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

Blowing open science

Posted by Tatiana

An update: I'm now in school full time plodding along, hopefully, towards a Master's Degree in Public Health. (First, I'm working on finishing up a BS.) Midwifery is still in my heart and in my future, but the confluence of the trials of learning and practicing midwifery with very young chilluns PLUS the opportunity for excellent funding to finish school has me eagerly accepting this chance. I see the research and policy making that a Public Health degree allows to be on excellent and friendly terms with the kind of direct-entry hands-off socially-conscious midwifery I plan on stepping into in a few years time.

All of this means that I am in a mountain of schoolwork and enjoying the grace of a little extra help with the kiddos this weekend to catch up. I LOVE statistics (which I think boads well for my research goals), and find I have a sharper and more critical eye for all of school than I ever had before (thanks, year of self-educating!) I'm a glutton for all of it. I can feel my toolbox filling with some wickedly useful skills to take on some of the nonsense ostensibly founded on science that we are all contending with every day.

Cheerio and wish me the best.

Edit: In retrospect, that's kind of an odd title I picked for this post. I guess I titled it "Blowing open science" because I just felt some walls of reverence crumble within myself that I hadn't even noticed before. Science is couched in this social world with all of its sneaky little unconscious ideals and motives, and I'm just a little less wooed with the illusion of it's supposed objectivity.

I know we try to deconstruct science in the blogosphere a lot, so that's not original. But I think that because we often use other science to disprove whatever science we're trying to deconstruct, it reinforces the notion that somewhere out there is that "real real" science, and if we just use it against that "not exactly real" science we'll come out on top. Spinning in the sand. And don't get me wrong, I love science and will continue to use it. Just with a little less mystical awe, is all.