Arms Wide Open
A Midwife’s Journey
Patricia Harman
Beacon Press, Boston
To my best friend, Tom, and to all those idealists who believe there is a better way
Midwife—to be with women at childbirth and throughout life
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Arms Wide Open: A Midwife’s Journey is based on journals I kept for many years. The events were recorded in detail, but there are gaps, and I painted in those gaps to the best of my recollection. All the characters, except my husband, Tom Harman, have been disguised, to protect their privacy. The patients described are composites, based on real people.
Arms Wide Open is not just for those interested in midwifery or feminism. It’s for anyone, of any gender, young or old, who cares about the earth and social justice. We each have our own song. This is mine and I sing it for you.
PRELUDE
All the way down Route 119, past Gandeeville, Snake Hollow, and Wolf Run, I’m thinking about the baby that died.
I wasn’t there, didn’t even know the family. It happened a few days ago, with another midwife, at a homebirth in Hardy County, on summer solstice, the longest day of the year.
Word on the informal West Virginia midwives’ hotline is that the baby’s shoulders got stuck, a grave emergency. The midwife, Jade, tried everything, all the maneuvers she’d studied in textbooks and the special tricks she’d learned from other practitioners, but nothing worked. They rushed, by ambulance, to the nearest hospital thirty miles away, with the baby’s blue head sticking out of the mother, but it was too late. Of course it was too late.
Homebirth midwives in West Virginia are legal, but just barely, and there’s no doubt the state coroner’s office will investigate. Jade is afraid. We are all afraid.
We whip around another corner and I lose my supper out the side window. Who do I think I am taking on this kind of responsibility? Why am I risking my life to get to a homebirth of people I hardly know? What am I doing in this Ford station wagon being whipped back and forth as we careen through the night?
I awake sick with grief, my heart pounding. I’m lying on a pillow-padded king-size bed with floral sheets. A man I hardly recognize sleeps next to me. This is Tom, I remind myself: my husband of thirty-three years, a person whose body and mind are as familiar to me as my own. I prop myself up on an elbow, inspecting his broad shoulders, smooth face, straight nose and full lips, his short silver hair, in the silver moonlight. One hairy leg sticks out of the covers. One arm, with the wide hand and sensitive surgeon’s fingers, circles his pillow. It’s 3:45, summer solstice morning.
When I rise and pull on my long white terry robe, I stand for a moment, getting my bearings, then open the bedroom door that squeaks and pad across the carpeted living room. Outside the tall corner windows, the trees dance in the dark. Once I called myself Trillium Stone. That was my pen name when I lived in rural communes, wrote for our political rag, The Wild Currents, taught the first natural-childbirth classes, and started doing homebirths.
Now I’m a nurse-midwife with short graying hair, who no longer delivers babies, living with an ob-gyn in this lakefront home, so far from where I ever thought I would live, so far from where I ever wanted to live. I search the photographs on the piano of my three handsome sons, now men. Do I wake? Do I sleep?
OK, my life has been a wild ride, I’ll admit it, but the image of this hippie chick lurching through the night, on her way to a homebirth, with only a thick copy of Varney’s Midwifery as a guide, disturbs me. What did she think she was doing? Where did she get the balls?
On the highest shelf in the back of our clothes closet, a stack of journals gathers dust. For seventeen years I carried them in a backpack from commune to commune. They’ve moved with me across the country three times, through midwifery school, Tom’s medical school and his ob-gyn residency. I can’t get the diaries out of my mind, a mute witness to my life . . .
I slip back through the bedroom. Tom snores on. By the dim closet light, I find a stepladder and struggle to bring down the shabby container. The journals have been closed for twenty-five years; pages stick together and smell faintly of mold.
I’m on a mission now, trying to understand, but I’m surprised to find that I started each entry with only the day and the month, no year. This is going to take a while. It seems I never expected anyone would want to reconstruct my life, not even me. I’m an archaeologist digging through my own past.
