Once is never enough
Have been stimulated by various things out there to consider the mindset that thinks that if you get A Certain Thing, that you only have do once, Right, that's it. Life's problems will be solved and there will be no more of them. The original grit around which this thought started accreting was the report in the paper about the Scientology belief about the woman having to be silent in labour for fear of giving the child Bad Engrams (if I have the jargon correct).
There are a whole lot of things wrong with this - I can sort of see the point of the Odent dim-light-cushions-and-soothing-new-age-music approach to birth, since the mother feeling calm and relaxed is doubtless a good thing, but the whole blame-the-mother feel to this 'shut up woman and push' approach makes me feel a bit queasy. It also ties into things that I read about the natural childbirth movement and women being distraught because they had not had a peak mystical experience or had even had to have epidurals or a caesarean. But they did have a healthy baby at the end of it, nevertheless.*
But this Scientology belief also appears to be making the assumption that if you get the birth right then there are going to be no more problems in the child's life (sorry, can't help it, *sniggers*). Maybe this is an exaggerated view: but there does seem to be this got to get particular event right and then everything's sorted attitude somewhere there. Everything will run smoothly thereafter.
This is possibly also part of my objection to people who make big productions out of weddings, though I will cop to my own issues around marriage here. But the idea of getting that One Big Day perfect, and the stressing around its possibly not being perfect: hello magical thinking?
There's also (for me) a connection to that Hollywood representation of psychoanalysis/therapy, where it's all about getting that revelation of the buried memory and then, wow! catharsis and everything is all all right. It doesn't work like that, from my memory: it's less about uncovering deep hidden stuff and more about spiralling around, returning to, working over, getting different angles on, things one does remember.
There are so many things where it's not about An Event or a singular one-off achievement: it's about a process, about reiteration, about repetition. About stages on the journey. And also about second, or even more than second, chances. That things that go wrong can still be made up in some other way.
*Grantly Dick Read's first book, Natural Childbirth, was published in 1933, when maternal and infant mortality was still high. It made little impression. It was not until he published the revised version Childbirth with Fear, about ten years later when both maternal and infant mortality had declined, that natural childbirth became a phenomenon. Yes, I think there is a relationship there: wanting to come out alive with a baby trumps concerns of the quality of experience.