Tea For The Tillerman

Friday July 24, 2009 11:37pm

I spent a long day at the clinic today attending the birth of a first time mom with a very asynclitic baby –a child neither committed to being transverse OR straight posterior, but in a funny place in between. The mother was complete at 11:30 this morning, and began to push and continued to push until she finally had her baby, with 13 people in the room, most of them midwives, at 5:15 this evening. That is a loooong time to push out a baby, even for a first timer, and not something midwives normally do at home. Kate, who was primary for this birth, caught the stubborn stinker and managed through either luck or skill, to help keep a very tight perineum intact. Well done, Kate. All through the first hour or so of pushing, my spidey sense was tingling. There was something not right about this second stage and while my heart continued to chime in that the baby would come, I was uncomfortable with it. In the end, the baby did come. And I was also right that there was something unusual about what I was seeing. But I definitely had moments, like the 2 hours of visible head, the hour of crowning, when I thought maybe the baby wouldn’t come on its own. Today was a good lesson in patience and a reminder to trust this process. That even after 6 hours of pushing and seemingly impossible positions and fits, babies do tend to come.

This baby came, I need to acknowledge, after Sue arrived. A reminder of my revolving door of characters: Sue is a homebirth midwife from Austrailia, has been for 30 years, was traine by an old timey doc who still did homebirths and who was eventually stripped of his medical license for training homebirth midwives. She knows great luminaries of midwifery and woman centered care like Ina May Gaskin and Sarah Buckley. She’s amazing and I’ve been learning a lot from her since being here. She’s also the mother of Tessa, the Australian doctor that I’ve become friends with here as well. They are a great team to have here. Sue’s energy was fresh when she walked into the birthroom about 30 minutes before the baby came. Everyone was tired, but the energy picked up as soon as she arrived. I cannot overstate the help and importance of having someone fresh to revive flagging energies at a long hard birth. Whenever I observe a particularly difficult birth, it is easy to sort of deflect it like, well, this won’t ever happen to me. But that’s not true. I have to pay attention ESPECIALLY at the hard long ones because, like it or not, there will be hard births where I will be exhausted and out of ideas and feeling like maybe the baby won’t ever come. And it is at that point that I will need help, a second pair of hands, a fresh set of eyes, some new perspective. This is why I love the idea of working in partnership instead of alone, of having a community that is supportive of you, so you have other midwives you can call on when its been 24 hours and you haven’t eaten or slept and you can smell yourself and you’re starting to hate the family you’re working with, and thinking about just walking out of the house and out of your job. Because there will be days when I will need to be able to say “Oh my god! This is taking forever!” and someone I trust to say to me, “Yeah, and? The baby is coming.” At any rate, the baby came. Probably would have come even without Sue’s energy, but I probably wouldn’t have wanted to stay for the end.

I was thinking about this a few hours after the birth when Sue called me over to “meet” her husband on Skype’s video chat. Her husband and I exchanged pleasantries and he asked if I was a “budding midwife” and Sue piped up, “She’s a midwife already. She’s getting ready to sit her final exams. She’s very skilled and a straight shooter and has a wicked sense of humor and I’m trying to convince her to move near us to set up a group homebirth practice with me.” As I burned with pride and embarrassment at such glowing remarks from someone I respected so well, her husband informed me that it was quite a compliment coming from her. I totally got that.

It is true that Sue has mentioned a few times recently, in a breezy mostly-teasing sort of way, that I should move to Australia and come to births with her. Of course it has my interest piqued. I don’t know what the next step in my life is. I feel like I’m ordering the rest of my life over the phone from a menu written only in a language I don’t speak, pressing buttons and hoping whatever is delivered is something I’ll like. I am feeling anxious about getting to a place in my skills where I feel more confident, worrying that I won’t have the kind of support I feel like I’ll need to practice where I live now. Would it be so outlandish to move across the globe to work with someone I respect immensely, who has more than my lifetime’s worth of experience, and not be her apprentice, but actually work with her?