With narrowed eyes, I flip through notebook after notebook, daring that flower child to show her face. When the alarm goes off, Tom, dressed in blue scrubs for the OR, finds me asleep in the white canvas chair, with a red journal open, over my heart.
FROM THE RED JOURNAL
LITTLE CABIN IN THE NORTH WOODS
1971–1972
Fall
CHAPTER 1
Home
“Keep up,” Stacy yells into a bitter wind, turning to wait for me. “This kid is getting heavy.” In the dim light, I can just see his face, his narrow nose, his long eyelashes, his brown beard and brown hair, a dark Scot with a square jaw and the back of an ox. He has the baby carrier on his back and a heavy canvas backpack loaded with supplies on his front. I try to pick up my pace, but I, too, am carrying a large knapsack of provisions, and though I’m sturdy and big boned, I’m not as strong as my lover.
The swamp is damp with second-growth cedars that lean close like old women. We squish along the narrow path until we come to the creek and find it flooded. To get home, we must cross on unstable logs. Stacy goes first with one-year-old Mica. I trudge behind, after finding a long stick to balance myself. One wrong move and I’ll tumble into the water.
The trip to Duluth was a disappointment. We’d hiked out of the homestead and then hitched into town, but three out of four friends we went to see were in Minneapolis at a war resisters’ meeting. I sigh into the dark.
Sometimes I’m tired of this difficult life, living without electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, or a vehicle, but it’s my choice. No one is forcing me to live in a two-room log cabin, on a remote farm, a mile from the nearest dirt road, ten miles from the closest store.
We traverse the big meadow where we have our garden and wind through the balsam grove, along the path to the smaller clearing. In the fading light, our two-story log house, taller than it is wide, looms over us. As always when we come up to it through the trees, its solid bulk surprises me. We built this cabin, overlooking the Lester River, with our own hands. It is ours and we are home.
Repentance
Rain, rain, a snare drum on the roof. All morning it rains and we work inside, chinking. Once, this hundred-year-old Finnish log house sat rotting on our friend Jason’s Christmas tree farm. Last summer we deconstructed it, hauled it ten miles over dirt roads on a borrowed logging truck, planed the old surface down to new wood, built a foundation, and reassembled the timbers like Lincoln Logs. It was grueling, hot work, with mosquitoes buzzing over our heads, but I loved it . . .
Mica crawls on the floor in his corduroy coveralls, plays in the wood chips. When he starts to fuss, I stop chinking and nurse him. Stacy has gone upstairs to take a nap. That’s one thing I appreciate about living here. You can sleep when you want to, work when you want to, make love when you want to. No time clocks. No boss constantly watching over you.
From my perch on the window seat, I gaze out the window. The Lester River, sixty feet down the grassy slope, is up to its banks. White foam floats on the water. Wildflowers encircle us, goldenrod and deep purple aster. A flock of yellow finch swoops down on the blossoms, looking for seeds. Except for this clearing a
nd the five-acre meadow where we garden, uninhabited forest surrounds us for miles.
One year old, Mica pulls my long braids while he nurses. I caress his fine white cobweb hair. This is the first time Stacy and I have lived alone as a couple, and it isn’t something we aspired to. When we bought this land two summers ago and still lived at Chester Creek House, an urban commune, our friends seemed interested in establishing a rural outpost. So far it’s just us. I’m not sure I mind; I feel safer out in the woods. There’s less risk I’ll run into Johan, less chance I’ll shatter the delicate balance of my nuclear family, crack it open like a blue robin’s egg.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. I never meant it to happen. The whole beautiful, sordid business is a paragraph in someone else’s life.
We were living at the Draft Counseling Center in Duluth, on Third Street, helping conscientious objectors and hiding the occasional draft evader on his way to Canada. This was after we left Freefolk, a small commune near Bemidji, Minnesota. Stacy was taking welding classes at the vocational school and I was four months pregnant, on purpose, with our baby.
