My name is Suzan, a woman’s health, womb, birth, mothering and traveling blogger whose field of knowledge has come from a very long history of living in the world of pregnancy, birth and early postpartum alongside a passion for traveling. The narratives I write about are all things female from menstruation to menopause while journeying as a free being in a tightly constructed societal framework and honouring my passion to live and learn in the breadth of experience, exposure, and exploration.
Being a traveler has been in my blood since childhood or before. The family narrative told me we had come from gypsies in times gone by, inciting romantic visions of life on the road in a caravan pulled by a donkey, everyone happy and well provided for. The intrepid traveler-self awoke in my early twenties, with a one-way ticket to the UK and a minimal amount of money in hand. Even back in the 80’s, $800 wasn’t going to take me far. It was no subtle lesson that survival meant action, getting out there and finding a place to stay and, means of supporting myself, week by week with patience and little attachment to time and dreams being realities. It was this way of living where new opportunities began to show up and without a second guess, this was the first of my great lessons in life. The beauty of youth is the wildish instinct to feel into what they want, trust that it will come together and, follow the path of desire. I had got to England, and I wanted to see and do as much as I could. I need only find the threads of possibility and let the journey unfold.
Going there had been an unexpected journey. I had been offered some out-of-town work over several months. The team on this project lived together and the work came with bonuses that for me quickly amounted to savings. Conversations flowed and a guy around my age shared his plan of heading to Europe, with no other intention for these savings, it seemed like a great idea for me too. A few months later, I was off to live the dream. Dreams come in many forms, and we all know they can have strange and nonsensical twists and turns, which in the world of travel are adventures; crazy, wild, cool and, character building.
At this stage you might ask, what’s this got to do with women, wombs, and birth? At that time in my life, I was not a midwife and had worked in male-dominated professions, so it may seem in reality, pretty much nothing, except…it does. The story of a young woman traveling alone on the other side of the world in an era that had not yet marketed the internet, personal computers or mobile phones was a story of feminine vulnerability. It exemplifies an ongoing background to how and why so many females have their rightful power and prowess diminished in the field of life through inequality to safety, perceptions of societal position, and the dark side of where that it can take us. Gender disparity 101. Conversely, it weaves the other side, the one where we can rise and in the richness of being female come to truly see what we have available to us. It’s an epic Camino; walking in the mountains of learning about ourselves in the presence of others, yet ultimately, alone. The light and dark moments were the shades that brought wonder and amazement to my life tapestry, the depth that I now know to be the greatest gift of living life with intense vibrancy. The accumulation of all finally brought me home to me and the blogs I write share one woman’s journey that has reached into the hearts and lives of thousands of other women, in one way or another.