Midwives

  She returned just before her twentieth birthday, telling her parents she'd stay through the summer and then resume her studies in the fall. My grandmother always insisted that my mother had dropped out with very good grades, all A's and B's, and Mount Holyoke would have been happy to take her back.

  But I don't think returning to college was ever very likely. She had already developed what was then a popular distaste for most traditional or institutional authority, and somehow Mount Holyoke had become suspect in her eyes. Besides, by July she had fallen in with a group of self-proclaimed artists in the hills northeast of Montpelier, an assemblage of singers and painters and writers that included an illustrator who would eventually decide to become an architect instead of an album cover designer--my father. The men in the group remained in college so they wouldn't lose their draft deferments, but the women dropped out and threw pots, hooked rugs, wrote songs.

  My mother became pregnant with me soon after that, and she and my father always reassured me that there was never any discussion of finding an expert in Boston or Montreal who would know how to make me go away.

  Knowing my parents, I indeed believe the idea of aborting me never crossed my mother's mind, but I'm sure the thought occurred to my father. I'm positive. I have never doubted his love, and I believe he's very glad I'm here, but he has always been a tidy man, and unplanned pregnancies are usually pretty messy affairs. My conception postponed indefinitely, and then forever, any discussion of Sibyl's returning to college.

  That's one of the main reasons that my mother became a lay midwife instead of a medically trained nurse midwife or perhaps even an obstetrician-gynecologist: no college degree and--over time--the conclusion that she didn't need one.

  Of course, she also believed with a passion that in most cases women should have their babies at home. She thought it was healthier for both the mother and the newborn. Women, in her mind, labored most efficiently in the environment they knew best and that made them the most comfortable; likewise, it was important to greet a baby as it emerged into the world in a room that was warm, and to catch it with hands that were kind. The whole idea of salad server-like forceps and abdominal transducers irritated my mother, and--eventually, this would prove to be the cruelest irony of all--she would give a laboring woman every chance in the world to deliver vaginally. In some cases, she waited for days, always patiently, before she would take the woman to a hospital where a doctor would anesthetize her, then cut through her abdominal and uterine walls and lift the startled child into the fluorescent lights of an operating room.

  My mother knew home birth wasn't for everyone, but she wanted it to remain a viable option for those who were interested. And if she had ever become a doctor or nurse-midwife, the state's Board of Medical Practice would have tried to force her to practice in a hospital.

  That was how the regulations worked then; that's how they work now. If doctors and nurse-midwives deliver babies at home, they do so without malpractice insurance or state sanction. So from my mother's perspective, there was no reason to get any sort of medical degree. She knew what she was doing.

  Did Sibyl Danforth dislike hospitals and what her prosecutors would describe as the medical establishment? For a time, I think she did. Was she, as they called her, a renegade? You bet. (Although when accused of being a renegade in court, she smiled and said, "I prefer to think of myself as a pioneer." Whenever I come across that exchange in the piles of court papers I've amassed, I grin.)

  There was a certain humor to her anti-ob-gyn bias that never came out at the trial. In one photo of her taken in 1969, she's leaning against the back of a VW Beetle, and there by her knees are two bumper stickers: QUESTION AUTHORITY! and ONLY DUCKS SHOULD BE QUACKS. The same misgivings that she had for what she perceived to be the entrenched power of professors and college presidents, she had for physicians and hospital administrators as well.

  And while she largely got over her distrust of doctors--while she never dawdled when she decided a woman needed medical intervention, while she certainly took me to pediatricians when I wasn't feeling well as a child--most doctors never learned to trust her.

  . . .

  Mine was not the first birth at which my mother was present. Mine was the third.

  In the year and a half between her return from Boston and my arrival in Vermont, two other women in that circle of friends northeast of Montpelier had children, and my mother was present at the first birth by accident, and the second by choice. Appropriately, the first of those births was in a bedroom in a drafty old Vermont farmhouse, not a sterile delivery room in a hospital.

  The first of those births--and my mother's baptism to midwifery--was Abigail Joy Wakefield's.

  The little girl was supposed to have been born in a hospital, but she arrived two weeks early. The six adults who were present the night her mother's labor began, including the two people who would become my own parents, feared they were too stoned to try and drive any of the cars that were parked willy-nilly by the old house as though an earthquake had hit. Consequently, in a reversion to sex roles that in my opinion was part instinct, part socialized, the men agreed to run the three and a half miles up the road to the pay phone at the general store, where they could call an ambulance, and the women took the laboring mother upstairs to make her as comfortable as possible--and deliver the baby, if it came to that.

  Why all three men went, including my father, has become another one of those almost mythic stories that were told and retold among my parents' friends for years. My father insisted that it was a spontaneous decision triggered by the fact that all of the men had dropped acid and simply failed to think the decision through properly. My mother and her female friends always teased him, however, that each guy had been a typical male who had wanted to get as far away from a woman in labor as humanly possible. Indeed, after traveling well over three miles in the dark, the men decided to wait by the main road for the ambulance, so they could be sure it found its way to the house.

