Mothering

I started taking these cases seriously and writing everything up.

I wrote a few articles, and I had that ad in Mothering Magazine.

And the cases were trickling in, and I was excited with every case that came my way, of course.

You know, they were all little gems for me.

And so this family enters our story not because the case was easy to validate against a real life, but because Carol's work with them would not just end up changing the child's life, but the course of Carol's.

In 1992, I got a phone call from a mother in Chicago, Colleen, whose son was having what she believed were past life memories that were deeply troubling him.

Colleen had found Carol through an ad she put in Mothering Magazine.

I'm Colleen Hocken.

I realized that I need to find more cases because I had such a small sample from my friends.

So I put an ad in Mothering Magazine, and I started getting letters and telephone calls.

[laughs] I wouldn't say the cases flooded in, but they were coming in, and it was extremely exciting for me.

I talked to all these parents on the phone, took notes, and I started to feel like a real researcher after that.

And I could literally feel my brain change from like mothering in a particular way, having the nursery set up next door with a little bassinet etc to like I wouldn't have a more than an arm's length away and I went whoa what happened to me there you know and I'd heard Michelle O'Don't talk about labor and birth and the hormonal cocktail that he talked about yeah and that made me really fascinated and I started reading more and writing more and then I had three more babies and those experiences got more So profound, I would say, in terms of what I felt like I did in my brain and my body.

And yeah, so then I started writing.

I wrote that first article called Ecstatic Birth, Nature's Hormonal Blueprint for Labor back in 2002, I think it was, for US Mothering Magazine.

And then I built on that with more research and more research.

And then in the early 2000s or mid 2000s, I was asked to write a report for childbirth connection in the US and that became the hormonal physiology of childbearing.

But my mother was born in an era where birth was clean, clinical, and cute, and children were seen and not heard.

So, looking for advice elsewhere, I opened Mothering Magazine.

Modern tips and age-old wisdom sprang from its breezy pages.

A central tenet advocated in its articles was to never be the one to end a conversation or leave off a hug with your child.