Harman - Arms wide open: a midwifes journey

Arms Wide Open

A Midwifes Journey

Patricia Harman

Beacon Press, Boston

To my best friend, Tom, and to all those idealists who believe there is a better way

Midwifeto be with women at childbirth and throughout life

AUTHORS NOTE

Arms Wide Open: A Midwifes Journey is based on journals I kept for many years. The events were recorded in detail, but there are gaps, and I painted in those gaps to the best of my recollection. All the characters, except my husband, Tom Harman, have been disguised, to protect their privacy. The patients described are composites, based on real people.

Arms Wide Open is not just for those interested in midwifery or feminism. Its for anyone, of any gender, young or old, who cares about the earth and social justice. We each have our own song. This is mine and I sing it for you.

PRELUDE

All the way down Route 119, past Gandeeville, Snake Hollow, and Wolf Run, Im thinking about the baby that died.

I wasnt there, didnt even know the family. It happened a few days ago, with another midwife, at a homebirth in Hardy County, on summer solstice, the longest day of the year.

Word on the informal West Virginia midwives hotline is that the babys shoulders got stuck, a grave emergency. The midwife, Jade, tried everything, all the maneuvers shed studied in textbooks and the special tricks shed learned from other practitioners, but nothing worked. They rushed, by ambulance, to the nearest hospital thirty miles away, with the babys blue head sticking out of the mother, but it was too late. Of course it was too late.

Homebirth midwives in West Virginia are legal, but just barely, and theres no doubt the state coroners office will investigate. Jade is afraid. We are all afraid.

We whip around another corner and I lose my supper out the side window. Who do I think I am taking on this kind of responsibility? Why am I risking my life to get to a homebirth of people I hardly know? What am I doing in this Ford station wagon being whipped back and forth as we careen through the night?

I awake sick with grief, my heart pounding. Im lying on a pillow-padded king-size bed with floral sheets. A man I hardly recognize sleeps next to me. This is Tom, I remind myself: my husband of thirty-three years, a person whose body and mind are as familiar to me as my own. I prop myself up on an elbow, inspecting his broad shoulders, smooth face, straight nose and full lips, his short silver hair, in the silver moonlight. One hairy leg sticks out of the covers. One arm, with the wide hand and sensitive surgeons fingers, circles his pillow. Its 3:45, summer solstice morning.

When I rise and pull on my long white terry robe, I stand for a moment, getting my bearings, then open the bedroom door that squeaks and pad across the carpeted living room. Outside the tall corner windows, the trees dance in the dark. Once I called myself Trillium Stone. That was my pen name when I lived in rural communes, wrote for our political rag, The Wild Currents , taught the first natural-childbirth classes, and started doing homebirths.

Now Im a nurse-midwife with short graying hair, who no longer delivers babies, living with an ob-gyn in this lakefront home, so far from where I ever thought I would live, so far from where I ever wanted to live. I search the photographs on the piano of my three handsome sons, now men. Do I wake? Do I sleep?

OK, my life has been a wild ride, Ill admit it, but the image of this hippie chick lurching through the night, on her way to a homebirth, with only a thick copy of Varneys Midwifery as a guide, disturbs me. What did she think she was doing? Where did she get the balls?

On the highest shelf in the back of our clothes closet, a stack of journals gathers dust. For seventeen years I carried them in a backpack from commune to commune. Theyve moved with me across the country three times, through midwifery school, Toms medical school and his ob-gyn residency. I cant get the diaries out of my mind, a mute witness to my life...

I slip back through the bedroom. Tom snores on. By the dim closet light, I find a stepladder and struggle to bring down the shabby container. The journals have been closed for twenty-five years; pages stick together and smell faintly of mold.

Im on a mission now, trying to understand, but Im surprised to find that I started each entry with only the day and the month, no year. This is going to take a while. It seems I never expected anyone would want to reconstruct my life, not even me. Im an archaeologist digging through my own past.

With narrowed eyes, I flip through notebook after notebook, daring that flower child to show her face. When the alarm goes off, Tom, dressed in blue scrubs for the OR, finds me asleep in the white canvas chair, with a red journal open, over my heart.

FROM THE RED JOURNAL

LITTLE CABIN IN THE NORTH WOODS

19711972

Fall

CHAPTER 1

Home

Keep up, Stacy yells into a bitter wind, turning to wait for me. This kid is getting heavy. In the dim light, I can just see his face, his narrow nose, his long eyelashes, his brown beard and brown hair, a dark Scot with a square jaw and the back of an ox. He has the baby carrier on his back and a heavy canvas backpack loaded with supplies on his front. I try to pick up my pace, but I, too, am carrying a large knapsack of provisions, and though Im sturdy and big boned, Im not as strong as my lover.

The swamp is damp with second-growth cedars that lean close like old women. We squish along the narrow path until we come to the creek and find it flooded. To get home, we must cross on unstable logs. Stacy goes first with one-year-old Mica. I trudge behind, after finding a long stick to balance myself. One wrong move and Ill tumble into the water.

The trip to Duluth was a disappointment. Wed hiked out of the homestead and then hitched into town, but three out of four friends we went to see were in Minneapolis at a war resisters meeting. I sigh into the dark.

Sometimes Im tired of this difficult life, living without electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, or a vehicle, but its my choice. No one is forcing me to live in a two-room log cabin, on a remote farm, a mile from the nearest dirt road, ten miles from the closest store.

We traverse the big meadow where we have our garden and wind through the balsam grove, along the path to the smaller clearing. In the fading light, our two-story log house, taller than it is wide, looms over us. As always when we come up to it through the trees, its solid bulk surprises me. We built this cabin, overlooking the Lester River, with our own hands. It is ours and we are home.

Repentance

Rain, rain, a snare drum on the roof. All morning it rains and we work inside, chinking. Once, this hundred-year-old Finnish log house sat rotting on our friend Jasons Christmas tree farm. Last summer we deconstructed it, hauled it ten miles over dirt roads on a borrowed logging truck, planed the old surface down to new wood, built a foundation, and reassembled the timbers like Lincoln Logs. It was grueling, hot work, with mosquitoes buzzing over our heads, but I loved it...

Mica crawls on the floor in his corduroy coveralls, plays in the wood chips. When he starts to fuss, I stop chinking and nurse him. Stacy has gone upstairs to take a nap. Thats one thing I appreciate about living here. You can sleep when you want to, work when you want to, make love when you want to. No time clocks. No boss constantly watching over you.

From my perch on the window seat, I gaze out the window. The Lester River, sixty feet down the grassy slope, is up to its banks. White foam floats on the water. Wildflowers encircle us, goldenrod and deep purple aster. A flock of yellow finch swoops down on the blossoms, looking for seeds. Except for this clearing and the five-acre meadow where we garden, uninhabited forest surrounds us for miles.