Flag me down at Midwifery Today!

For those of you who happen to be attending the Midwifery Today conference this week in Eugene, please feel free to flag me down and introduce yourself! I'm afraid I don't have great current photos available of myself but this will have to do...

I probably won't be reading a mirror-image copy of Бульдог и Таксик with baby chew marks on it, and my hair looks kind of different, but that's pretty much my face.. so, you know, look for it and say hi! It would be delightful to meet some readers in real life, and if you're thinking about becoming a contributor all the better - I can woo you with my charm. (I'm totally not charming!) But you know, with everything so digitized and distancing it's a breath of air to have a little of that human connection.

I have to admit that I already have a tight knot in my stomach about the logistics of my children's needs balanced out against not wanting to miss such great and charismatic folks that do such important work and who are here for such a brief window.

I'm signed up for some interesting talks and workshops, but I'm most curious to hear what the main conference talks will discuss with the conference tag line topic of "Gentle Birth Is a Human Rights Issue." I do hope to hear the disparities in access to midwifery care getting some air time.

Introducing Myself

I will start my midwifery program in May at Midwives College of Utah, a program I chose for its distance learning and flexibility, as well as the fact that I live in Salt Lake, where direct entry midwifery is expressly legal and licensing is optional. Utah is not the place I ever thought I'd end up, being a lesbian from the Midwest, but I came here to get my PhD in Literature & Creative Writing, studying & teaching poetry (my day job, as I like to joke), and the university's program is in the top five in the nation. Fortunately I've fallen in love with the place and its natural beauty and I hope to stay here for awhile. 

My road to birthwork seems at once direct and circuitous. I have always loved babies, pregnancy, and birth, but it never occurred to me that could be a career. When I was little, I used to play doctor with my stuffed animals and dolls, but the only thing that ever happened was they gave birth. I told my mother I wanted to be a doctor, and she said, "No, you don't! You want to be a teacher and a writer." She was correct, I did. But now that I look back on that, I obviously wanted to be a midwife, I just didn't know such a job existed! I was the older sister and the oldest cousin, and worked regularly as a babysitter for several families in my teens. I was never happier than when I was surrounded by children. I went off to college and then became a high school English teacher for awhile before going back to grad school for my MFA and now my PhD. But I missed having children in my life. One night I was out with some friends and one woman confided in me that she and her husband were trying to conceive. I discovered a few years ago that I am infertile, and, anyway, I am single and not in a position to parent right now. But I went home from an evening of talking about babies and I felt this primal ache. I loved school and writing, but something very deep was missing from my life. That is when I decided to become a doula. 

I trained and certified through DONA and have had the pleasure to assist at several births. It fulfills me in a way my academic life never has. I love knowing so much about the process, and I found I was quite good at helping parents through the process of labor. My knack for school helped me remember all I read, and my maternal instincts and babysitter skills kicked in when it came to sensing what a woman needed from me in labor. All the clients I worked with wanted natural vaginal deliveries, but chose to deliver at a hospital, and I became so frustrated as time and again the OBs would swoop in and disregard a mother's plan. After a particularly frustrating encounter with an OB who lied to my client, telling her that purple pushing was the only way it was possible to get the baby out when my client was begging to be allowed to breathe and push at will and grunt, after the OB told me doulas only make things difficult for doctors, I thought for awhile that maybe I should give it up. It was so frustrating feeling so powerless, but after a few months of taking a break, I missed it so much. I felt like I wasn't fulfilling my calling. I decided that what I really wanted was more involvement, not less. I wanted to be the one in charge, I wanted more power so that I could give that power back to the person in labor, where it belongs, so that she can tune in to her body and her instincts and birth the way she wants. 

I am training to be a direct-entry midwife and I hope to specialize in home births. I look forward to sharing my journey with you!

Interesting New Comment

I wanted to quickly call attention to an interesting new comment on an old post "The Art and Joy of Pelvic Exams". The comment describes a developing technology that seems to assist with pelvic exams. I'm really interested to hear what people have to say about the possibility of using some sort of video probe to visualize the cervix rather than performing a vaginal exam. Would something be lost if we stopped doing pelvic exams or if we changed them in such a significant way? What do we have to gain and would

Calling new contributors

The trouble with a collaborative blog of student midwives is that you have a collaborative blog of people who don't really have time to write very often, who may prefer to roll up their sleeves and get into the mess of life, and who may - just possibly - have their heads in the clouds on occasion.