  Fortunately, neither my mother nor Abigail Joy's mother, Alexis Bell Wakefield, were tripping. That evening they'd merely been smoking pot.

  Initially, my mother and Alexis were joined in the bedroom by Luna Raskin. Unlike the other two women, Luna did have all sorts of synthetic chemicals in her body, and every time Alexis sobbed, "Oh, God, it hurts, it hurts so much!" Luna would grab my mother's shirt and wail, "They're killing her, they're killing her!"

  For a moment my mother assumed Luna meant Alexis's contractions. But when she elaborated, my mother realized with a combination of horror and astonishment that Luna was referring to President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whose photograph had been on the front page of the newspaper that day.

  At that point my mother threw Luna out of the bedroom and delivered the baby herself.

  My mother wasn't sure what delivery tools she would need, and made one of those decisions that suggested she was indeed called to be a midwife: She concluded that women had been having babies for a long, long time before someone invented delivery tools, whatever they were. She imagined the female body had a pretty good idea of what it was supposed to do, if she could simply keep Alexis calm.

  Nevertheless, she did round up all of the washcloths and towels she could find, and she filled a huge lobster pot with boiling hot water. She had no idea what one should expect from a placenta, she had no comprehension of what it meant to push, and (in hind-sight this probably was for the best) she had never even heard a term like cephalo-pelvic disproportion--an infant head a couple of hat sizes too big for mom's pelvis.

  She turned off the overhead light in the bedroom, assuming Alexis would be more comfortable if she wasn't staring straight up into a bright light; the lamp in the corner shed just enough light for Sibyl to see clearly all of the things she didn't understand.

  Fortunately, Alexis's own mother had insisted that her daughter visit an ob-gyn, and Alexis had done some reading on her own. The woman was also blessed with a very short labor
and a small--but healthy--baby. Yet no labor is easy, and while my mother never lost her belief that the process she was watching was incredibly beautiful, as the pain Alexis was feeling grew worse, Sibyl grew fearful that something was wrong. She would rub Alexis's legs and massage her back, and purr that she thought Alexis was merely experiencing what almost every woman since creation had felt. But inside, my mother had her doubts.

  When the better part of an hour had passed and neither the men nor an ambulance had returned, those fears led her to wash her hands once again, this time with a thoroughness that would have impressed a heart surgeon. She took off her silver bracelets and the three different rings she wore on her fingers, including the one my father had given her after a rock concert near Walden Pond, and scrubbed her wrists and her arms up to her elbows.

  When her hands were as clean as she believed possible, she placed a finger as far inside Alexis's vagina as she could, hoping to discover whether the baby was about to emerge.

  "Am I dilated?" Alexis groaned, rolling her head back and forth on the pillow as if the spine in her neck were made of Jell-O.

  At that point in Sibyl's life, the word dilation had always been used in the context of pupils and drugs. She had no idea that Alexis was referring to her cervix. And so my mother looked up from between Alexis's legs to scan her friend's face, but the woman had shut her eyes.

  "I think so," my mother answered; although she couldn't see Alexis's pupils, she assumed that anyone who had spent as much time with her mouth around a bong as Alexis had must have eyes that were dilated.

  "How far?"

  "Shhhhhhh," my mother the emergency midwife said. She wiggled the tip of her forefinger inside Alexis and grazed something hard that she understood instantly was a skull. The baby's head. Briefly she rolled her finger across it, astonished by how much of it she could feel.

  "Can you feel the head?" Alexis asked.

  "I can feel the head," Sibyl answered, mesmerized, and slowly withdrew her finger.

  Just a few minutes later Alexis screamed that she had to push, and she did.

  "Go for it," my mother said. "You're doing great."

  Without thinking about the logic behind her idea but assured on some primitive level that it was the right thing to do, she leaned Alexis up against the headboard of the bed and surrounded her with pillows. My mother thought if Alexis sat up, gravity would help the baby fall out.

  She then kneeled on the bed between Alexis's legs and watched for a few minutes as the woman pushed and groaned and gritted her teeth, and absolutely nothing seemed to happen. The lips of her vagina may have grown more damp, but certainly no head had begun to protrude from between them.

  "Relax for a minute. I think you just made a ton of progress," my mother lied. She wrapped her hands under each of the woman's knees and lifted her legs up and out, hoping to widen the opening for the baby. "Ready?" she asked Alexis, and Alexis nodded.

  For the next thirty minutes Alexis would push and rest, push and rest. All the while my mother kept cheering Alexis on, telling her over and over and over that she could do this, she could push for another second, one more second, the baby was about to pop like a cork if she pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed.