I was exhausted when I got home from the clinic tonight, but my brain was still busy so I decided I would walk into town and get some quiet time alone. I happily used the headlamp that Austin brought for me on the dark walk through the Monkey Forest, finally not afraid of cobras in the shadows, or falling into unseen holes. The rain finally stopped this morning and everything is soggy and the humidity was intense today. In town, I stopped at one of the bootlegged DVD stores and got 2 movies for $1.50 each. Then I went to my favorite restaurant here and had yummy chicken soup and iced tea. I geeked out on some early Cat Stevens while I ate, and I missed Austin. Walking home, it was especially late and the Balinese aren’t used to white women walking alone in the dark at night. I was probably stopped 10 times by guys on motorbikes wanting to know if I needed a ride to my hotel (“Free?” one of them offered as I waved him off). Since Austin and therefore the scooter has gone and I’m back to walking everywhere, I noticed that I’m developing quite a phobia of the sidewalks in Ubud because of my fall. I am seeing every foot of walkway ahead of me as having the potential to crumble beneath my feet and send me back into the grimy, watery depths of the Bainese gutter. So I’ve been walking on the curb, or even in the street. I’m less afraid of being hit by a car or a motorbike than I am of falling through the sidewalk or not seeing a hole where the sidewalk used to be. Every time I feel one of the walk tiles shift under my feet, my heart jumps up into my throat and my pulse quickens. It is making walking around here unpleasant.

As I alternated between gingerly stepping on the wobbly sidewalk and playing chicken with the oncoming traffic in the street, I wondered if taking one of these “helpful” gentlemen up on their offer of a ride wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world. Which, of course, got me thinking about men in general and sort of fondly acknowledging that guys the world over are basically the same. Most of the guys pulling over to offer me a ride were hoping to get paid to ride me down the hill a few blocks, but I think there was also a secondary motivation of a young woman walking alone at night and the potential that I might “like” them. That’s basically how guys work, right? While Austin was here, we came to the decision to stop denying that we are in a relationship. Both of us were wanting to take it “slow,” to test the waters for a while, not pressure ourselves with a label, to give me some time to heal from my previous relationship (that only ended two months ago!). But we both had to admit that we were not really taking it slow, that we’d spent all our time together since we met up until I left, and then he flew halfway around the world and at great expense to surprise me here. Did either one of us want to see other people still? No. We were falling in love. It was time to just call a spade a spade. I can’t predict what is on the road ahead for us, but I adore him. He showed up so completely while he was here, participating in the clinic, making real connections with my friends here, adopting this temporary home of mine as his too. It was exactly what I would have wanted. Its so early still and I know the love drugs are running strong in our systems right now, but I’m really happy.

With all the happiness comes some insecurity, because I DON’T know what comes next. It echoes the thread that is running through my life at the moment. What am I doing? Where am I going? What do I want? EVERYTHING feels young and tender right now. There isn’t anything that feels established or old news. It’s a strange time in my life, to be sure. Embarking on what feels like a totally new chapter in my life, everything still in its cellophane to be unwrapped, explored, hoping it won’t get spoiled, and knowing it is the nature of things to change. I keep thinking of Cat Stevens songs (yes, I’m obsessing on him a little bit right now), “Miles from nowhere/ guess I’ll take my/ time to reach there.” and “You’re still young/ that’s your fault/ there’s so much you have to go through.” I am so acutely aware of my age right now, feeling SO young and immature, recognizing that most of what I’m going through will only go away with more time and experience. I feel like I’m re-living that awkward geeky stage of ages 14 and 15, when I was all lumpy and too big for myself and my teeth didn’t fit in my mouth well and my boobs made me uncomfortable. I am feeling that way spiritually right now. Just uncomfortable in my skin, self-aware enough to mostly laugh about it, and generally just looking forward to it being over, not feeling like the ugly duckling anymore. I’m ready to be the swan.