One of things I love most about midwifery is the unique relationships I enter into. Some of these have been long and complex spanning every month of the child-bearing year and beyond.  Sometimes people who once called you in the middle of the night in labour now e-mail you in the middle of the night to share toddler observations and end-of-day musings.

Sometimes, though, they are tiny little moments. Barely a day.  Brief and rich, they are the entire experience condensed into a handful of breathtaking hours.

When I arrived at work I was not in the baby-catching mood. I was tired, couldn’t find any comfortable pants and feeling rather introverted for no particular reason.
K, on the other hand was not in the birthing or midwife-bonding mood. Twelve hours into her hospital experience she did not appear to be making any progress from uncomfortable-sort-of labour to actually-a-baby-coming serious business. and she was unhappy and stressed.
So while I tried to put on my best friendly and competent face she scowled at me, questioned every suggestion I made by snagging the other on-duty midwife to second-opinion her and confided in the med student trailing me that she didn’t think XY nor Z had been done properly.

“She’s anxious” groaned the Doctor, after she’d requested I update him yet again on her non-news. “She has no faith in me” I muttered to the med student. “Anyone know the rugby score?” her polite and completely disinterested partner queried from the corner. We hadn’t even known he was there.

After a few hours of sleep on her part and office-hibernating on mine, things seemed no better. Her labour had picked up slightly but she was still highly anxious and nothing I was saying seemed to allay her doubts.
I decided it was time to call in the heavy guns and offered her the birthing pool.

Bliss. Her husband was dispatched to adjust the radio, handle the towels and proffer the ice water. He perked up, seemed almost interested and settled into his work.
I taught the med student how to monitor a fetal heart without drowning and then drifted off to watch the beauty of undisturbed labour.
K sighed contentedly in the dimly lit water, ceased her frenzied seething and closed her eyes to the unfolding within.

Ninety minutes later,  I knelt at the most peaceful entrance to the world I’ve seen in a long time – feeling assuredly as if in supplication.
Mama (out of the bath now) breathed with a yogic steadiness, as the trembling med student held out her hands under mine. To her utter amazement, and for her first time, she did nothing but listen to me calmly match K’s breath with quiet steady words, and observe the perfect crowning, the slow rotation, the streaming of fluid from the mouth and nose, the purpling of baby’s head as the tight fit wore on the cord tucked round his neck.
And then, with unabashed splendour, out he tumbled into her waiting hands, passed through mama’s legs and into her arms. Uncontainable cries of joy instantly erupted – from mama, sliding his wet body against her chest, from daddy wrapped around the scene as if he wouldn’t be pried away for his life, and the med student – freshly bathed in her first hit of natural birth and all it’s miracle.

Oh, to be intimate with such an epicentre of joy.

Thank you for . . oh. . everything!  It was so much better like that!
Her baby, wide eyed, calm and exquisitely perfect peered up into my face too.

My pleasure.

And if I never see them again, which may very well be -
We had that day – that one day filled with all the raw pieces of life -
pain and doubt, trust and acceptance, love and amazement

And I will remember her,
And she will remember how she felt on the day he was born.

Not bad for a work day.

Summer brings my largest specimens yet:

carrot and girl

I’m impressed with myself. . . !

These exchanges of hand occur weekly – bounty and thoughtfulness colliding into my lap. Jars of exotic golden fruit mince, gingery sauces, bags bursting with desperate asylum seeking lettuces, a farm (replete with laying hens and lowing beasts) to stay on for two weeks, perfect strawberries, life stories, and stories of life.

We take each other’s blood (when our faces look like low hemoglobin incarnate), opinions, massages, and feedback forms for our Midwifery Standards Review. We laugh and snipe, clench our teeth at each other over the latest absurd phone call or specialist review we disagree with, talk birth, see birth, talk dying and on some quiet nights, hung with silvered weight, see dying.

