TONTS. - TONTS. on the road with Roberta Giovedi

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Welcome to another episode of TONTS. on the road. Audio grabs from Claire's tour of the UK last year. This one is from her show in the Caves in Edinburgh Scotland with the wonderful doula and mamma medicine women's circle facilitator Roberta Giovedi. Roberta had a baby during Covid and noticed that many mothers in her community (including herself) were feeling isolated and alone. With the help of an organisation called the Planetary Healing Centre Roberta began running women's circles for mothers in the woods near her home building space for mothers to share their stories, stitch, sit with their feet in the stream and shine a light on the darkness as well as the love they were experiencing. This speech is so powerful and felt like a rally cry to recenter mothers and children in our communities. For more from Roberta you can read her full speech and her story here and to find out more about her circles you can head to her instagram account https://www.instagram.com/mamma_medicine/For more from Claire you can head to https://www.clairetonti.com or instagram @clairetontiOriginal theme music: Free by Claire TontiEditing: RAW CollingsSocial Media: Maisie JG Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I create, speak and write today, the Rwandan people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging, acknowledging that the sovereignty of this land has never been ceded. I want to acknowledge the people who have given birth on this land, raised children on this land, connected to country and spirit for thousands and thousands of years. Hello, welcome to Tons, the podcast of in-depth interviews about emotions and the way they shape our lives. I'm your host, Claire Tonti, and I'm so glad you are here. Each week, I speak to writers,

activists, experts, thinkers, and deeply feeling humans about their stories. And this week, I have a very special Tons on the Road episode again. So this one is from a cave in Scotland in Edinburgh. I performed at the cavesaves in Edinburgh last year and I invited a really special doula. Her name is Roberta Giovanni to come and speak about her work running Mama's Circles in the forest. What she has to say is so transformative and life-changing and powerful. Before this event where she stood up on stage and spoke into a microphone. Roberta told me that she'd never spoken into a microphone before. Usually she runs her circles with women, sitting in circles, stitching and talking about the difficult and tricky and wonderful parts of their lives. She runs a website called Mama Medicine, which I highly recommend you go and check out.

This speech I felt was like a rallying cry. I got goosebumps all over me when I heard her speaking in that cave. The history of women being silenced and murdered in Scotland, thousands and thousands of women slaughtered for witchcraft, for practising midwifery, the history of that is just mind-boggling and devastating and speaks into, I think, a wider problem of women's voices being silenced, of knowledge about our bodies and our feminine energy being silenced, the patriarchal lens through which so much of us have had to live through and the wildness that we have had to deny about our bodies and ourselves. So Roberta speaking in this way and also being 15 weeks pregnant, she's now had her second baby. And I just adored this moment. It felt so special and precious to me.

So I hope you enjoy listening to this too. After she spoke, I sang my album, Atrescence, and it was just such a precious, precious time. Okay, here she is, Roberta Giovedi. I'm going to start with a story that I usually tell mums in my circles. It's a story called The Monster of Rasai. I might not pronounce it well. Rasai is a small island off the Isle of Skye.

And on this island was living a crafter in a very small house. He was a mean man and he was always alone. One day, walking in the field, he found a little creature, a little ugly, hairy, black creature with white teeth and pink, purpley fingers. And he decided to pick it up and took it home and said, Mom, I can make use of this little monster. I can make him work for me. He took it home, he put it on the table and started poking it and poking him and poking him

until he woke up and started screaming and crying, calling for his mommy. Before he knew, the mommy monster started stomping down the mountains through the field to get their baby back. And she stopped outside the house. She couldn't get in. The house was too small. She couldn't get through the door.

She couldn't get to the windows, and she starts rowing. Give me back my baby. But the crafter said, no, you have to do me this favor, and this other favor, and this other favor. And he asked the mummy monster to do lots of work for him. Now, the mummy monster was an earthy creature. She had no problem with sorting out the fields, the bushes. She just had to talk with the rocks and the trees and the forest, and the work was done. In the meantime, the baby monster was crying and screaming for his mother.

The crafter said, the last thing you need to do is to build me a house, a big house with 20 windows and seven doors. And the mummy monster did that. But the crofter had no intention to give the baby back to his mummy and finally said, now you need to cover the roof of my house with thousands of feathers from birds from all over Scotland, of all different colors. Now the mummy monster, who was an earthy creature, knew.

She knew at that point she would never get her baby back. She had no control of the sky. She had no control over the birds. And so she sat outside the house and started to cry. Cry and roar and cry in despair so loudly that all the mom' birds from everywhere, from all the Scottish islands, from the mainland, heard the cry of a mother who had lost her baby.

