Mothers and Midwives Movement

03/06/2023

😝

20/05/2023

Here’s your weekend funny 😆

08/05/2023

Question, how did they know about the s***m and egg which can only be seen with a microscopic, 6000 years ago?? 🧐
Incredible!

The stone carvings on the walls of the Varamurthyeswarar temple in Tamil Nadu (India, naturally) depict the process of human conception and birth.
If the different stages of pregnancy surprise no one, the depiction of fertilization is simply unthinkable. Thousands of years before the discovery of these very cells, before ultrasound and the microscope, a detailed process of how cells meet, merge and grow in a woman's womb is carved on a 6000-year-old temple.

05/05/2023

International Midwives Day, 5th of May, is a day to salute the hardest working women I know, who no matter what, will wake up in the night to stand with a pregnant woman as she experiences her awakening powerfully stepping into motherhood.

Birthing in New Zealand is seen internationally as the gold standard of maternity care. Continuity-of-care most certainly is mother and baby centric, but it comes at an emotional and physical cost for the midwife. Prior to 2021 there were shortages within midwifery that were later heavily compounded by the Government mandates. As we have moved on from Covid, it is now time the mandates were dropped to allow mandated midwives to return to their profession and students back to their education, for the strain is real, birthing units are barely covered with safe staffing levels, which is neither safe for our babies/pēpē our women/wāhine or the midwives holding the sacred birthing space.

📣It is time that New Zealanders woke up to the plight of their maternity system before it is too late.

So for the Midwives doing it tough out there, we see you, we hear you and respect you, and we pray each day that your voices will be heard and that you will be treated like the warrior queens that you truly are, with honour and gratitude. 💗🫶

10/04/2023

“A healthy baby should not be the ceiling” quite right, a ‘healthy birthing experience’ should be the bench mark over and above a healthy live born baby. To achieve both it is imperative that continuity-of-care is maintained.

Continuity-of-care supports and underpins the midwife mother relationship, it’s within this relationship that connection and trust is built over time, through various discussions regarding health and mother led birthing plans that form the foundation for this dyad. If the knowing midwife is in tune with the mother it enables the birth dance to unfold gently at it’s own pace with minimal conversation, this allows the birthing woman to remain in her primal birthing brain - her ‘woman’s cave’ safe, in the dark, away from bother to birth calmly in peace.

"A healthy baby is all that matters"
🤱🏽 Let’s be clear. A healthy baby is NOT all that matters (of course it is essential but should not be the only focus)
This is said so often to women, but what does it really mean?
🤱🏽 Maternity services often focus primarily on the safety and well-being of the baby.
So when the baby is born alive and well, it doesn't seem to matter what the woman had to go through to achieve that as the only outcome.
🤱🏽 But we have to keep repeating the message that WOMEN MATTER TOO.
Birthing people matter. We all matter, and physical and psychological safety is as important for the mother as well as her infant.
As midwives, doulas, maternity support workers and obstetricians - what we do and how we do it, what we say and how we say it - can make a woman’s birth experience either transforming or harrowing.
So of course, everyone wants a healthy baby - but that should be the minimum of what we seek and not the ceiling.
You need to be informed and educated so that you can ensure that your choices and decisions are in your control - do not hand over your power.💪
Photo image - unknown (but thank you!)

06/04/2023

Happy Easter to you all, Mother’s and Midwives still doing the mahi through this public holiday break, whilst marking the time of the year with reverence and hopefully consuming a little chocolate and some hot cross buns to keep you going.

Embrace yourselves for you are powerful, strong, soft women/wahine The feminine goddess.

‘Perhaps, most of all, we are what we accept, what we allow to be important, what we embrace about each other, and ourselves.’

— Call the Midwife

i am always bending low to pick things up that call to me with their soft, insistent voices, that whisper words that make the inside of my head pause for a little while.

these words from the popular television series, Call the Midwife, did just that for me.

i am not a great television watcher, always preferring books to most things on the box, but i do love this series. there is a lot of quiet wisdom.

this is one of those quotes, the meaning of which, will be vastly different to each person reading it.

i only know that it deserved to be shared—it is that rich in wisdom.

liezel