Janel Mirendah

The Baby Keeper

I am an Attachment and Birth Trauma Therapist and an expert in newborn communication.  I teach mothers and fathers the art of listening to their baby.

My book, currently titled, “Listening to Babies,” continues to gestate.
I am a fierce advocate for protecting the soul’s experience of coming into being and I coined the moniker, Baby Keeper, and did the logo here, in early 2000s.

I coined the word, Baby Keeper, and the definition, after I was exposed to the work of Jeannine Parvati Baker who coined the phrase Birth Keeper. I was fortunate to correspond with her the last year of her life.  My grandson whose birth is featured in my film, “The Other Side of the Glass: A Birth Film For and About Men” was born at this time.  My experience of witnessing his birth, and the soul connection and communication I had with him during the process led me to define myself, and my work, as the Baby Keeper.

I incorporate a Master's in Counseling with energetic craniosacral modality, and twenty year study of neural processes, consciousness, and trauma to create a new and science-based process. My focus now after years of supporting mothers and babies to heal after trauma birth without the father and sometimes in spite of his resistance, is on the supporting the new father “to put on the oxygen mask first” to support his partner and baby.  I provide birth videography that includes a healing process called “His Moment of Awe”.

I completed Doula and hypnobirthing training in early 2001. I was coming into the experience as a birth trauma therapist. I wanted to prevent birth trauma.

I realized at my first birth that I could not participate under the “scope of practice” of Doulas. Being me, the advocate for the harmed and fighter of wrongs since age five, I could not watch nor participate in the routine disruption and abuse of the mother-baby.

Here’s a clip from my film - twelve years later - of a father talking about his “disappointment with the doula.” There are many defensive and even angry commenters who miss the point. The point of the clip is that no one - not the doula, not the transferring midwife, not the grandmother, and barely the physician father in their stories could intervene on behalf of the mother-baby.

THAT is the problem that I focus on: Reforming the obstetrical system AND helping mother-baby and father to heal after medicalized birth, regardless of what happened. Obstetrics does not want to empower women and provide natural and empowering birth. We need to dismantle obstetric medicine and create a mother-baby physiological birth focus, and end the profit, drug, and OB focused model of birth that is accepted as normal.

I am very concerned with how we conceive humans and the next generation of humans. Half of all new humans are unwanted. Being wanted … being welcomed by people who want you … this is a core need of the human psyche.

My Baby Keeper logo represents how we each are conceived into a body that is the union of the Feminine and the Masculine. We are each the embodiment of the union of an egg from a female and a sperm from a man.

In this painted version, the Feminine is represented in green and forms the body, the unconscious, the emotional aspect of the new person, the baby. Mother Earth. The Masculine is represented as blue, and forms the head, the mental thinking processes of the baby. Father Sky.

Fathering and mothering are both very important. How men and women live, feel, and think, and why they are engaging in sex, when it results in conceiving another human being is critical to that human being.

I believe that to achieve true healing and higher realms of emotional and spiritual functioning that we need to embrace who we are as the union of the sperm and egg. This requires us each to heal, to integrate our experience of coming in at conception, our gestation, labor and birth, and our first two years of life.

I write under the hashtag #fundmothering on Facebook. It is the baby who has a right to their mother full-time in the first year of life. The neuro and emotional developmental needs of the newborn and infant attachment have been known for sixty plus years.

We need to reframe who and what “maternity and paternity leave” is truly about. The BABY. As long as our culture frames “family leave” as a “woman’s right” and a “woman’s choice”, the misogynist culture will fight over it and deny it. Distilling it to “family leave” to be inclusive of fathers, does not truly serve the baby or the father or mother.

What serves the mother and father is to support them to support their baby. Our language about providing leave for mothers and fathers is based on the need for them to leave their work. It is ass backwards to focus Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave, and Family Leave (in the name of so-called inclusion) on leaving their JOBS, their work, their livelihood - because it impacts their employer or company.

We need to focus on WHO and WHAT the need it. It is the need of EVERY human being we bring to this planet to have what it physiologically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually needs during the PRIME period of time when the brain is in the most significant development.

We need to see how critical the physiologic needs are for the mother - the body who made him or her - the baby - and see these physiologic needs as that human baby’s rights. Rights to the mother who made him or her for the first two years of life, one year minimum. Not stranger or institutionalized care.

Every human baby, regardless of the mother’s race, religion, age, income, education, gender identity, or geography, needs exactly the same thing. Birth is the only time we are truly equal. Every human baby has the same physiologic needs at birth that are ignored in modern birth and first three years of development.

Every human baby NEEDS and deserves and has a right to have a well-resourced, nourished, protected, and nurtured - mother. The baby has a right to the body who made him or her for the last stage of primal and early development. When we respect and protect this time and experience for every baby, we have the best opportunity to create a just and equal world.

I believe we can save humanity and the planet by ending the abuse of the mother-baby and ensuring that secure attachment between baby and mothers happens.

Physiologic birth …

The physiologic needs of the baby at birth are best met by physiologic midwifery care, not medical care practices.

