This I Believe

The loud, urgent, insistent beep summons me from sleep. I turn to grab my pager and check the time. It is very early morning, and the page is from one of my clients. She is beginning labor. The final steps in her journey have begun. She has asked me to be her midwife. She will allow me to guide and support her. To witness not only the miracle of her child’s birth, but her own transformation to mother.

When she asks me to join her later, she is deep in labor. I watch as she gives herself permission to let each contraction become stronger than the last, to find the place where her deep groans resonate with her power. It is a sound that I hear often as women give in to what they can no longer control. She allows herself to feel this pain because she values the hard work she is doing, but her eyes tell me of her fear. She thinks she can’t possibly feel something this intense and still survive it. She isn’t sure what she wants or needs and can’t put it into words. She does know that she wants to quit, walk away, leave the labor with us for a short time, to be finished later. She wants to know when it will end, and that we will be with her until it does. Yet, as each contraction ends she sleeps, or jokes, or eats, or walks.

The deep groaning, moaning, and grunting sounds tell me that the time for birth is drawing closer. Quietly, tentatively she begins to recognize this and gives in to the overwhelming urge to push. I watch as she slowly, unhurriedly, gently begins to bring her child out, insisting that she wants to feel every inch as this little one slides from one world into the next. A look of joy and amazement crosses her face as she touches her baby’s head before it is completely born. For a brief moment her baby is suspended between two worlds, born and not born, before slipping into her hands and mine.

When she has accomplished the task of giving birth- she scoops up her newborn and envelops it between her arms and her heart and says triumphantly, “I did it!” She has given birth. She has reached a place within herself she wasn’t sure existed and holds the reward of her efforts. She is stronger than she thought and braver than her partner could imagine.

Another woman has taught me again, to believe in the power of normal birth. Each time I have watched a woman choose her own path through labor, she has taught me that she knows instinctively how to give birth, and to do it well. Her new self-knowledge spills over into her ability to parent, and then to create change in the wider community. She becomes more powerful, transformed by birth.

My fascination with birth and babies may have drawn me to midwifery, but birth’s ability to transform and empower has led to my life’s work. I now run a birth center and home birth practice where women are reminded to trust themselves because they know more than they think. Although many of these families will say I taught them these lessons, they have actually taught me, repeatedly, to believe in birth’s ability to change everything.