While Stacy was at class during the day, Johan Sorensen and I talked about peace and the revolution. He gave me shoulder rubs and then back rubs. Then my neck . . . I never hid that we were sexually involved. I was single, though the seed of new life grew inside me.
Stacy and I didn’t believe in marriage . . . Still, my unfaithfulness wounded him, cut him deep. I try not to think about it. It’s better with just the three of us here.
When Mica was born, everything changed. My sacrifice on the altar of birth burned some of the selfishness out of me. I was a mother now and even I couldn’t handle three males in my life.
I gently lay my sleeping baby down on the window seat, touch the little brown birthmark near his ear, tuck a blanket around him, and study the yellow-poplar log walls. The Finnish pioneer who originally built this dwelling fit the timbers so tight you can’t see daylight, but still wind whistles through. If we don’t finish chinking by snowfall, we’ll have to move back to town. I stand and maneuver another piece of firewood into the cookstove.
The rain stops and as the low sun slants golden under the clouds, Stacy clomps down the stairs. I see first, in the shaft of light that comes in from the window, his narrow bare feet and then his jeans and finally his whole, powerful, shirtless body.
Here is a man who loves work and music and movement and sex. Here is a man who would walk through fire to halt injustice or save a child. He leans forward and peers out the window, where each drop of water at the end of each balsam needle reflects the fading day. “Want to go out for a walk?” he asks.
The fire crackles in the woodstove. How could I want anything more?
Alone
Three days of intermittent cold rain and then the low, flat gray clouds move on. The sky is clear, but by afternoon the light fades. Already we’ve had a hard frost. Stacy sits on the stairs, tying his boots. He’s on his way out to our mailbox at the end of Dahl Road.
“Wait just a second; I want you to take my letter for Colin.” As I rummage around in the tin box where we keep the stamps, I glance at our money jar on the same shelf. Almost empty.
“Do you really want to walk all that way? It’ll be night soon. You could wait until morning.”
“No, I’m up for a hike. I need the exercise.” Stacy shuts the heavy oak door behind him and I can hear the Big Ben alarm clock ticking upstairs.
All day we’ve been chinking, slow and tedious work. Outside there’s more chinking to do and more tasks. The window over the kitchen table is still covered with plastic. We need to dig a pit for the root crops and get in more firewood before snow. Winter comes early in the North Woods.
I stare out the corner window at the darkening day. Weathermen bombings, the Manson murders, and Ronald Reagan’s announcement, as the governor of California, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” have eroded hippie popularity.
Everywhere there is craziness with drugs and cops and demonstrations gone bad. In the Victorian house on Haight Street in San Francisco, where I lived after I dropped out of Lewis & Clark College, there was a jar of peyote buttons on the mantel and strangers shooting up in the kitchen. We could see that our utopian dream was turning into a nightmare and left early to build the new world elsewhere.
A few years ago, people waved at us when we strolled down the street; found us interesting, exotic birds blown in from some other continent. Long-haired hippie women with flowers behind their ears smiled on the cover of Time.
The last time Stacy and I hitched to town, car after car passed us by, the drivers averting their eyes. It’s not just my paranoia. Many despise us. Like a covey of Amish in a casino, we hippies stand out. Our dress, our speech, and our values set us apart. This is the country we were born in, but we are strangers in a strange land.
I don’t like Stacy going out alone after dark.
I let out my air and get on with my work. While he’s gone, I’ll wash diapers. This is not my favorite chore, but we aren’t going to Duluth for another week and it’s my turn. I’m in luck. Before he left, my companion hauled two buckets of water up from the river.
First I pour the water in a big tin pan on the cookstove. While it heats, I rinse the soiled nappies in cold. When the water is hot, I scrub them with homemade soap, rinse twice, and two hours later they hang on a rope across the kitchen. Mica is asleep upstairs in his little bed and I stand on the porch, listening for Stacy. He’s been gone a long time. Dogs bark in the distance.
“Whoo. Whoo,” I yell into the blackness. “Whoo. Whoo.”