And every mum's bird who had ever, ever hatched an egg had ever seen a little bird coming out of a egg and fed them and devoted her life to the babies, flew over the island of Rasai and plucked a feather from her body and put it on top of the roof. And by the end of the day, the roof was covered of beautiful, colorful, fluffy feathers from all the mothers who had seen themselves and recognized the cry of another mother. At that point, the crafter had to give back the baby. And the mommy monster, and the mommy baby,

sorry, and the baby monster went back to the baby. And the mommy monster, and the mommy baby, sorry, and the baby monster went back to the mountains, to their cave, and cuddled, and slept together, glad to be together again. So,

I like this story because it really shares a message that it's very important. When mothers come together, when mothers meet eyes, when mothers feel safe enough to tell their stories, to share their challenges, their disappointments, their joys and their despair, every other mother knows what that is like.

And it's ready, ready to hold, ready to share, ready to be present, ready to listen without judgment. When I heard the word mother sense for the first time, I was well into my mothering journey with my first daughter. And for the first time, I felt I was not alone. For the first time, I felt that

all the overwhelm, all the feelings, all the emotions, all the failure, the guilt, the self-doubt, I had felt at the beginning of my journey was validated. I was not alone.

There were like hundreds, thousands of mothers across the countries, everywhere, in every corner of the planet, feeling the same. And I realized that what we are expected from society is to feel joy, to feel blissful, to feel grateful just to have, you know, had a healthy child. What are we complaining about? But the truth is, what if we don't feel like that? What if we feel lonely? What if we feel we are not ourselves? There is an extreme tendency to pathologize mother's feelings. And I just want you to know, if you are a mom, if you are a dad,

if you know parents, if you're not a parent yourself, that actually there is nothing wrong with the feelings. You see, when I had my daughter, I stepped into COVID pandemic lockdown straight away. And I was sitting there in my house on my own with a baby in my hand, shell-shocked, as we all do, no matter how much preparation, how many books you read, how many things people tell you, thinking, all I need to do is to keep myself and this baby alive. And there is no one around me,

there is no one who can come to this house, no one I can actually ask help to. What happens if we actually are in complete isolation? And I realized in that moment if a safe place for moms to cry, to call upon other mothers, to call for support, to be held, to just be mothers, do not exist. It's up to us to create some. A couple of years after, I decided to start Circles for Mothers. And I met all kinds of women.

Mothers, mothers to be, women who want to be mothers, mothers of older children, mothers of toddlers, newborn mothers. And I've heard all kinds of stories. Stories of single motherhood, stories of big families, stories of relationships falling apart or relationships coming together. Stories of moms who had too much support and they just wanted to be left alone. And mothers who didn't have enough people around. And I start writing and wondering about all these stories that had one thing in common, courage. Because there is nothing ordinary in conceiving and growing a human inside you, giving birth to them and surviving for them. Many women that came to these circles felt unsupported.

It was like a common thing, and not just because of COVID. And I thought to myself, what if the medical system cannot support mothers in an adequate way? You see, the label of postpartum depression is one step away from shedding some tears because you feel overwhelmed. And I'm not saying that it's not a thing, but my mission became, how can we prevent women to get there? How can we support men to support mothers? Because, bless them, there is not enough support and understanding for mothers. Can you imagine how much support there is for men? How much information and preparation there is for men

about pregnancy, birth, postpartum, breastfeeding? In many traditional societies, at least the ones I can represent, the ones I can talk for, men are not raised to be fathers. And women are raised to be mothers. To be more accurate, women are raised to carry the burden of motherhood.

And before that, to carry the burden of menstrual cycles. And I thought to myself, how can we change this? How can we talk to people openly? How can we create spaces for women to talk without being afraid? Because if you ever felt discomfort, sadness, you felt out of place as a mother

and you have been fearful to express these feelings to your doctor, to your mother, your mother-in-law, to your partner, to your friends, you've been quite right. You've been quite right. Because when there is not opportunity for collective healing, a woman that feels all these feelings is very triggering for every other woman

who has not been held, has not had opportunity to heal her own birth trauma, to overcome her own postpartum depression, to build security and safety and confidence in how we bring up our children. What I encourage women to do when I hold space in mother circles is to celebrate celebrate every moment of your motherhood celebrate the mistakes the failures, the success celebrate whether you manage to successfully breastfeed or if you don't