We take these pieces – of birth, life, death – and bring them home.  Blend and shape them, make them spin into the fabric of us. We have raw materials here. What we make of them, makes the soul.

I think I knit it on size 8 needles, but who can be sure when your needles are frequently co-opted for use as more important things like finger extensions for poking at one’s brother, par example.

So fabulous, pants become optional and bubbles become possible to capture!

Three. Years. Old.

Ah, what a spectacle to have fed and watered such a sweet, bright seed to such a tempest of wild perfection.

Lately I keep finding myself repeating a sentence to people around me:

I’m happy to go to work and happy to come home

- an easy and succint way of saying -

Work/Life balance feels easy when you are challenged and fulfilled in both places. The challenges of one overwhelm? Time to swap for the other.

Of course, it is not always that ideal. Last week I worked six days in a row including a short change (where you work late one night and then early the next morning) and only found out about the last day of work after I was home and celebrating my (short-lived) start-o-weekend. But that is reality of small towns where midwives have emergencies in their own lives and there isn’t a great pool of resources to dip into.
Sometimes there is just the very newest midwife, tired at the end of her week, who must be called in because there is literally no-one else left to ring.

And yet, even in my grumbling, exhausted and, downright annoyed state, I was very quietly pleased. I am necessary, contributing, and part of a unique niche of skills. It feels nice.

At home, and at work.

Plus I am developing a fine taste for:

:: the exuberant stampede to my turning of the front door handle

:: occasionally my children getting sick of me and trundling off to find a daddy to cuddle with instead

:: feeling like my house-work is a helpful gift to my partner*, not a menacingly never-ending self-administered torture

Yes. . . it works

*note I have not asked him if he feels the same way!

Spring is unfurling here in tiny and unremarkable ways. In the seed potatoes chitting hopefully in the window sill. In the misplaced beluga lentils accidentally sprouting on the damp cloth by the sink. In winter they would have moulded instead.

Likewise, in tiny and unremarkable ways I midwife the women of this small town – unfurling from every corner in the damp grey nights.
Reaching in to help an outstretched hand meet the new, thin dawn as a heavy, calm baby unsticks and eases slowly out.
Talking and listening, and then again a thousand-fold – through the rough, frightening and lonely places of birth and new motherhood. Gently guiding women back to their own centers of instinctual trust and confidence. Placing a quiet hand here and there occasionally – always remembering the truth that the woman’s body knows the best ways.

Oh, and sometimes I am not great. Unsure, confused, inwardly panicked and doubtful. Sometimes I leave work with no evidence to hold that I have done any good things.

But that is just fine. I am still a humble student at the feet of midwifery.
Only now someone has given my signed name a steady legal flourish.

And sometimes, often times, there are tangible signs that I made something different.
In the blissful tableau of guzzling pink face and confidently nurturing mama.
In being stopped just outside the door by a new father who says “I’m so glad you were there – it made everything better”
In the silent, steady breathing of the safely born.

The other morning I drove home towards the fog-topped mountains and came across a woman walking along the raised curb – arms outstretched, reveling in the birth of the new, damp day.
We grinned at each other – the beautiful wide smile of those that understand the world is good.

You quietly edged your way into the beginning in the gentle hours of Monday morning. I was still asleep on the couch, propped up against its odd comfort, leaving the big bed to your daddy and sister. I dreamt then, that my mother was asking me if it was still ‘safe’ to be pregnant ‘at this time’ and I emphatically answered ‘yes!’. Thus, with her presence and opinions known, my mother disappeared and the lull of rough-edged contractions began to fill out my consciousness.

Clinging to the last moments of rest, I hunched forward, leaning into the arm of the couch while Jess, who had come from Auckland to be with us, filled my request for a back massage. Squirming through that, and then a short-lived breakfast of homemade yoghurt and peaches  – I suggested to her it only might be labour. Then suddenly your daddy and Noemi appeared in the living room and I suddenly relented to the notion that today you would be born.

