community which its founder told me about some years ago, with great sorrow for its premature demise. The latter finally succumbed for lack of students, having retreated a step at a time from their original policy of curricular and other forms of self-regulation by students.

 

Basically, I believe education to be a fundamental political - not just a social - problem of democracy. We have the schools which our relative maturity as a people permits and reflects. Approaching possible solutions to our educational problems needs to be regarded as akin to therapy for a national as well as a personal disease. In proposing specific measures intended to provide symptomatic relief for these problems, we run the risk of masking a far more fundamental illness which we may be reluctant to face as a people and a culture. To me the basic problem is often one of institutionalized heartlessness, and as such is shared by us all, alternative schoolers, home schoolers and public schoolers alike.

 

It is my belief that the two institutions which create the worst feelings of helplessness on the part of families are the educational and the medical ones. A parent who runs into conflict with either of them can be seriously damaged, even jailed! People who accept the consequences for their children of the model of life on which these social institutions are based have no trouble they cannot handle, but if they cannot accept these beliefs and still have no other options, then they are going to feel bound into the larger society and hence to its rules. To belong to one of the clinics run by medically-insured health plans or to have group medical insurance necessitates a certain level of income, which insures that poor people have their "own" medical care and effectively shuts out anyone else. A young couple wanting to have a baby is going naturally to assume the necessity of a certain level of income in order to pay for this child's medical care.

 

But even this distinction of class doesn't touch the heart of the problem as I see it. The real problem is the extent to which our society robs parents and children of their autonomy, starting right at birth, and continuing on through childhood. The outcome is, or may be, good for the society (although I actually do not believe that it is), but it creates all sorts of problems for the recipients of the "system." I'm not laying all our social problems at the doors of the schools and doctors' offices, but I am saying that in having taken over the traditional teaching functions which once belonged to parents and neighbors, they are responsible by default for the fact that people grow up and have children without either proper personal or social support and information with which to play the roles.

 

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