To Cathy who I’m convinced is the best midwife in the modern world and who successfully brought me, my siblings, and many of my cousins into the world.
For many homeschooled kids… school does not end for summer break. If it did, homeschooled kids would never make it past a 2nd-grade level of math.
But summer school was often shorter than normal, so after morning devotional, math, (gross) and 1 hour of reading, my mom would finally release us for our summer break.
Some days we would play Iron Chef outside using only plants and mud to create culinary masterpieces, other days we would fill a kiddie pool with 2 inches of water and rose petals and pretend we were at a spa, and sometimes we just rode our bikes in a loop around the neighborhood for miles.
But on days when the Utah desert temperatures were just too high… we would go downstairs to the basement and watch whatever random TV shows were on in the middle of summer on a Tuesday afternoon.
We were only allowed to watch a limited number of channels, so after our recurring fight about whether Animal Planet was actually interesting, we always settled on TLC, which I only now realize stands for “The Learning Channel.”
TLC easily qualifies as one of the most unhinged parts of my childhood.
I never knew what to expect when I was watching TLC… sometimes it was a woman trying to choose a $7000 wedding dress with only a $2000 budget, other times it was watching young Amish teens find their way in the big city… and most of the time on summer afternoons it was a show called Bringing Home Baby in which a camera crew followed an expectant mother through the whole childbirth process.
We followed the cravings, the body changes, the birthing classes, and then as the water broke and labor progressed we got regular updates on the cervix, the dilation, and the father’s mental state.
I’m almost positive they just filmed most of the actual birth because I have some vivid memories of some pretty graphic scenes.
So imagine my siblings and I chilling in the living room on a hot summer afternoon watching women giving birth on television.
You would think that we sat there mouths hanging open… wide eyes… traumatized.
But no… as we sat there watching Bringing Home Baby a few of us would be reading a book, one of us might be dozing off, and the rest of us would be painting our nails with the newest shade of bright pink nail polish from the dollar store.
The show hardly got a reaction out of us at all… In fact, any show on Animal Planet brought out a much stronger reaction from us than Bringing Home Baby ever did.
There could be a few reasons for this lack of reaction.
It could be because when I was 9 years old I was shaken awake from a deep sleep by my older sister so I could see my brother being born just down the hall in my parent’s room.
It could be because I came home from a debate tournament one day to a woman moaning and realized it was my Aunt Jen in the final pushing stages of delivering my newest cousin.
Or it could be because when I asked if I could swim in the giant blow-up pool in my Aunt Amy’s living room she told me it was for her birth, not for swimming.
But I think the truth of it goes back much farther than any of these things.
When I took my first breath in this world it wasn’t the clean, sterilized air of the hospital but the warm, weird smell of my house in Orem Utah.
I’m sad to say I wasn’t a pool baby…
If you’ve never seen a kid’s pool blown up in someone’s living room for the sake of birthing a baby… you’ve never really lived.
I actually don’t know that much about my birth… I was a second child and a complete accident that turned into a major blessing. *winky face *sly face *head nod with subtle smile *shrugging shoulders with subtle smile
Of my six siblings four of us were born at home.
You see my parents were raised in mostly completely normal ways… for the 70s at least and let’s be honest… during the 70s absolutely nothing was normal at all.
My father was the youngest of three insane, wild, and future prison boys.
My mother was the second youngest of 11 and was basically an orphan.
Like I said I feel like this was normal in the 70’s.
Another thing that might have been normal was choosing to start a family in a radically different way than the one you were raised in.
So somehow my parent’s insane ways of being raised combined to create a result that made them super passionate about having kids at home and using a midwife.
I blame the 70’s.
But my strange childhood doesn’t end there.
For the first 10 years of my life my mom ran a store in our basement with my aunt Amy… the one who gave birth in a blow-up pool.
The store was called: For Every Mother
And it was exactly like it sounds.
The store sold all things mom… blankets, onesies, binkies, wraps, strollers, creams, salves, and most importantly breast pumps. Ohhhh did the store have breast pumps.
There was a certain salve called Lansinoh at the store that I used religiously for cracked and dry lips… I used to tell everyone about this amazing lip salve and I was WELL into my teenage years before I realized the actual use of that salve.
There was a doorbell on the basement door and my siblings and I would answer it filled with excitement about what kind of expectant mother would be on the other side.
There were old women, young women, first-time moms, mothers of 18, and occasionally hippies who had ventured into the big city from the woods.
When my mom wasn’t immediately available, we would put a bookmark in our math textbooks and help the expectant mothers ourselves.
We guided them to the right breast pump, gave nursing advice, and had conversations where we would say “I know it’s tough for those first few weeks but baby is so close to adjusting to a new sleep schedule.”
There was something powerful about a home-birthed-child encouraging a first-time mom who was venturing out for the first time to do something different.
You can imagine young 9-year-old Ari listening to the fears of a 27-year-old woman and telling her “This is the right decision and everything is going to be ok… I was born at home and look at how I turned out.” *winky face *sly face *head nod with subtle smile *shrugging shoulders with subtle smile
I learned a lot from being assistant to the assistant to the part owner of For Every Mother.
It was a great education for me and my sisters… in business and in childbearing.
It is the reason, having no children myself, that I am able to commiserate with women who tell me the agony of being dilated at a 3 for 17 hours.
It’s also probably the reason why I watched all 13 seasons of Call The Midwife and was affected so strongly (does that show teach more about birth or Catholocism? I’ll never know)
There’s something really special, and profound, and crucial about seeing a birth… especially in its more raw forms at home with a midwife.
Babies are born all the time but we constantly forget what it takes for it to happen… and when you see the baby finally emerge after hours of agony (if you’re still conscious at this point) you just have this insane moment where you say to yourself…
That thing is alive… and it’s a baby… and the baby is alive… and that just happened.
There’s no other experience like it in the whole world.
There’s also something about the midwife-mother relationship that is kind of spellbinding. There could be a full-blown war happening just outside and nothing would break the focus from the midwife on the mother.
It’s a whole other level of concentration.
So while the birth room is busy with assistants going back and forth, water being drawn, towels everywhere, the father freaking out, and Ari in the corner eating pizza (this really happened) the only thing that really matters is the midwife and the mother and baby they are focused on bringing into the world.
The focus and the power of Midwife Cathy (the best midwife of all time) was awe-inspiring and also scary as hell.
There’s also nothing like running into the midwife who delivered you as a 16 yr old and having this conversation
Midwife Cathy: “I birthed you.”
16-year-old Ari: “Thank you?”
Midwife Cathy: *looks Ari up and down sizing her up… “You’ve put on some weight since I’ve last seen you… and you seem to be doing alright”
16 yr old Ari: *wiping tears away “Thank you”
If your midwife tells you “You’re doing alright” that’s high praise indeed.
So all this to say that I’ve seen some things in my life.
Things that are illegal to show on television.
And it’s been really freaking good for me because despite TLC being “The Learning Channel” it’s usually the things that they don’t show on reality television that teach you the most about real life.