Twice Alive: A Spiritual Guide to Mothering Through Pregnancy and the Child’s First Year
By Beth Osnes

Twice Alive: A Spiritual Guide to Mothering Through Pregnancy and the Child’s First Year Beth Osnes WovenWord Press, 2005 Just released in April 2005

Osnes takes readers through her third pregnancy, offering a traveler's theme for each stage she calls, "what to watch for on this leg of the journey" and weaving in very well-written journal entries along with suggestions for women. While there are many books about pregnancy and birth – they are written from the outside… focusing on symptoms and checklists. Osnes writes from the inside out, never wavering from her quest to be all that she is and all she can become.

Twice Alive, as the title suggests, is two narratives. One is the story, with all its treasures, of conscious pregnancy, birth and early mothering. The second story is how the first one both informed and transformed Osnes. By watching herself, writing down the good and bad, noticing what affected her as a mother and as a woman, she cultivated a mindful practice.

I could call it mindful mothering but it is much more than that. It is the ripening of a human's life. It is the nourishing of a spiritual life, fed by ordinary moments seen as daily miracles.

When the baby is inside the mother, there is a calm complete feeling, knowing the baby is safe within, one with you, perfectly surrounded…Once the baby is out, there is the wild satisfaction of seeing your baby, holding it, sensually drinking in the child…and there sets in a yearning for being closer than is possible... the yearning kicks its heels deep into you and will stay with you always, making you feel that you can never hold your child closely enough, that you can never look at her face long enough, that you can never spend enough time with her even if you are together all day. This, I think, is love. Love seems to require separation or there can be no object and agent, two distinct beings.

In the second part of the book, Osnes shares how she took her mothering onto the stage in her one-woman show, The Mother Load. She takes it into the founding of an organization, Mother Acting Up, a movement "to summon the gigantic political strength of mothers to ensure the health, education and safely of every child, not just a privileged few."

"Parenting is a public art," writes Osnes and indeed it is. We share our mothering when we walk around with our big pregnant bellies. We display ourselves when we breastfeed on a park bench, feed our toddler goldfish crackers in the grocery store, run down the street helping our kindergarten learn to ride a two-wheelers. Osnes has taken her personal life and deliberately chose how she wanted all of us to see it. In this book, she offers her examined life and we are changed in her presence.

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Twice Alive: A Spiritual Guide to Mothering Through Pregnancy and the Child's First Year; $17.50

Copyright © 2005 Anna Stewart. All rights reserved worldwide.