How did I become a midwife? What a question! Why do I breathe? Why do I live?
I think I was born a midwife. I was the fifth of six children, and by that
time, my mom thought her loss of menses was menopause! Because for six
months my three sisters were having babies, she kept her pregnancy a secret
until a month before I was born. After sixteen years it was another
daughter for her, and I was her first hospital birth. Although she never
talked about such things, I caught the sense that she was disgusted with
her hospital birth. To her, birth was a normal event and was therefore not
to be talked about. She had even birthed twins at home during the
Depression.
I grew up in a large extended family and had great parents and a wonderful
childhood spent roaming the woods of Missouri. My mother had been the
oldest of twelve children and mothered all of them because her parents died
early in life from the Spanish flu. In fact her mother had her last
children at the same time my mom was starting her family, so my mom raised
her siblings, too. When anyone had a problem, they were at our home. My
sisters tried to mother me but I resisted the idea of having four mothers!
Babies were always around-my sisters and brothers were having them and were
more than happy to let me play with them. I began to baby sit at a young
age and starting when I was five, worked in the church nursery-I loved
babies!
I ended up marrying the nursery teacher's son when I was eighteen years
old. We waited three years to have our first child. It was 1966 and we were
on our own in Okinawa, Japan. We went to the library and ordered books
about natural birth from publishers in the United States. Our friends
thought we were crazy. We ended up going off base to a Seventh Day
Adventist hospital where we were allowed to do pretty much what we wanted.
I had a nice birth and afterward nursed my baby. Suddenly, all the friends
who thought we were crazy came to us to find out how we had done it. I
started speaking to couples' groups and generally spreading the word about
natural birth.
I birthed my second baby five years later in a small town in Idaho. By that
time I had helped several friends educate themselves about birth. Quite by
chance I met a newly arrived midwife in my eighth month of pregnancy. I was
quickly hooked, and readily changed my plans to having a homebirth. I loved
it! And I thought this was all quite normal-I wasn't aware of the political
statement I was apparently making. Sixteen months later our next was born,
this time in Denver. By then I had begun to realize a normal birth was
pretty hard to put together.
Within a year friends asked me to help them do what I had done, and I
jumped in head first. I started teaching classes and attending hospital and
homebirths as a doula. A year later a couple asked me to be their midwife
for their first baby and I dove right in. I had great help from another
midwife and a doctor who had attended my last birth and both were happy to
be there for me. Within five months, however, we moved to Billings, Montana
and I was on my own. In the eight months we lived there I attended eight
births, then it was on to Cheyenne, Wyoming for the next three and a half
years. It took me seven years to do a hundred births. Twenty-three years
later I have attended over six hundred births and am still counting. I love
babies, mothers and fathers-I love it all. I believe in birth and love to
see the transition from girl to woman in first time moms.
For the past eight years I have worked with the Hutterite community in
Montana. It has been a special privilege because these women are only one
generation away from home birthing and they have lost it so badly. It is
wonderful to see them be empowered again.
Reprinted from Midwifery Today E-News (Vol 2 Issue 13 March 31, 2000)
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