I used to be a midwife. Sometimes I will be doing the dishes, or looking at a photograph, or catching a glance of a pregnant woman out of the corner of my eye, and it will happen: I remember that I used to be a midwife.
As a calling, it was rewarding, nerve-wracking, and meaningful. I learned right away that it could also be difficult.
The second birth I ever attended — as a student midwife, a month into my program — was in a Seattle hospital. I was observing an obstetrician/gynaecologist (or, as I learned to say, an ‘o-b-g-y-n’). The mother was a seventeen year old girl who didn’t want the baby and whose partner was nowhere to be seen. Her parents were there for support, but they barely played a role; she had an epidural, needed oxytocin, and ended up with a vacuum-assisted delivery.
At the time, I had been reading about the feminist movement that popularized ‘twilight sleep’, where women chose to be drugged with a combination of morphine (an opioid) and scopolamine (an amnesiac). This coincided with the sharp increase in hospital-based deliveries around the turn of the century, and the overall medicalization of childbirth. Not only did women welcome the pain relief of the morphine, but they actually felt empowered by the notion of being able to save themselves from the entire experience of childbirth. It wasn’t too long before women realized that this was actually depriving them of the very thing that helped them bond to their children.
I stood behind the doctor and the nurses, transfixed by the miracle of childbirth. I felt like crying at the sight of this tiny infant take its first breaths, a newcomer to this world, deserving of so much love. I wanted to hug them, celebrate with them.
Instead, I stood by, watching as the nurses laid the child on the warmer, clamped her arms to her chest, and pinned her in a pair of receiving blankets. She was rendered completely immobile. They passed her to her mother, who was talking on the phone. I watched as she continued to chatter away, barely registering the weight of the child on her arm.
I was taken by a cruel thought: She doesn’t care.
I was shocked that I, as a total outsider to this family, could be so emotionally involved and transformed by this event, and that she was not. It was as if she had not been there when it happened. Here we were, a hundred years later, and she had induced her own twilight birth.
The sadness of her detachment overwhelmed me.