1. Midwifery has been taken over by the medical establishment every time women try to bring it back. Midwifery today is medicalized and controlled by the medical establishment. The US fell to 54th in the world in mortality while spending the most. CNM are trained in and overseen by the medical care system and obstetricians train to do surgery.

Going to the hospital to birth naturally is like being a vegetarian/vegan and going to the steakhouse expecting to get a vegetarian meal. Thinking you can get a natural, safe, empowering birth in the hospital is like thinking your meatless meal prepared in the kitchen that specializes in meat is vegetarian. The veggie appearing dish is literally heavily tainted by the environment and practices focused on cooking meat.

Hospital trained people are trained by a system that does not want to do non-intervention, non-drugged, non-instrumental, non-surgical birth.

2. #fundmothering. To save humanity and the planet, our culture needs to have the public will and heart to fund every baby to be cared for by loved ones for a minimum of one year. The science has shown for generations that the baby needs the mother, a well resourced, loved, nurtured mother, for two to 3 years minimum. We need to fund the baby in order to have the mother, or the father, or the grandmother: someone who is gaga in love with the baby.

I am doing a documentary on Dr James Prescott, neuropsychologist, a former NIH, MCH division researcher, who showed in the 70s that babies need their mother for minimum of one year, three to 5 ideally.

We do not need universal stranger childcare. We need to shift the belief that it is ok to be paid for care of children so long as the children belong to another woman. That’s nuts. We need EVERY BABY to have ONE YEAR minimum funding for mother-chosen, familial care.

#Fundmothering for every baby because the mother is who the BABY needs

Pay the mother, not strangers in an institution - or grandmother/father or father or aunt - to provide for her child during the prime time of emotional neural development. Isn’t it odd? That in the US it is ok to get paid to care for children as long as they aren’t your own? It is preferable to fund corporate child care providers; and, to pay mostly women not even a livable wage to care for other women’s babies.

Our culture does not value mothering as worthy work - work that is worthy of income. Our culture says it is ok for a woman have a job caring for children as long as it is not her own baby. Not her families baby. Disconnection at birth and first years of life creates jobs. It is preferable in this country to pay for the myriad services and programs to fix disconnected children.

Rather than pay a woman - or grandmother/father or father or aunt - to provide for her child during the prime time of emotional neural development, it is preferable in the US to fund corporate childcare providers; and to pay caregivers who are mostly women not even a livable wage to care for other women’s babies.  It is preferable in this country to pay for the myriad services and programs to fix disconnected children because it creates jobs.

Why not fund the BABY?

Fund the family who is already caring for babies because full time child care is not developmentally a sound practice for a culture, and because it is unaffordable and unaccessible.

Why is institutionalized stranger care more socially acceptable?

Senator Elizabeth Warren tells a wonderful story about how her Aunt Bee came to help her with her little ones and stayed for sixteen years. Aunt Bee and all of the grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and friends who are filling in big gaps in child care for mothers and fathers (who do not feel it is developmentally appropriate for their child to be in day care settings, or do not have access to affordable, quality care) deserve to have a living wage, access to health care and retirement. As do the strangers who work in institutionalized care facilities.

First of all, Aunt B’s time, talents, gifts, and attention for her RELATIVE children is just as worthy of income as it is for stranger care. She deserves to be valued and seen as worthy by her culture for caring for the children in her family.

Grandmothers/fathers, fathers, aunts and uncles, and siblings are already caring for babies while mothers go back to work as early as two weeks.

Secondly, and logically, let’s fund the BABY. Fund every baby to have what we know the human baby needs to be a highly functional, thriving human: a well-resourced (safe, happy, nurtured, nourished, financially secure) mother. EVERY baby needs a well-resourced, present, safe mother for ONE year minimum. If she can’t or wishes not to, then still fund the baby’s FAMILY care for the baby. Fund the mother to pay a loved one - to determine who cares for her baby and child - during the prime emotional brain development.

Thirdly, protect women’s positions in educational, financial work space. A woman who is in college should not lose her place nor her scholarship if she has a baby. A woman in a career should not lose her spot on the ladder and her job should be protected for at least one year. Every woman’s job should be protected for one year.

Baby Stay rather than Family Leave, please.

It feels awkward at first to say Baby Stay. The words we use are important. “Family leave” says it is about leaving WORK, the job, not about leaving the baby. It clearly says who and what is our national priority. Not the baby, not the family, and not the mother and father.

Family Care is about WHO should be doing it, whether it is a mother or father or grandmother caring for baby or an ill family member.

True Baby Stay or Family Care will focus on and fund the BABY; and; the mother/father will determine who it is that cares for the baby. True “family leave” is “baby stay”. Someone who loves the baby stays with the baby during the prime neural developmental time of creating the emotional brain, the limbic system.

”Baby Stay” leave must protect the mother’s scholarships, matriculation, job, and career progress. A federal program that protects the rights of the human baby to have his or her mother for minimum of one year, and protects mother’s other pursuits in work and financial stability, will also lead to few abortions. Most abortions are a result of not funding or supporting mothering as a valuable effort worthy of financial support.