Stacy has no lantern, and along the trail that stretches between our home and the mailbox there are roots you can trip on, rocks you could crack your head open on, and a treacherous swamp to cross.
“Whoo. Whoo,” I call again, but there’s only the roar of the river. The quarter moon rises; just a faint glow on the horizon but the Lester reflects the circle of light. A great horned owl, a quarter mile downriver, picks up the call. Hoo-hoo hoooooo hoo-hoo. I picture his round eyes piercing the gloom.
Then “Whoooo,” very faint. At first when I hear it, I think the owl mocks me, but from faraway in the swamp, Stacy’s voice comes again. “Whoo. Whoo.”
CHAPTER 2
Peace
“Aren’t you worried?” I yell down. “Winter’s almost here. Aren’t you worried about the cold?”
It’s raining again and the roof leaks like a sieve. Every two hours, I empty the containers under the eaves and quickly replace them. Only the west side, where we sleep, is dry. Because of the wind, we can’t make repairs.
The swollen Lester River surges past our cabin. We can’t get close to the swimming hole or anywhere near the small island where the old pine tree stands. Biting the inside of my lower lip, I watch the raging water from the upstairs window and wonder at what we’re doing, trying to live on this eighty-acre subsistence farm, growing our own food, building our dwelling out of recycled materials, living as lightly on the earth as possible. Are we going too far?
Then I clatter down the stairs in my jeans and heavy boots. “Aren’t you concerned about the weather, Stacy?”
“Nah, there’ll be some good days to work outside yet. There’s not much left to do and we’ll finish sometime. Think about it. The old couple I met at the end of Dahl Road made it through winter in the old days.” Stacy refers to the Olsens, our closest neighbors, the people he visited the night he was away so long.
He mixes another batch of the caulking material and hands me a trowel. Fingers of cold reach into the room and this is still October. What will it be like by December? I shake that thought away.
Stacy has his own steady rhythm. He works calmly at one pace, then when up against it, works harder, but I have a sense of urgency and don’t like leaving things to the last minute. Slap, I s
quish on the putty. Whoosh, I smooth the cookie-dough-like substance into the crevice.
Paul and Silas bound in jail . . . That’s Stacy singing an old freedom song. Had no money for to go their bail. Music has always been important to me. I can trace my life story by the soundtrack playing in the back of my mind. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on . . .
All afternoon, we sing as we work. We take turns entertaining the baby and emptying the buckets of water and the rain keeps pounding. My wrists are sore and my arms aching but I’m not stopping until Stacy does.
“Quitting time,” Stacy finally announces, picking up Mica and throwing him up to the ceiling. I cringe; the baby’s head comes so close to a beam. Why do men do such things? I can’t remember ever seeing a woman toss a baby, certainly not a mother. Little Mica laughs uproariously and I see why Stacy thinks it’s so fun.
In the fading light, my friend washes our tools in the bucket. I warm up our bean soup and muffins and light the lamp. Tonight, as is our custom before eating, we make a circle with our hands, even the baby. As we do, I imagine we’re holding hands with all the nonviolent revolutionaries we’ve known. I look around at the unfinished walls, the piles of clothes, tools, and building supplies, and shake my head. Stacy’s probably right. I worry too much.
Warmth from the cookstove, rain on our roof, the three of us safe in our little log cabin. In the glow of the kerosene lamp, Stacy’s eyes are moist. I feel the same way. “Peace,” Stacy whispers, and we sing our Johnny Appleseed song. The Lord’s been good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need: the sun and the rain and the apple tree. The Lord’s been good to me . . .
Thou Shalt Not
“Have you heard from Colin?”
Aaron, our friend from Chester Creek House, pulls an extra wooden chair up to the kitchen table. He’s a tall guy with dark wild curly hair and a toothy smile that makes you grin even if you aren’t in the mood. He showed up this morning saying he was just on a hike, but he must have sensed how desperately we needed him. We’ve spent all afternoon, under the Minnesota blue sky, nailing down new roofing paper.
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