Chris Bohjalian - Midwives

"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.