create rituals with other women with sisters create rituals with your men create rituals with your children create rituals and celebrate with your sons so that they can

step, they can find their place in the world and step into fatherhood one day from a better perspective. Celebrate with your daughters so that if motherhood is the path they choose,

they can be more prepared. They can get there from a higher place compared to us or the previous generations. You see, one incredibly, incredible discovery is, for me, I'm 14 weeks pregnant this week, and the world has opened up. I can potentially go to any groups, any birth preparation groups in person, face-to-face,

go and talk about, I feel, but nothing has changed. That feeling of isolation, of guilt and shame, it's still there. And I thought, let's not blame COVID, because nothing has changed for mothers. We're still invisible. And I thought, let's not blame COVID. Because nothing has changed for mothers. We're still invisible. And I ask, whether you are a mom or father, or you have children around, experience with children,

or children terrify you, it doesn't matter. When you see a mom struggling on a bus with a crying toddler or with a screaming baby. Go up, say hi. Look into her eyes. Just make her feel that you see her. Because you see, I don't think the world is going to change with the war or with politics or with... I don't know much about these things, but what I believe, the place that the world is going to be changed by matters. We are the ones who bring up and bring into the world the next generations of people.

And only if we are honored and heard and seen, something will change in the future. So I made some notes and I didn't look at them. So I don't even know if I said everything I wanted to say today. But yeah, celebrate. If you wonder, how do you celebrate? Well, I sit in a woodland, in circles, with the moms, and join my circles for a few hours, thanks to a beautiful, amazing charity called the Planetary Healing Center, who has found, these people have found sponsorship for me to run these circles. We celebrate with fire. We sit around the fire. We celebrate with water. We put our feet in the stream. We sing. We tell stories. I tell folk tales. They tell me their birth stories. We cry. We laugh a lot. We make bread on the open fire. We work with the clay. We make

dream catchers. We work with wool. And slowly, I can tell, session by session, something unlocks in each of us, including me. And we talk about the light of motherhood, but we also talk about the darkness. Because when we uncover the darkness, we take power away from it. And we make space for more healing, not just for ourselves and for others, but also for all the women, all the mothers before us who had no opportunity to have a voice.

So, thank you. You've been listening to a podcast with me, Claire Twente, and this week with a live Taunts on the Road recording from Roberta Giovanni. For more from Roberta, you can find her at Mama Medicine on Instagram. It's probably the best place to go where she's running more women's circles now, allowing women to deeply restore and connect around the darkness and the light of motherhood. For more from me, you can

head to claretonte.com or I'm on Instagram at claretonte and my album, Matrescence, is on Spotify if you're curious to listen to that. I also have a new song called To Breathe, which is a meditation track. My album, Matrescence, is about my transition through motherhood, the dark, the light, the stories from other women in my life and what they have gone through. And I would love you to take a listen. It's 11 songs. As well, I wanted to tell you that I'm coming back to the UK to come back

on tour. I can't get to Scotland this time around, unfortunately, but I will be in Dublin. I'll be in Wales and I'm also going to be in Exeter running a Matressence Festival on the 21st and 22nd of June. The lineup is over on my site, but we have so many extraordinary speakers and artists and poets. The idea, it's two days where you can bring your babies and your kids and enter into the festival however you choose. I think it's going to be a really, really magical event and I would love you to come. All right, that's it for me this week. You can find all that information at claire20.com forward slash events. Thank you as always for all call it for me this week. You can find all that information at claire20.com forward slash events. Thank you as always to Raquel Collings for editing this week's episode

and to Maisie for running our social media. Thank you. Freedom, we want all of it. Spent so long being good girls girls can't breathe through it we're gonna rip it up we're gonna tear it down this cage you want us in no longer fits our crowns because we are fire and we can be free we can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be Cause we are fire and we can finally breathe We can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be

We can be free We can be free And don't forget that bodies can break They want us hungry and humble Thinking our worth isn't our weight Thought if we starved ourselves To fit their box and fit their mold We'd lose our fight, stay small Wait to be told that we are fire

And we can be free We can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be Cause we are fire And we can finally see We can unlearn all the things that they told us we should be We can't unlearn all the things that they told us we should be We can be free We can be free We're gonna rip it up, we're gonna eat it all

Here are my thoughts now, we're gonna take it all We're gonna rip it up, we're gonna take it all. We're gonna rip it up, we're gonna eat it all. Hear my voice now, we're gonna take it all. Cause we are fire and we can be free. We can be free. We can be free We can be free We can be free

We can be free We can be free