Notes From Home & Road

scattered, unfiltered, raw

Dear reader,

I have been repeating the 23rd Psalm to myself over and over, covering the miles between my home and the homes of the mothers in my circle of care. Praying silently. Praying aloud. There between the asphalt and the sky my heart wrestles with the ever present questions: “What if? Why?”

In the last weeks of pregnancy and the first weeks after birth, prenatal and postpartum visits are scheduled close together. Clients and I see much of each other, so much so that the widening of time between visits once several weeks have passed after birth can feel jarring.

I checked the phone every day for a message from you.

I weigh one mother’s baby weekly, reassuring her that her milk supply is abundant and her baby growing beautifully despite her concerns. I bring her specially blended herbal teas to support her sleep. We discuss family planning, chronic health concerns, and referrals for physical therapy to help her heal ongoing back pain.

Her baby smiles enthusiastically at me as I do a routine well-baby check at four weeks—one of his very first smiles. All three of us are comfortably settled on the big bed where she gave birth weeks ago, April sun suffusing our bodies in warmth. We laugh. Chat about little boys and their rambunctious antics. Share complaints about walls that serve double-time as apartments for rampant infestations of stinkbugs.

I leave applesauce and soup on her kitchen counter when I go.

The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside the still waters.

The words are familiar to my heart; they require no concentration. I turn them over in my mind like beads in the hand, over and over and over.

Nine lambs in April, all thriving. I am thrilled. Disbelieving. Grateful.

There is one bottle baby, a twin lamb whose mother accepts her brother and rejects her. I name her Andromeda. The name is replaced by the children, who call her Pumpkin Pie. I never call her Andromeda again. Less than four weeks after her birth she eats my mother’s rose bush.

More miles. Tears. Another mother, one whose arms reached to welcome a baby and were left empty, whose prayers for mercy were met with silence.

I bring supplements, food, body oil. She asks questions, wondering if she is abnormal in how her grief is unfolding. Wondering if her body is full of betrayals. She is overwhelmed by everyone wanting to hear every detail of her story, and wishes she could write it out to hand out to visitors without reliving every anguished moment.

We sit together, for hours. The conversation between us is only partly in words; the rest is said in silence.

Do you wake at night too? Do you think of him?

“Yes.”

I don’t tell her that when I wake it is often to tears already running down my cheeks, reaching out for my son to feel him still breathing. I don’t tell her about the wrestling in the wee hours, crying out to God against the unfairness of it all.

She asks me to bring him with me when I come to visit her again.

A woman who birthed twins seventeen years ago tells me my mother was the one who supported her and asks me if my mom is still practicing midwifery. I tell her she died almost three years ago now, and stopped practicing two years before that.

How did I forget that? I knew that.

I don’t mention to her that I still forget it happened—forget for a flash of a moment that my mother’s bones rest in the earth. That my first inner impulse is to still reach for my phone and call her, especially when I leave a birth which asked much of all involved.

“Her aliveness must have left the stronger impression on you.” I am smiling at her when I say it, and I mean it. I remember what the mother of the silently born babe said to me: He lives in the hearts of so many people now. I never would have imagined it.

The twins that my mother helped to welcome are staying over to help their sister with her newborn, the sister I have supported now through two births as my mother supported hers. They glow with enthusiasm over the baby, and tease the toddlers.

You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever.

A client comes for a prenatal visit at twelve weeks and asks me to check her progesterone levels, remembering her late miscarriage last year. Her words are matter of fact and her speed brisk as she goes over the details, but her voice catches.

I never knew how many mothers and fathers are showing a good face to the world and privately struggling until I went through it myself. We had a very hard time for a while.

Another client’s breech baby spontaneously turns head down after a series of exercises.

An early heartbeat check sends vigorous fetal heart tones galloping through the room, far earlier than I dared to hope finding them.

The daffodils lining the sidewalk to the grieving mother’s front door bloom, then the tulips. I have walked that path from her driveway into her room so many times by now that I feel I could do it with my eyes closed and without stumbling.

I’m so glad to see you again. I wished for you to be here.

There are tears in her eyes.

The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside still waters.

But these waters are not still, they are flowing over cheeks lined with loss of sleep.

There is more wanting here than the body can hold. No answer that can ease the heart. No clinical skill matters here, not anymore. All I can give now is presence, knowing all the while that presence is such a small gift to offer when such palpable grief enters the room.

We spend several hours together. Quietly I tell her the story of Adam Wilson’s elderly neighbor, of the mother who after decades and decades still grieved the beloved son who died on a different floor of hospital as she was giving birth to another child.

You can’t control when acceptance of the facts comes to you. It might take years, and that’s okay. But your son—he will be held in your heart for as long as you live. And you are still his mother.

The smallness of what I have given her feels to me like a chest-crushing weight. As I drive home, past trees in new bloom, I realize I am mouthing words to myself, barely audible.

The lambs get fatter and taller. They repeatedly slip the fence and go gamboling about the lawn, only to skitter back to their mothers at the first startling noise or curious approach of the puppies. Our suppers move outside for a few of the warmer evenings, bright cloth spread across the porch table and food piled high.

Grief wakes me up at night. I chop vegetables for soup, designated for travel to homes where the veil is drawn thin.

I dream of what it would be like to pick up the phone and call my mother. The next day, I accidentally start dialing the number that used to be hers.

I place another order for midwifery supplies and jar up a new batch of herbal tea. Print updated postpartum instruction sheets. Schedule another round of prenatal visits. Read and re-read pieces like the beautiful essay Haley Baumeister shared after the birth of her daughter. “Babies, even unexpected or overwhelming amounts of them, seem more and more like miracles given in due time.” There is truth to this. I feel it more keenly with the passing years.

In the second week of April I plant a lilac bush by the house, just past the lamb-eaten rosebush. I write a letter that I do not send. I tuck peas into a freshly weeded strip of garden earth. I practice listening and showing up, more often failing at both than succeeding.

Yet again I am left holding new depths of gratitude for those things which exist beyond the boundaries of the moment—those simple acts of care which offer sustenance both through great celebration and through great loss.

The bowl of soup, the note dropped into the mail, the tucking of the child into bed come nightfall.

The invitation to dinner. The pause in an errand for a warm conversation. The reliability of kindness in one’s demeanor. The harsh word left unsaid, the compliment given. The extended hand.

These are not things to be taken for granted. They never were. But is it really grief which must always deliver the invitation to unearth the depths of their meaning?

With love,
Jan