Midwives by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

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,
basedboth 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
    A S 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,