Retreating into the roomy cocoon of our bedroom, I curled myself, hands and knees around a pile of pillows and let your daddy work his magic acupressure points into the small of my back. Each contraction’s stiff peak suddenly melted into a dullness that spread through my body, relaxing me and allowing me to enjoy the time together.

No need to call the midwife – we merely waited for her to return home from boxing class whereupon she surveyed me swaying against the door jamb en route to the toilet and said “right”.  My desire to hibernate was strong and she intuitively headed out again – this time to gather an epic’s worth of groceries. Apparently births require good food to proceed.

The day passed calmly – snug in bed, eating grapes and reading friend’s blogs. Relishing the peace and quiet. I was encouraged by some bloody show and the discouraged when I peeked at the clock and saw the contractions were still five minutes apart. I popped out of the room and asked for a quick check – 5cm. Ah, so something was definitely happening.

Around dinner time the discomfort had swelled and I announced I wanted into the warm pool your daddy had filled in our alcove. The bliss of warm buoyancy conflicted with the tiring heat of the water and the steady increase in power of each contraction. A photo of me smiling took some effort! Pressed into your daddy’s neck, the water reflected strangely off the clear plastic of the pool in the dimly lit room. I felt you gently shift and turn inside me, pressing your way through the labrinyth of my pelvis. Our midwife crept around sopping up the leak that had sprung in the pool but I was only briefly roused from my labour-dreaming to be unreasonably annoyed with her.

Soon the split and heave of collapse and collide within began to over power my sense of self and frighten me. Afraid it would never end and I would forever be thrust, blind and heaving into the vast oblivion of pain I demanded our midwife check my progress, break my waters and get me out of there! I was tired and angry and unable to see the way through any more. Because I had been to so many births as her student, I was worried that anything she said to me would fail to impress and steady me. Thankfully, I was wrong and her words were soothing and strong.  I did, however, turn a few times to your daddy to ask him if what she said “was true”. His reassurance was somehow more trustworthy because I knew he had seen me through birth before. His quiet presence each and every second I clung to him became the epicentre, the life-point to which I could cling, or at least view through the tempest.

At last it was night, and at last the wholeness of your body was bearing its full weight against mine. The feeling was threatening and yet inviting, asking me to plunge into the darkest point where only the tiniest hope of breaking through resided.

Thrusting my way in and out of the birth pool, to the bathroom (where I remember noting that my footprints, small, neat and wet on the black & white bathroom floor were improbably lovely) and back to the bed I ranted and flailed looking for a non-existent escape-clause. Demanding another examination, the news that only a small lip of cervix remained was more distressing than heartening. I moaned and seethed through the urge to rip myself open and be done with it. Lying on my side, the contractions occasionally had no pause between them and the world seemed to have disappeared altogether. Only the sight, just out of the corner of my eye, of the second midwife calmly finishing up my knitting for me by the light of a small lamp reminded me that all was well and right with the world.

Finally, the lip had melted away and our midwife’s finger slipped through your membranes and flooded the end of the bed with relief. And then, as the vast and roaring power filled every space between you and I, out, out out into the wide world we hurtled. Bound together in a tight and seamless unity, speeding towards the moment of being ripped apart. The very last contraction that held you inside me I remembered my desire to give you peace at birth and I calmly breathed through just one contraction. Then the crash and tumult of unimaginable proportions hit and your sleek wet head was flung into open air. “still posterior*” remarked our midwife admiringly and I paused to laugh in amazement and allow the second midwife to take a quick photo at your unusual entrance.  Star-gazing we sometimes call it in midwifery.
Then the last razor-tipped wave – the one that will never be remembered, because on its crest came you,  serene and blue. As if gently deposited on my chest by the evening tide.  Calm-eyed and wise, soaking your sweetness into my skin and deeper. Saturating us all with your beautiful completeness. Bringing the starry night in to stay with us forever.

Such peace and such power.
Thank you forever and for always – for the gift of birthing you.

All my love,
mama