Matrona Diaries #2- Keeping it real & talking about the Golden Hour

I had good intentions. A blog per week. Its been a month. How did that happen?

I usually have good intentions and its the execution or discipline that can sometime fall short. I find it really difficult sometimes to keep commitments I’ve made to myself and I do a good job of beating myself up for not meeting those commitments. Sometimes it feels like so much is happening, the world changing so quickly, that its difficult to gage how much capacity you will have for creating the things you desire. Best thing I can do is just start fresh each new day, so here we are and if you are reading this, thank you for the time you take to do so. Hopefully you aren’t feeling similar to me in this space.

Regardless of the time it took to sit down and write this, I knew immediately in week two of the Matrona that I would blog about Golden Hour. I first learned about the golden hour reading the book Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce. Reading this book gave me an new perspective on birth, postpartum and early childhood development, and while all aspects of birth are miraculous and sacred, the golden hour in particular has a criticality to how the burgeoning new family bonds and starts their journey together. I was able to recognise that this experience did not occur during my birth, and see some of the downstream effects of what that had done to my bonds with my family and the way we operated and interacted with each other. Boiling down a lifetime of a challenging relationship with my mother and father, I could see with impact the lack of golden hour had, and since learning of it, I have seen its effects- and what life looks like for people who have experienced this, and those who haven’t.

The Golden hour is the time immediately following birth, where a mother and baby (partner can be included as well) share uninterrupted bonding time. Usually this is done with skin on skin contact, the mother holding the newborn, connecting, bonding, soothing the newly birthed child. Perhaps the newborn is still covered in the precious vernix they were coated in as they passed through the birth canal, and perhaps she is gently rubbing that protective coating into the baby resting on her. This gentle massage is the first time mother and baby are co-regulating their nervous systems together. Relaxing from the intense journey they have just travelled together, and resting before they launch together into the many more journeys to come.

In this time, the baby and mother are receiving a cocktail of hormones that cascade post birth, including oxytocin, the hormone of love. They are looking into each others eyes, finally seeing each other face to face and the baby is recognising the voice they have been hearing in utero. If the baby and mother are able to rest and relax into this bliss filled place, natural instincts have an easier time kicking in, like the instinct to feed. Being right on their mothers skin, they can smell the milk that will be released to nourish them. They can see the dark nipples and line up their mothers belly through their newly adapting eyes. These hormones tell the mothers body that the baby is now out of the womb. Oxytocin, while creating a cocktail of love, also relaxes smooth muscle tissues, signalling to the uterus to start contracting back to a smaller size now that it is unoccupied, and signalling the placenta to release from the uterine wall. What is most helpful during this time is to leave this process uninterrupted and undisturbed until the mother naturally feels ready to transition out of this time. This is their time, and it is sacred.

If you could imagine this experience from the baby’s perspective, they have just completed a very intense journey to arrive in their mothers arms, and being surrounded by completely new environment and surroundings, their anchor to this earth is still their mother. To be separated from her, especially immediately, can not only interrupt the physiological hormone cascade but has created separation from that anchor, and the developing psyche has now experienced a fracture to their connection to the world. In a sense they have the potential to become untethered.

Speaking from my own life experience with my mother, I had felt a deep lack of bonding with her for as long as I could remember, and grew to be an anxiously attached adult. I had a very typical western hospital birth in the 80s. My mother delivered me on her back, I broke her tailbone on the way out, and I was caught from her body into the gloved hands and scrub wearing medical team in the delivery room, where I was immediately carted around by these blue strangers to be washed, weighed, tested, bundled up head to toe and then placed into the arms of my very overwhelmed and emotionally undernourished mother. All this was very normal and just how it was at the time. We struggled to connect, I struggled to breastfeed, she struggled to heal from the trauma and bond with me. She was just as bewildered as I was, and that is how I see her face when I look at photos of my birth that my father took to document the moment. When I read Magical Child, I saw many places in our relationship where that feeling was initiated and then reinforced, the lack of golden hour being a very specific experience I could look to. My mother left her physical body in 2022 in the same hospital she gave birth to me in, and in her passing I have been able to make so much peace with our relationship, and find compassion and forgiveness for the way we were. It makes perfect sense to me now.

Separate from my own experience and fresh in my learning of golden hour, I have seen how this critical time has impacted other families, other relational bonds and our society overall. I see this as one starting place for us to help heal the wounds that tend to permeate society. How can we start that? I think it is by informing mothers about the golden hour during pregnancy and protecting this experience for those who will be giving birth in the future. We also need to inform adults that are on their own healing journey, and hold space for the processing of this experience if one becomes aware of their own experience being less than ideal. In my case, I had a wonderful friend who is a massage therapist facilitate for me a ceremonial experience for recapturing my golden hour. She comforted and soothed me, petting my hair and gently rubbing my back as I laid on her massage table in the fetal position or in child’s pose. I could feel my nervous system receiving an upgrade and balance that I had not experienced before, and the effects of that experience have remained. My ability to regulate my nervous system vastly improved, my anxiety has diminished and I am healing the ways I show up in relationships based upon my fears and anxieties of separation. It felt miraculous, and also made perfect sense to me. I am so grateful to her intuition and tender care.

There is so much to birth, and while learning about these commonly missed and vital developmental moments, it can sometimes be very deflating and depressing just thinking about how much suffering this has created in the world. In these places I always like to remind myself that we have the power and the capacity to heal what we have experienced that created suffering- all is not lost. I am so grateful for that to be my experience and my prayer is that every mother and child who wish to have their space and sacredness respected and protected receive their golden hour, and that every child who did not receive it, is able to find the awareness to reclaim it.