She is thrilled. My 5-year-old daughter may soon attend, for the first time ever, the birth of a baby. Though we don’t, necessarily, celebrate birthdays annually, I thought of it as a gift — a major blessing, a milestone — for her upcoming 6th birthday anniversary.

My sweet daughter is ready to witness such a miracle, I’m sure of it, and the birthing parents are the perfect gentle and loving couple to welcome her attendance. I’m simply tingly with excitement.

So my little one, Eliana, and I have talked about what a 2 a.m. phone call means: No matter how blessedly you’re sleeping, you have to get up quickly; get dressed quickly; brush your teeth quickly; make sure you have your things quickly; and get out the door — you guessed it — quickly.

Preparing her for the call — and, more importantly, for the birth itself — is just as fun as anything Eliana and I have ever done together in 6 years. We’ve had long talks about how to be a servant to the family and to the midwife, about being quiet and respectful, about the seriousness and sanctity of what happens.

We’ve talked about the gross stuff. (Yes, often there’s poop at births.) We’ve talked about the scary stuff, though I’ll be opportunistic and tell you there just isn’t usually much scary stuff at home births. (These are not “A Baby Story” births.) We’ve talked about the fact that circumstances might change or that she might sleep through it altogether.

All this talking is purposeful: I want to teach her. I want her to learn something from me. I want her to find her calling in life, and it’s possible midwifery — or something close to it — is it. But even if she never wants to pursue anything along these lines, I am confident I am required to, at least, pass on what I know, mother to daughter.



WRITING ABOUT MOTHER-DAUGHTER relationships is what I’m supposed to be doing here. A column ago I wrote about mother-son, and in time, I want to touch on all family relationships, as each is unique.

Frankly, I find the mother-daughter relationship more challenging than mother-son. That’s because I struggle with knowing what it means to be a woman, a mother, in general.

Thus, a digression:

For much of my life, the dye of woman was cast to me by pop culture, which is frightening.

In the 1960s and in the 1970s, a woman was a bra burner. In the 1980s she was a corporate executive. In the 1990s she became a soccer mom with khakis, running shoes and a minivan. Today, she can be a lot of things, but mostly, she’s someone who is supposed to “do it all” — everything from extravagant themed birthday parties to master’s degrees to a refrigerator stocked with organic eats — and do it all well.

Parallel to those stereotypes along the years has been what I call Mrs. Cleaver, a character from a television show I’m too young to have watched with any regularity but have seen a time or two. She’s a religious icon.

You know that housewife. She is coiffed and perfected in all things domestic. She keeps a beautiful, orderly home; she manages to serve three square meals a day from a tidy kitchen; she has the ultimate kindergarten-teacher ways with her children; she sews and cans and probably bakes lots of cookies; she’s a perfect size 6 in a straight skirt (despite those cookies); she takes the “Obey your husband” mandate taught from Bible letters seriously, which greatly annoys the feminists.

As I grew into a woman myself, none of these roles seemed right to me, not one. I knew there was something wrong with burning my bra, pursuing a shark-tank career as an end in itself, and trying to “do it all.” I definitely struggled with Mrs. Cleaver, whom I have yet to find in the Scriptures, by the way.

But I also have yet to find the “right” woman, and thus I struggle with who I am and what I do. That struggle, then, makes it difficult for me to know just how to help shape my daughters, for I certainly don’t want to leave them subject to pop culture — or to Mrs. Cleaver either.



IN THE MEANTIME, while I continue to wrestle and wrangle with femininity, I’ve decided to go ahead and pass on to my daughters what I DO know with hopes that they will pursue their roles in life even as they learn what they are as I do.

So Eliana. If circumstances warrant, she’ll get a taste of the ultimate in womanhood — childbirth. (No matter what, you have to admit birthing is an inherently feminine process.) I’m hopeful she catches the beauty, the bittersweetness in birthing and the strength and weakness required for birthing. I’m hopeful we get to kneel — together — to serve a family, to greet a baby.

Then I hope we’ll talk about it some more, as I will next week about this mother-daughter thing.



Goshen News columnist Stephanie Price is a wife, mother, teacher, childbirth educator, midwife’s assistant and nursing student living in Union, Mich. Contact her at wholefamily@goshennews.com, (269) 641-7249 or on Facebook at the page “Whole Family Column by Steph Price.