  A little before one in the morning my mother nearly fell back off the bed when all of that pushing suddenly worked, and the dark swatch of hair that had been teasing her behind the labial lips for what had seemed forever suddenly punched its way out, and she was staring down into a baby forehead, baby eyes, a baby nose, and a baby mouth. Lips shaped like a rose, so small they might have belonged to a doll. She cupped the head in her hands, planning to pillow its fall into the world, when a shoulder slipped out, then another, and then all of Abigail Joy and her umbilical cord. The baby was pink, and when she opened her eyes she started to howl, a long baby cry that caused Alexis to sob and smile at once, a howl so impressive that had my mother at the time had the slightest idea what an Apgar score was, she would have given the child a perfect ten.

  As she was studying the two spots where the umbilical cord met mother and daughter, assuming she should snip it while wondering how, my mother heard sirens racing up the hill to the farmhouse, and she knew an ambulance was about to arrive. She was at once relieved and disappointed. She had been scared, no doubt about it, but something about the pressure of the moment had given her a high that made her giddy. This was life force she was witnessing, the miracle that is a mother's energy and body--a body that physically transforms itself before a person's very eyes--and the miracle that is the baby, a soul in a physical vessel that is tiny but strong, capable of pushing itself into the world and almost instantly breathing and squirming and crying on its own.

  When Sibyl's friend Donna went into labor a few months later, she asked my mother to be with her in the hospital. I wasn't with my mother when she delivered Abigail Joy, but I was there at the second birth that she saw. I calculate I was six weeks old, perhaps as much as half an inch long, with a skeleton of cartilage and the start of a skull that would be mercifully thick. Unlike my skin.

  Chapter 4.

  Doctors use the word contraction and a lot of midwives use the word rush. I've never really liked either one: Contraction is too functional and rush is too vague. One is too biologic and one is too ... out there. At least for me.

  I'm not sure when I started using the expression aura surge, or in the midst of delivery, simply the word surge. Rand believes it was while delivering Nancy Deaver's first son, Casey, the day after we'd all stood around the statehouse in Montpelier, cheering for McGovern. Rand wasn't at the birth, of course, but Casey was born in the afternoon and it was at dinner that night that Rand noticed my using the words surge and aura surge.

  Maybe he's right. I might have made some connection between the way all of us in Montpelier were tripping when McGovern spoke one day, most of us without any chemical help, and the way Nancy and I were tripping the next. I felt really good about the planet and the future both afternoons. When we were all on the statehouse lawn listening to the man, it was freezing outside, and while my cheeks were so cold my skin was stinging, I could see people's breath when they spoke and it looked like they were sharing their auras in this incredibly spiritual and meaningful and perhaps just plain healthy sort of way.

  And while I've always understood the biologic rationale for the medical establishment's use of the word contraction, based both on Connie's birth and all of the births I've attended, the idea of a surge reflects both the baby's desire for progress and the mother's unbelievable power. Surge may also be more spiritually accurate, especially if it's called an aura surge.

  --from the notebooks of Sibyl Danforth, midwife

  AS LATE AS THE FALL OF 1981--the autumn of my mother's trial--my father, Rand, was still wearing sideburns. They didn't crawl across his face to the corners of his mouth the way they had in the late 1960s and early '70s, but I remember looking up at his cheeks as we sat together in the courtroom and noting how his sideburns fell like horseshoes around his ears, descending to just below each lobe.

  When the testimony was especially damaging to my mother, or when my mother was being cross-examined by the state's attorney, I watched my father pull nervously at the dark hair he allowed to grow beside his ears.

  STATE'S ATTORNEY WILLIAM TANNER: So you asked Reverend Bedford to bring you a knife?

  SIBYL DANFORTH: Yes.

  TANNER: You didn't just ask for any knife. You asked for a sharp knife, didn't you?

  DANFORTH: Probably I don't think I would have asked for a dull one.

  TANNER: Both Reverend Bedford and your apprentice recall you requested "the sharpest knife in the house." Were those your words?

  DANFORTH: Those might have been my words.

  TANNER: Is the reason you needed "the sharpest knife in the house" because you don't carry a scalpel?

  DANFORTH: Do you mean to births?

  TANNER: That's exactly what I mean.

  DANFORTH: No, of course I don't. I've never met
a midwife who does.

  TANNER: You've never met a midwife who carries a scalpel?

  DANFORTH: Right.

  TANNER: Is that because a midwife is not a surgeon?

  DANFORTH: Yes.

  TANNER: Do you believe surgeons possess a special expertise that you as a midwife do not?

  DANFORTH: Good Lord, don't you think so?

  TANNER: Mrs. Danforth?

  DANFORTH: Yes, surgeons know things I don't. So do airline pilots and kindergarten teachers.

  TANNER: Are you referring to their training?

  DANFORTH: I've never said I was a surgeon.

  TANNER: Is a cesarean section a surgical procedure?

  DANFORTH: Obviously

  TANNER: Do you think you're qualified to perform this surgery?

  DANFORTH: In even my worst nightmares, I never imagined I'd have to.