The Other Side of the World

Ok, potentially I may be the kind of renaissance-lit studying, mechanical-phobic sentimentally-quirky kind of girl (er, woman!) who may have named her car. After one of Queen Elizabeth the 1st’s nicknames.
Try not to be too appalled.

At least I finally bought a car!

it felt really weird.

And then I drove it the 2 hours home, by myself, on the rain-wind-fog buffeted highway.

durafemina, indeed.

Here’s to hoping for some inspiration from her namesake - that redhead virgin’s steely longevity. . .

I know I whined in one of my last posts about having to get up so early for my hospital placement, but I was unprepared for the universe to prove me so bloody wrong about my reluctant attitude last week.

Thursday morning after an hour’s full-moon-flooded walk to the hospital I spent most of the day with a delightfully sage midwife (dare I say the grandmother archetype?) and the most glowing new mother I have ever clapped eyes on - who just happens to have an inoperable brain tumour.

There is something inexplicably potent about being around people who are exuding a sort of awareness-of-life that you can’t quite grasp at yourself, but that you get a sense of, as if it was passing by, just out of reach. It wasn’t sappy, nor even emotional, and if there were any cliches being tossed around (O, the miraculous perfect baby that was-not-meant-to-be-medically possible. Score one for the non-medical!) they were so appropriate as to be matter of fact, and nothing more. It was just one of those days that makes days seem less complicated and more austerely beautiful.

“I realized”, the woman told me, as she patiently withstood my doubtlessly clumsy poking around her body, “that a midwife doesn’t need to be maternal to matter, only that she has to be there. With you. For as long as it takes, for whatever it takes. The whole way, without glory, without needing your praise”. There seemed to me a spiritualism in her philosophy that sat nicely with us in that moment together, mutually smeared with blood and cotton wool and surgical tape.

That whole day made me breathe a sigh of relief; that my life (by all appearances) will be long, that gloves and antiseptic soap are plentiful here, that I don’t have to worry about being wise and maternal before I am ready to be, and most of all -
relief that there are still days where all is raw, and painful, and new, and wise, and perfect.

Just a side note to say - life with the constant option (key word) of a 2 year old and a big black dog that eats whatever aforementioned child drops on the floor and two suspcious-eyed cats and a generous man who brings me popsicles and a computer chair on wheels and my funny, smart, gorgeous soon-to-be-a-midwife-with-me friend Jane is great. Especially on a friday night spent re-discovering the delights of operating the height adjustor on that computer chair. But we already knew I was cool like that. eh?

I had the day off today because my hospital placement for the semester doesn’t start until next week. Much as I miss the smell of liquor (amniotic fluid), I am not looking forward to waking up early enough to walk an hour across town and make it by 6:45 a.m.. I have definitely decided that there are only three things worth waking up that early for:
watching the sun rise with a big bag of cherries & good company
woman expelling life
an extraordinary snuggle

I’m hoping for some of #2 chez l’hopital, because, realistically, the other two are pipe dreams.

But I digress.
After productively running a bundle of errands, I stopped in at work to procure a big, fat, crunchy-topped banana-studded muffin and ended up getting coerced into working a 5 hour shift. Which wasn’t so bad because waitressing makes me very reflective and I made a compedium of ordinary things that have the ability to totally win me over:
people that buy me popsicles, unasked
people that safely escort me home
people that manage to cram untold depths of wonderfullness into packages of mail

and now to round off the list of threes - a third list. The most mundane of the lot. Three things I purchased today:
a long(er) ethernet cable [wherein I found myself uttering the insanely ditzy sentence “how long is 5m?”]
a bitter concoction that is supposed to make me the nauseous feeling of the last 10 days go away [and for the last time, I am NOT pregnant!]
the erstwhile banana muffin. yum.

Apparently ordinary days put me in the mood for compilations.
Are y’all asleep yet?

Trying to sidle my way into an intuitive relationship with the forces of nature that start uteri contracting I decided that W would call us between 3 and 7 that day. At 7:30 exactly, the universe winked and nudged me reassuringly and the phone rang.

I think one of the things I love most about attending a birth is that absolutely impossible moment when the will of the woman reaches its threshold. When she meets the ultimate physical certainty that the bones and meat and sinews of her body will not stretch any further and there is nothing that will separate a space for another life to fit through hers. When her face is deep in the agony of struggle with a physical body attempting an unworldly act.

Because it is in this moment that the act of Life occurs. It comes from nowhere and nothingness and yet is everything truly beautiful about the world.

Birth is the meeting place of normal, impossible.

Loving arms wrapped around and over the swollen brown belly -
Reaching down through the water and into the newest space in the universe -

“Hello Simon”

Daddy, and water, and his mother’s blood roaring past his ears.