Fingerprints All Over My Heart
Day 38: Last Day!!!
In my quiet times of contemplation I often find myself sifting through my favorite birth room memories. Births and birth rooms are truly lovely moments and places in a midwife’s life. The are like precious jewels to be taken out and admired. I do hesitate to give them too much glory or weight however. You may wonder at my reasoning when I say that. Let me try to explain what I mean by that statement. Midwifery has its ups and downs like any work. It has much hard work that goes into helping assure that there is as much safety and evidence based care given during the actual birth, but when you consider the hours that you will spend with each of “your ladies” it is a relatively small piece of the big picture. Much of the “success” of each birth is directly related to the preparation that occurs beforehand. It has to do with your lady’s nutrition, her psycho-social state, her spiritual state, her mental state, her fear level, her level of comfort with you as a person. These issues can be affected by how much prenatal time, education hours, time spent reviewing her chart to understand her overall stasis, and time spent simply listening to her and holding space for her as a person. Of course the responsibility is not all on you, it is important how much time and effort she puts into her own health, spiritual state, mental state, family situation, etc. It is a real team effort between you, the woman herself and her support persons. Much of it can be thought of as tedium. This is where we get down to the real nitty gritty of being a midwife. Yes, ok, it is impressive that we can power through those long labors and difficult births, yes it is awesome that we have so many education hours, or CEU’s, or seminars, or certificates. It is good, it is needed. But the true part of where we minister to our women is the hours we sit across from them, and take the initial history, do the prenatal visits, and listen… and listen… and listen. This is much of the real art of midwifery. If you find this part almost unbearable, or tedious, or boring, then I doubt if you really understand what it is going to take to be a good midwife. It is about women, their lives, their stories, their pregnancies and finally their births. We must love all the little parts of this work, but most of all we must love the women.