Midwifery Literature and Art is my favorite. class. ever. I don’t want it to end! Here is a series of small, even silly assignments I’ve done for this class.

Assignment: write 2 haikus

Haiku 1:

Matrescence moments

Then, now, will be. forever

Ever becoming

Haiku 2:

Baby works on down

Wriggling, turning, pressing

Baby knows his way

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Assignment: Write 150 words+ in response to this prompt: “A midwife goes on a road trip.”

A midwife goes on a road trip, car packed to the gills. How did it happen? Waiting 9 months to be off call, so many No’s to this time space. Three empty days. A miracle.

A midwife goes on a road trip, to Louisville, Kentucky, to a midwifery conference, where others know her crazy life of so many middle of the night and mid day mini road trips. It’s a life of road trips, but this one’s different, when there’s not a baby at the destination but a conference of fellow midwives.

A midwife goes on a road trip. She sings and cries along the way. For being alone, for being together. For being held after holding so many. She’s lived a thousand lives, and she relives them as she drives. A thousand revolutions of the tires, of the sun, of the babies’ heads, of the lives. Revolutions as repetitions, revolutions as change. Thousands and thousands of road trip revolutions. Her mind revolves.

A midwife goes on a road trip. It means she gets to stop. A road trip of rest. A road trip of not. Of not being on call. Not going to births. Not being with. On the road trip, she gets to be the mom.

A midwife goes on a road trip. She gets to be remade. Redone. Refreshed. Renewed. The revolutions stop. She gets a bed, a break, a breakfast. She gets to sigh, to clap, to cry.

The road trip saves her life.

She goes on, with life.

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Assignment: Create a list of 8-10 things that bring you happiness.

1. Reading a magazine (like Midwifery Today or Grace Tender)

2. Camping

3. Mountain hiking (not terribly strenuous)

4. Drinking coffee

5. Reading midwifery books for fun!

6. Going to Rembrant’s café with my daughters and/or sister

7. Walking around downtown or at the RiverWalk

8. Cross stitching

9. Petting our dog

10. Posting on FaceBook

11. Writing/journaling

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Assignment: create a fun Certificate of birth keepsake for your clients:

Sadly, I’m close to finishing my favorite class of all time: Midwifery Literature and Art. I’m posting one of my assignments here. I’m supposed to write a “midwifery pet peeve rant:” A 2-paragraph “furious diatribe.” Then, I’m to turn the tables, and write 2 more paragraphs “advocating” for my pet peeve.

Here’s what I wrote:

After returning to the home birth community, I’m noticing a troubling trend associated with the rise of Instagram. Let’s call it the “Instagram Birth Syndrome.” Quite a few women today come to homebirth after seeing a few blissful seconds of Instagram births. And she might not even realize that she doesn’t so much want the *home* birth as much as she wants the *Instagram* birth. But what is that Instagram birth? It’s a few seconds of selected scenes, beautiful, sweet scenes carefully edited and woven together. One might see the woman “breathing” her baby out in the water. Or 30 seconds of photos from a few shots of labor, to the smiles of the baby on the breast.

But something is greatly lacking with birth preparation often consisting of a random flood of Instagram birth images tracking through one’s brain. Are clients committed to the philosophy of home birth? the philosophy of birth’s natural-ness and physiological flow? Do they really know all that birth entails? For the modern woman in a developed country, natural birth is probably the most intense physical challenge she will ever face. Not to mention the overwhelming hormonal/emotional elation usually ending from that process. In most births I attend, birth doesn’t look anything like an Instagram Birth impression. It is loud, it is pain, it is purpose, it’s messy, it is challenge, it is going inside yourself—leaving the world of time and rational thought. For hours. It’s agony and hard, hard work. It’s not something you can really capture on Instagram. Nor the world of hormonal ecstasy that awaits in the hours and days following birth. The complete Ecstasy. It’s strange, getting to the end of a woman’s birth journey with her, realizing that she was expecting the Instagram version of birth, not the unfilmable version of what her birth really was. Most of actual birth would never “make it’ on Instagram.

On the other hand, Instagram has been the greatest modern asset to positive birth change. Women are able to see, with great intimacy, the powerful sacredness of a woman giving birth. Instagram-able images capture something about the special nature of a child being born—it’s no longer hidden away in books, locked away in hospitals; it’s there, in everyone’s face. Birth, in all its power and respect. Midwives honoring women, dads being supported and supportive, birth being honored—to unfold inside the family and home environment, accompanied by beauty and ritual that befits the act of birth.

Instagram has changed the grip of hierarchy and hidden, systematic de-birthing of birth that the medical model enshrined. Instagram has put birth back into women’s hands, literally. They can see and learn from one another in ways that are a bit similar to the old-style community birth, when women gathered around to support the laboring mom. It’s not quite the same, but pretty close.

Is Instagram responsible for “Instagram Birth Syndrome” or is it home birth’s greatest asset? Take your pick. It’s probably both.

Photo: Victoria’s birth on the floor of our living room in Kyiv, 2007.