The Other Side of the World

A feast of a day.
My friend and classmate often refers to home visits as “all day drinking tea with your jacket on” – New Zealanders are not famous for heating their homes. It was a yellow, spring-hope day though and we hopped from coffee, biscuits and eager soon-mamas to the outdoor clothesline burgeoning with lots of family-lives-here-and-more-will-soon sage-mamas. Ante-natal appointments conducted over small wet clothes, for those of us who could reach.

Moving inside, we are Bench-seated around the thick wooden table in the cool, quiet kitchen; our easy open conversation spreads and pools with olive oil over cheese and fresh bread, tomato and twists of salad leaves.
We share with women; heartbeats, laughter, measures of folic acid, knowledge plucked from our inner tree and profferred like armfuls of an endless supply of leaves (should you want any). They return with fragrant rushes of lemongrass, coriander and fresh tumeric for our cupboards. With curries spiced with far-from-home and seedlings for our garden and glass tumblers of juice offered with shy, curled hands. And so, something begins to weave itself intricately before us. Some of the designs are new and tender and uncertain, others are complex, well-tested and shaped with shared joy and loss and beginning again.

Trust and connections make good midwifery work.
In one house, my midwife points out all the rooms she has caught babies in.
I read the woman’s labour notes – she has written them herself.
Separate entries for each baby -
labour: a good time.

Seriously, seriously – how am I supposed to not eat this delicious child?

More pictures up at the lovely daddy for the voracious among you.

And thanks to Claire for the ridiculously cute hood!

Self Portrait: breastfeeding in bed

we are the mother-baby; dishevelled, glamourous, lulling time into ecstacy – at the fountain of mouth-upon-breast.

We arrived for our scheduled 40 week appointment in the late afternoon to find on-the-verge-of-mama slung over the low couch moaning into her contractions. We were on time and she’d been expecting us so she hadn’t bothered to call anytime in the previous 6 hours of labouring.

A planned hospital birth, we arrived 90 minutes later and found ourselves gazing surreally at a very frank chunk of glistening oracle-like meconium.

At this point I have either lost you completely, or caused you to catch your breath ever so slightly. In the interest of maintaining my blog as my blog and not a midwifery textbook I’ll grossly paraphrase here: Breech.

Thanks to a comprehensive and oft-criticized study that I should probably be referencing here, or should probably have memorized the name of by now (but haven’t because, let’s be honest here, it’s 10pm and I am still in my pyjamas and my child is slightly crusty and the bread baking failed beyond all spectacular failures today), it is now customary in much of the developed world to perform a Caesarian section, no questions asked, for any and all babies who need, or want to enter the world a little, shall we say, ass-backwards. And of course, after this study declared unequivocally that cutting and ripping was always the safer way, the numbers of skilled breech-birth attendants promptly began plummeting like a particularily energetic monsoon mud-slip.

Which brings us back to the action, standing with this realization, a foot away from a beautifully labouring, glowing woman, her proud and constant partner and her encouraging, rapt mother. And just like that, the midwife, the With Woman, the guarder of the birth space, the protector and defender of the sacrity, came hurtling into the room with all the fury and force of blackening Tsunami sky.

Because this is New Zealand and we were in the hospital space with its protocols and its rules and its carefully conservative doctors (which all have their use, yes) calls were made and people rushed in with dizzying, frenzied movements, papers were tossed around, sharp pointy metal objects were wielded and voices were raised.

In the middle of the panicked melee, there was our space to do our work. We looked into the woman’s eyes, we spoke and we held her and we stood (metaphorically of course) between her labour-dance and the storm outside. And my Queen Bodaecia preceptor powerfully navigated the swirling tides of the obstetric team until there we were, Mother Father, Midwife, me, and newest born, perfectly born, bum-first born, birth-canal-route born, wonderfully born girl baby. Somewhere around us there were a dozen people with their unused iv lines, clean scalpels, their surgical gowns and their anaesthetics, but, huddled in the centre in my jeans and t-shirt biting back tears over the fresh nativity, I was safely in the guarded space, the Eye of Birth.

And ever so grateful to come home a few hours later to these -

I planted: endive, arugala, purple kale, romanescue broccoli, garlic, onion

she consumed: dirt, dead leaves, compost

bathing ensued

she breastfeeds: constantly, consumately, while mumbling around a nipple

I await: ripe bellies – one due, one pre-labouring

life ensues