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 -

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