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.
A Midwife with a passion for laughing and thinking...
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2 comments:
Absolutely! <3
Love this Bettie.....it is not about us.....You know that birth starts at safe and midwives do not automatically make it more or less safe, but both are possible. The more we trust that the mother and baby know what they are doing and protect their space to do it, the better. And that is what trusting birth is......trusting that the symbiotic physiology of mother and baby will finish what they started.
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