Midwives (4 page)

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.

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.

TANNER: I’ll repeat my question. Do you think you’re qualified to perform this surgery?

DANFORTH: No, and I’ve never said that I thought I was.

TANNER: And yet you did. With a kitchen knife, on a living woman, you—

DANFORTH: I would never endanger the mother to save the fetus—

TANNER: You didn’t endanger the mother, you killed—

HASTINGS: Objection!

Perhaps I should have been surprised that by the end of the trial my father had any hair left at all. In photographs taken the following winter, his hair looks as if it has begun to gray, but the sideburns are as prominent as ever.

My mother’s calling—to her it was never a job or even a career—meant that my father was much more involved with me as a child than the fathers of most of my friends were with them. There was always a long list of baby-sitters pressed against the refrigerator door with a magnet, and occasionally I did indeed wind up with my mother at somebody’s delivery, but birth is as unpredictable as it is time-consuming, and my father often filled the Connie-care breach. After all, I was an only child and my mother would have to disappear for twelve hours, or a day, or a day and a half at a time.

My father wasn’t much of a playmate when it came to dressing dolls or banging plastic pots and skillets around my toy kitchen (actually, he wasn’t very good with regular cast-iron or metal ones either), but he was creative when I needed new voices for trolls, and extremely handy when it came to building a permanent playhouse from wood, or a temporary one from card tables and bed sheets. He would usually endure whatever program I wanted to watch on television, even if it meant an irritating struggle adjusting the rabbit ears atop the television set for a full fifteen minutes before my show began. (Reception in our part of Vermont then was laughably poor. I remember a day one spring—when the baseball season had begun and the basketball and hockey seasons were in the midst of their endless play-offs—when my father was watching a basketball game through so much screen snow and fuzz that my mother sat down on the couch beside him, thumbed through a magazine for five or ten minutes, then looked up and inquired, “What sport is this?”)

My father and I also spent a fair amount of time together driving around northern Vermont in his Jeep: Often he was chauffeuring Rollie and me to the bookstore or the toy shop in distant Montpelier, the tack shop in St. Johnsbury, or to some third friend’s home in Hardwick or Greensboro or Craftsbury. One September and October, it seemed, he was driving us somewhere every single day, and then working at the dining-room table in our home all night to try and keep up with the work he was missing nine to five at his office: There had been a notable baby boom in the county that fall, roughly nine months after the coldest, harshest winter in years, and my mother was busy.

And although my father was unfailingly patient with me, and always at least feigned contentment at the prospect of another Saturday afternoon or Wednesday evening with only an eight- or a nine-year-old child for company, I know the demands of my mother’s calling strained their marriage. When they fought, and I remember them fighting most when I was in elementary school and at that age when I was at once young enough to need virtually constant supervision by someone and old enough to understand on some level the dynamics of what was occurring, their arguments would filter up through the registers in the ceilings of the rooms on the first floor of our house.

“She needs a mother, dammit!” my father would snap, or “You’re never here for her!” or “I can’t do this alone!” Against all experience, he continued to believe he could use me as a trump card to convince my mother to stay home. It never worked, which usually compelled him to change his tactics from guilt to threats:

“I didn’t marry you to live in this house all alone!”

“A marriage demands two people’s attention, Sibyl.”

“I
will
have a wife in this world, Sibyl. That’s a fact.”

At the beginning of these fights, my mother always sounded more perplexed and hurt than angry, but underneath that initial sadness in her tone was a stubbornness as unyielding as Vermont granite. She could no sooner stop delivering babies than people could stop having them.

But I also believe that my father deserves high marks for simply enduring all that he did: The husbands of most midwives don’t put up with their spouses’ hours for long, especially once they are fathers themselves, and most of my mother’s midwife friends had been divorced at least once.

Usually my parents’ arguments ended in silence, often because my father was incredulous:

“Wait a minute. Didn’t the baby arrive at six in the evening?” I might hear my father asking.

“Yup. Julia. Such a pretty girl.”

“It’s past nine o’clock! What the hell have you been doing for the last three hours?”

“Folding baby clothes. You know I love folding baby clothes.”

“You were folding baby clothes for three hours? I suppose the parents own a store that sells baby clothes?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Rand. You know I didn’t stay there just to fold baby clothes. I wanted to make sure everyone was okay. It
is
their first child, you know.”

“So how long did you spend—”

“Thirty minutes, Rand. I probably spent thirty minutes actually folding Onesies and Julia’s tiny little turtlenecks.”

“But you did hang around for three hours—”

“Yes, I did. I made sure Julia was nursing, and Julia’s mom was up and around. I made sure the family had plenty of food in the refrigerator, and the neighbors were planning to bring by casseroles for the next few days.”

“And you made sure the baby’s clothes were folded.”

“You bet,” my mother might say, and I could see in my mind my father shaking his head in quiet astonishment. A moment later I would hear him leave the kitchen, where they might have been bickering, and go upstairs alone to their bedroom. Sometimes, later, I’d hear them make love as they made up: To this day, I remember the noise their bed made as among the most reassuring sounds I’ve ever heard.

Unfortunately, there were also those fights that would escalate and become ugly, sometimes because my father had been drinking. He might have been drunk when my mother returned, and she might have been tired and cranky. This was a combustible mix. And while my mother would never drink to catch up—her sense of responsibility as a midwife prevented her from drinking or smoking pot whenever she was on call—when she was hurt she could lash out with a fury that was both articulate and verbally violent. I never heard my parents slap or hit each other, but powered by bad scotch and exhaustion, they’d say things as wounding as a fist. Maybe even more so. I’d hear expressions and exchanges I didn’t understand at the time but that frightened me nonetheless because I knew someday I would.

I never told Rollie the details of my parents’ fights, but I told her enough that one day she gave me some advice that served me well: Every so often, replace an inch or so of the Clan MacGregor with an inch or so of tap water. Be judicious if the bottle is low, and always mark in your mind the exact spot on the label the fluid had reached—the hem of the bagpiper’s kilt or the bagpipe itself, for example, or the bottom of the letters that spelled the scotch’s brand name.

She had been doing this with her own parents for years, she said, and look at how well their marriage worked.

On those nights my father chose to smother his frustrations with scotch, my parents’ fights were like powerful three A.M. thunderstorms: loud and scary, sometimes taking an agonizingly long time to blow over, but causing little apparent damage. When I would scan our yard in the morning after even an especially fierce and frightening August storm, the sunshine usually revealed only minor damage. Some of the white, late-summer blossoms from the hydrangea might be on the ground; a sickly maple might have lost a few leaves; behind our house, there might even have been a small branch from a tree in the woods, blown onto the lawn by the wind.

But the sunshine always reassured me that the storms were never as bad as they’d sounded, and usually I felt that way after my parents’ fights when we’d all have breakfast together the next day. I know my parents never stopped loving each other—passionately, madly, chaotically—and one or the other of them was always there for me.

Given the amount of time I spent being transported places by my father when I was growing up, it shouldn’t surprise me that my first exposure to the Bedfords was with him. But of course it was through my mother that our families’ fates were linked: Mrs. Bedford was one of my mother’s patients and the center of the very public tragedies our two families faced.