As I neared the end of my pregnancy, I took the same drive on a giant highway I do almost every day to get to work. Today, in a new way, I noticed the grackles and doves and other birds that somehow survive in this urban landscape. I saw the plants that break through the cracks in the sea of concrete.
My first thought was about the resilience of Mother Earth. We’ve put her through so much and somehow she keeps evolving and surviving.
But I hold this thought alongside another truth — what if she didn’t have to be so exhaustingly resilient?
Brianna Childs Davenport
I live in the city of Houston, one of the highway capitals of the world. Oil and gas and highway construction (and all the greed inherent to these) are king, and regard for the earth is minimal if not non-existent for most of our people with power.
This disregard for Mother Earth is perfectly parallel to our country’s disregard for mothers.
There is an obsession with praising the resilience of mothers, especially on Mother’s Day. But what if instead we changed our culture and policies to help mothers thrive?
I’m writing this in the throes of my fourth trimester, with my perfect daughter napping in my lap. I’m newly postpartum and still healing from so many changes to how I hoped my birth and postpartum experience might go. I have experienced severe pain, extreme grief and haunting anxiety. And all of that even with an amazing support system and a lot of privilege.
I have an extremely supportive husband. I have the means to get a doula who advocated for and comforted me through my pregnancy, labor and postpartum. A friend gifted me a session with a lactation consultant who I desperately reached out to when breastfeeding took an unexpected turn and my baby lost too much weight in the first week. I have the friend who’s a pelvic floor physical therapist to aid in my recovery and walk alongside me. I have unbelievable friends and church community members who signed up for our meal train and gifted us meals for weeks and weeks. I have a beautiful job as pastor of a church whose policy was 12 weeks of paid leave before I even came on staff (one of the lucky few). I have so many friends and family who sent encouraging texts, checked on me and provided baby girl with ample supplies.
And I still have felt exhausted and sad and every other emotion under the sun. I still have been in pain and felt lonely and isolated. All this and my gratitude have co-existed.
“Our country is a pro-birth country, not a pro-life country.”
And all of it has further confirmed that our country is a pro-birth country, not a pro-life country.
If our country cared about mothers and children, we would have paid family leave as a law. According to Pew Research, among 41 countries, only the U.S. lacks paid parental leave. In fact, a number of countries offer more than a year of paid leave — Bulgaria, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, Austria, Slovakia, Latvia, Norway and Slovenia.
If our country cared about mothers and children, we would care about how Black mothers are three times as likely to die in childbirth as white mothers. We would make it so we don’t have the highest rates of maternal mortality among high-income nations, with 80% of those deaths being preventable. We would care that pregnancy is not a neutral health experience; it is dangerous and transformative.
If our country cared about mothers and children, we would have these resources I was able to access included in insurance, readily available at the hospital. There would be well-paid doulas, lactation consultants, pelvic physical therapists, childbirth educators and perinatal-trained therapists and other mental health professionals in great numbers so every new mother could have this support.
Child care would be way more affordable, if not free.
Groceries would be an actual priority and affordable, not just a pawn in a political game.
The conversation about the inequitable portion of the mental load and household labor women bear would be even more pervasive. Domestic labor would be respected and valued.
Our society would see the error in our hyper-individualism and obsession with the family unit and instead see the beauty of the village. We were meant to live as a collective all along.
Growing up, I heard constant messaging in Christianity about becoming a mother as the main purpose of a woman. So why don’t Christians vote and advocate for women so it’s a better experience?
“What if we made it so birth is an embodied, holy and empowering experience for everyone?”
I already know I’m extremely resilient as a woman and now especially as a new mother. I already know the veil is so thin between death and new life in that delivery room. So what if we made it so we didn’t have to be quite so isolated, exhausted and scared? What if we made it so birth is an embodied, holy and empowering experience for everyone?
Resilience is understood and the baseline, so let’s instead do our part to help mothers not just survive but thrive in this sacred transition. If we really cared about families, things would look a lot different.
It would look a lot different in how we treat the earth too. They’re both rooted in a patriarchy that overlooks, dismisses and often downright disrespects Mother Earth and mothers.
I dream of a world where women don’t have to fear for their lives in birth or feel completely alone in their postpartum. I dream of a world where all creation is cared for, and we start acting like we know this is the only earth we have.
Like the great Wendell Berry, who we sadly lost recently, said, “The earth is what we all have in common.”
One might also say being born from a mother is another thing we all have in common. There is so much opportunity to care for the earth and to care for mothers. I believe we have the means to provide all this and more, if only we would prioritize it.
Brianna Childs Davenport serves as executive pastor of Gather Houston. She loves to spend time exploring (usually by bike and often looking for birds) with her husband, Blake, their new daughter, Ramona, and their dog, Diggory.