Some mothers cannot and do not want to stay home. Some babies are adopted and some mothers die. Babies are born to surrogates. It is sad, when any human baby does not have his or her mother for the most formative brain development of their life. Our social evolution, however, does not alter biology and the fundamental needs of the baby. But in those cases, Baby Stay funding means the family (whoever is raising the baby, whatever looks like) - can determine who cares for their baby; and, those people must be financially supported to do so.

Institutionalized care, funding non-family over family is a root cause of many of our social issues. Our prevalent emotional and mental status of fear, of lack and the poverty mindset, the constant search for abundance, despite being the wealthiest nation in the world, originates in routine, ritualized separation of mother and baby at birth and throughout infancy.

GRANDMOTHERS

No one is more biologically and evolutionarilly prepared to protect and love the mother and baby than the maternal grandmother. Both maternal and paternal grandmother’s profound role in the baby and mother’s lives has been forgotten - usurped by medical model of birth where nurses replaced midwives and grandmothers. The Doula profession has evolved in past twenty-years in an attempt to support and protect the mother in the system. But it can’t. We are in great need of a revolution of birth and grandmothering.

Many of us grandmothers today had many losses in the 2007-09 recession. Our retirements funds were pillaged - are gone or a fraction of what we had. Many lost their homes. From listening to women my age, I hear stories of women eased and forced out of their professional positions after age 50. It is nearly impossible to find new employment in one’s field and at one’s level, and the pay is far less. Grandmothers who are caring for their grandchildren deserve to be paid for caring for the next generation.

Fathers

My long time regard for men's experience - while coming of age in feminist seventies - and my advocacy since then, culminates in my film. It defines my current passion for recreating the world we want. If we want to have peaceful, connected, drug-free humans, we need to do that. Do that at birth.

My passion is for supporting the father's story to be heard and felt, and to have His Moment of Awe - stepping into his power as a father.

Lack of fathers has been cited recently as the main problem facing fathers. This is not an indictment of men. If there is blame, it our collective culture that focuses on profits over people. Mothers guilt and father’s absence are symptoms of a limbic capitalism focused culture, that’s gives personhood rights to corporations, but not babies and families.

I began my psychology career in high school working two years with a clinical psychologist in a Veteran's Hospital. Almost two decades later I would convince the Board of Directors of a domestic violence shelter to see and address the needs of the men, and I developed their program. I have worked with men/fathers in treatment facility and juvenile justice.

My father was present at my (very traumatic) birth in a time when only 4% of men were "allowed." He attended all six of his children’s births from 1949-70. It's no surprise that I would follow the path of studying psychology of birth trauma, and would be deeply aware of the profound need of the father/other to be there, that he has his story of witnessing the birth, and of the need for him to be an empowered partner, rather than a vicariously traumatized witness to his partner and baby’s unspeakable experience.

I believe the world can be healed if we create a standard of care in birth where the father and mother-baby are ALL protected as a unit, and mother and father are the first and only ones to touch their baby for as long as possible. Nils Bergman, MD, researcher calls it “Zero Separation.”

My joy is supporting a father to have that moment of deep connection - whether at the time of birth or later in a healing session.

SILENT WITNESS

I PARTICIPATE IN YOUR BABY’S BIRTH AS A SACRED, SILENT WITNESS AND AS A SUPPORT PERSON FOR THE FATHER AND GRANDMOTHER. 

As a Silent Witness I provide deep witnessing of your baby’s experience and the opportunity for post-natal healing. Whatever happened, can be integrated. The earlier, the better.

In a process called “His Moment of Awe,” I support the father and grandmother/other to “put on their oxygen mask first.”

The grandmother’s profound role in the baby and mother’s lives has been forgotten - usurped by medical model of birth and the profession of Doula that evolved to protect the mother in the system. But can’t. No one is more biologically and evolutionarily prepared to protect the mother and baby than the maternal grandmother.

I support the father and grandmother first to process THEIR experience of their wife/daughter/other’s giving birth to their family’s new baby. When they - the support system for the mother-baby - is resourced they can best support the mother-baby.

The process culminates in a sacred process of having the experience that they missed in the birth, regardless of the reasons: ie, cesarean, NICU, etc.

A Soul Portrait for the baby and a series of portraits are included to use as tools for ongoing support. These are pieces of art so “easy” to use for busy young families.  Mother and father and grandmother have the option of creating a series of portraits that are the “parenting manual” they say we don’t have. The manual is within: within the mother who made and birthed the baby. The more undisturbed her body is, the more she trusts her body and instincts, the more she makes the most informed choices she can - for that baby. The Soul Portraits we do in the 9 week postpartum process create that manual to support mothers who live in a very unnatural, technological world.

The final postnatal attachment session includes viewing video in a therapeutic process based in Craniosacral Therapy (CST), traditional counseling, and neural development of baby, and pre- and birth psychology.