So, erm, are there any more of you out there?

For me the beauty of a collaboration is that in the collision of different and sometimes disparate perspectives, we are all enriched. So whether you favor hospital, birth center or home birth, whether you believe in regulation or in outlaw midwifery, whether you believe in active management or active hand-sitting - you are invited. You can cozy into the collective without worrying about self-promotion, or having to shoulder the burden of producing content alone, or having to stand stark and naked with the exposure an unpopular opinion (you might still be naked, but you won't the stark when you're with peers.) I find that comforting, anyway. Plus I'm tired of the me-me-me of the internet. I want to move the discourse forward, be enriched, and bring something useful to the table - not just create another popularity-craving cyber-identity. Neither the world nor my ego needs that!

(Are you sold yet?)

So, consider yourself invited. Join the conversation, and may we all be changed and improved in the process. Contact Katy - bones206@gmail.com - if you're interested!

I don't have a punchline

There is just this: an unplanned unassisted (but planned home birth) to a mother who, when her baby grew limp and breathless moments after her birth had the resuscitation training to calmly position her, breathe into her mouth, and repeat until her little arms curled up, she sputtered, and she cried. (Watch.) When I first watched the baby's arms grow limp, even though I anticipated it, having read the word "resuscitation" in Rixa's post, I panicked. My own baby was nursing to sleep as I watched this and I startled harshly enough that he pulled back, opened his eyes and looked at me, surprised. As I watched the baby grow dangly, I said to the screen, "No, no."

That was the first pit of the last 20 minutes, that full-body rejection of the sight of an unbreathing baby. (Qualifier: I am a mom with a still-young baby and some unresolved junk around his birth - I know I have no business bringing all of that to anyone's birth, and I am not attending births. But I'm allowed to watch youtube.)

And then, as I watched the aftermath, mama settling into the tub, baby squirming in the normal fashion, the bustling attendant arriving and then being asked to leave, and the new baby girl seeming fine, I filled with joyful exuberance. That this one precious, tender, incredibly sensitive new little person could be born needing help and receiving that help from her mother in the warm safety of a tub is a transcendently beautiful departure of what neonatal resuscitation normally looks like. Nothing jarring, nothing painful or invasive, nothing panicked, nothing even as upset as my own response watching on a screen so many miles away. No, just family, breath appropriately applied, and the rolling of time into life here among us other breathing people. I felt buoyant and celebratory.

But now I'm sad again. Because this exemplifies what Adrienne Rich said. I believe every baby is that tender, soft, new, sensitive and deserving of such gentleness. Especially when it needs extra help. But in our world, such gentleness is not a universal right but a privilege that becomes available based on the constraints of social, cultural and demographic factors, including educational privilege and a willingness to make a choice that our culture largely regards as reckless. That is an awful lot to ask of people, who are social, dynamic beings in constant relationship and flux with the people around us, carrying with us the vestiges of that sense that certainly we can't know everything about this world, so mightn't it be wise to defer to authority?

I love Rixa's bold and unapologetic grasp on her responsibility for the choices she makes for her family. I'm so glad for her, and for that sweet baby girl who may have had the world's most tender resuscitation. I'm so glad for my own children's relatively peaceful births, and for the so many that are held in that remarkably rare spirit of reverence and respect in this slowly growing trend of gentle birthing.

But it is a bittersweet gladness, indeed, when I let myself broaden the lens to the larger world.

I wish I could summarize it all with... "And here is our clear answer."

But where? Where is our clear answer? I don't live in a world that has any of those. Not really, anyway. We like to assume the stance of certainty and conviction, but not one answer seems to stand firm against the onslaught of every possible experience, every possible shred of information, and every possible circumstance. And as much as I don't like to leave a bit of writing dangling with this feeling of conflicted joy-sad-ambiguity, it's what I have. There is no punchline.

"When culture trumps law"

Quite an image for reproductive justice in all its forms.

Click to see:

Zina Saunders illustration

Is the natural birth movement too narrow?

"A movement narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth, which does not ask questions and demand answers about the lives of children and the priorities of government; a movement in which individual families rely on consumerism and educational privilege to supply their own children with good nutrition, schooling, health care, can, while perceiving itself as progressive or alternative, exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose children grow up in poverty and which places its highest priority on the technology of war."

-- Adrienne Rich