I need your story.

Yes, yours. Your story about how you became a parent. Your story about pregnancy. Your birth story. How you recovered. And those cocooned weeks of early motherhood that were so hard for you and that you thought no one else could understand. No matter how typical or extreme, I need them.

For what?

I’m writing a book.

I want to find out how we are similar and why. We all live in this American culture and sometimes we don’t realize how it affects us. And it most certainly does. I want to read across many narratives about these experiences in America in hopes of finding common patterns and themes that reveal seeds of truth about our culture.

Why?

Because our culture creates unspoken assumptions about what is good or bad, safe or unsafe. Forty years ago, it was standard practice in American hospitals to separate newborns from their mothers after birth. Dozens of them would lie in rolling hospital cribs parked in the nursery rather than cuddled in their mothers’ arms. Why? Because our culture dictated it. “Mothers needed their rest” was the rationale. Now, we know that keeping infants with their mothers after birth drastically reduces negative outcomes. So doesn’t it make you wonder—What are we doing now that is still based on assumptions? And why do we automatically do these things?

As Americans, we are especially at risk of cultural blindness because our language is the most prestigious around the globe and our culture is the most heavily propagated in worldwide media. We are more likely to see our culture as “normal” and other cultures as “exotic.”

That’s why I’m writing this book.

I want to read across narratives of parents to find out what we assume is normal and how it has had consequences in our lives. I want to see what emerges when I put our stories together. What can we learn about the American experience when it comes to pregnancy, birth, and beyond? And how can we make changes in our society to stop behaviors and assumptions that harm us?

So why an ethnography?

The best way to investigate and explore the topic of birth is to actually give birth. This makes the ethnographic role of participant-observer especially useful in exploring this topic. In this book, I will be telling parts of my story and stories from contributors like you that represent common patterns and themes that emerge from my analysis. The end goal is to give light to some of these unspoken assumptions, values, and beliefs that can subconsciously affect our decision-making about one of the most important events of our lives: becoming parents.

Will you tell me about what happened to you, how it made you feel, what others said to you, and even what they didn’t say? Let’s find out what we have in common. Let’s explore what it means to give birth in America today. Let’s find out what causes us pain and heartache. In doing so, we learn, and in learning, we become free.  Will you join me?

I hope you will.

~Sharon Tjaden-Glass

For more information about this project, visit this website: http://ethnographyofamericanbirth.wordpress.com/

To share your story, visit this page: http://ethnographyofamericanbirth.wordpress.com/contribute/