A very personal poem

Mother

A decade ago I sat outside

I looked for beauty

I would find enough to justify little gifts from God

Hummingbirds who took the bait

Blue jays who played in the trees

 The place that I created; a little spot to hide the rest

Big enough that if you set your gaze just right

You could only see beautiful

Sometimes I sat and did nothing but find the beautiful

I would become filled with wonder

 That the woodpecker joined me for coffee

That the eagle circled overhead

I pretended that there wasn’t any darkness inside that door

Sometimes I was inspired enough to write things that nobody would read

To sing even when I was told to be quiet

I laughed and danced and loved

Sometimes, if I were really lucky, they joined me

I hugged and kissed them all

I wondered if they would ever know

How big my heart grew when I looked at them

How lucky I felt to have them

Its how I was able to go on

I was given these little gifts from God

Signs that it was all okay

Now, in the courtyard

There are only things that I have placed there

The little deer that belonged to grandma

The wind chime I bought as a token of freedom

I haven’t charmed the hummingbirds just yet

But, there is peace here

There is never a need to escape from what is inside the door

There is never a need to play the game of finding gifts from God

Now, when I am inspired I sing, write, or dance

I have no critics

They still lack an understanding of the way my heart grows when I look at them

They are not all here for me to hug and kiss

My heart aches for more, but rests in the knowledge that they have better now

There is no veil over the truth

Someday, if I am really lucky, they will all join me

And we will see the beautiful

It's not about us...

Even the most humble of birth servant will have a time when they feel that they "saved" a mom or baby or both in the course of a birth. This feeling may be more truth than fiction. The wise eye of experience or intuition may catch on to the red flags and spur appropriate action that changes the course of the event from tragedy to triumph. This is why we have midwives, right? To safeguard the birth and save lives, right? Wrong.

The truth is that we are simply there. Our passion for our work, our study, our innate and learned abilities are not the key. The key is that the mother-baby unit will nearly always reveal that attention is needed to those who pay attention. We should be marveling more over this wonder than praising those who preside over the birth in the role of professional. In this knowledge, we should be able to step back even more. To allow the birth process to unfold without unnecessary interruption and to feel that we are needed more to protect the physiological process than to manage it.

The bigger job of the midwife is to assist the mother during pregnancy in believing that her body is capable of wonders beyond her imagination. To prevent her from being mired down in details. To support her in tuning into the the spiritual and biological magic that is developing within her. Her body has the tools it needs to make this safe and functional. The real trick is to teach her how to get out of her own way and to embrace the mystery of it after she accepts the science.

The pitfall in birthwork is that our culture is so far from supporting mothers in that journey that we are tempted to create cookie cutter solutions to a problem that stems from our own births. Can we believe in something that we ourselves have never experienced? Can we promise something that can be nearly impossible to comprehend?

We not only can, we must. Our survival depends on it, as dramatic as that sounds. We need humans running around this planet who were marinated in Oxytocin. We need mothering that stems out of ecstatic birth. This is not to say that the births that go awry are tragic because we are blessed to live in an age where we can actually prevent tragedy in birth and we should. It is that we should not go around preventing tragedy when nothing was wrong. We should not save anyone who does not need saving.

I like to imagine myself in the role of midwife as the servant. Maybe I have sharp skills and a vast knowledge of normal birth, but I would rather be outside the room because she will be better off without me, or standing nearby showing her I believe that she is fine, or laying next to her quietly to show her I am not going anywhere, or sitting at her feet amazed at what I get to witness when I do almost nothing.