The Midwife’s Midwife

By Judy Ribner, DNP-C, CNM

I was turning heads.

Here I am in the center of the ultra-Orthodox, Satmar Chassidic Jewish community in Williamsburg, jumping out of a bright red jeep with a brown leather birth stool peeking out of my canvas sack. Next to me is Kristen carrying a bulging briefcase on her back. We walk with purpose, the two of us.

We are a curious pair: a Park Slope, gentile, middle-aged, white American lady with a 29-year-old, J. Crew clad woman wearing a neon yellow earring in the left ear and a turquoise one in the right.

Men in long black beards and black kappotas (long black coats) wonder why we are infiltrating their insular neighborhood. Maybe it was the conscientious confidence in our stride.

We knew we should be here. We knew we were important.

Did they think we were child protective services?

We approach the apartment and knock.

Hindy greets us warmly. The only hint that she may be having a baby tonight was her large, well rounded, proud belly. Her demeanor was confusing. She was just too calm and pain free.

Hadn’t she called claiming she is in labor?

Amidst an English that bespoke her superior fluency in Yiddish, Hindy tells us that she wishes the baby would come already but she just doesn’t know what is with her labor. The contractions are irregular, spaced apart, alternating strong and weak. Her water had released 14 hours ago. Her last baby had arrived by now. Yet here she is still stubbornly pregnant with her sixth child.

“Can you check me?”

“Check for what?” Kristen replies.

“How dilated I am. This way I know. It could be I am just at four.”

“But what is that going to tell us? You can go from four to ten in a few minutes. Besides, what difference does it make if you are at 4 or at 8? It’s not like we are going to do anything different. Either way we are just going to wait until your baby comes. Besides, your water was released 14 hours ago and we don’t know your GBS status.”

Hindy defers the exam. Her first five babies had been born in a NYC hospital. She is conditioned to greeting labor with two gloved fingers inside her vagina.

I observe her recalibrate. She embraces the inherent mysteriousness of her laboring body.

Kristen places her hand gently on Hindy’s left hip.

“What does it feel like when the baby comes out?” Hindy asks.

At her last five births, she had been numbed into oblivion and an outside observer to her own experiences.

After a few minutes of soft-spoken discussion with Kristen and a gentle hand on Hindy’s waist, our pregnant mother relaxes the energy of her body. She is in sync with the reassuring presence of her beloved midwife.

In a conspicuously silent way, Hindy’s body is wracked with a surge of power that stiffens her abdomen and contorts her face. Kristen observes her through one wave of force and whispers to me “we are having a baby.”

That was all the midwife needed to know about the “labor progress.” No gloves, no lubricant, no vaginal exam, no cries of a laboring mother. Kristen is exquisitely attuned to the intensity of the experience that her woman is having; she shares the birth journey. As an expert midwife, she is homed in on the signs of imminent birth.

Kristen auscultates the baby’s heartbeat. I forget to document the time. I am in a trance, fastened to the life within the womb, detached from charting and “clinical management.”

“Do you want to slip off your panties? Would you want me to slip off your panties for you? Would you want to sit on the birthing stool?”

Hindy steps away from us to remove her underwear. She relinquishes herself of her efforts to hold her baby in. The baby’s entranceway to the world is unhindered, free, and open. She lies down in the bed in which she conceived her baby. We trail silently behind her, sitting beside her.

We don’t do anything for her. We just be with her.

We don’t talk to her. We listen to her. Her rhythmic breathing.

We don’t instruct her. We humbly look on with wonder and a curious amazement.

I smile at Kristen through my masked face. Her eyes slant and smile back at me. Kristen ignites the oxytocin surge in me from my own baby’s birth. My flooding hormone saturates my bloodstream. Kristen is my midwife.

The room is dim. The energy divine. Hindy is breathing deeply, laboring hard. She is surrendering to the egotism of her own body.

I wonder what thoughts, if any, are being unleashed during this mammalian, transcendental state. Is she reconnecting to her own birth into the world?

Hindy looks up to me: “Is my bedroom door locked?”

I jump up to lock it.

Her husband and toddler son are on the other side of it, shut away from Hindy’s most private, powerful moments.

The little boy knows to stand still near his father and let Mama be alone. He is harmonized with the enormity of the moment. He is highly alert but makes no noises from his side of the door and no requests to go to Mama. His instincts surrender himself to the magnitude of what is happening around him.

I come right back to Hindy’s bedside. Hindy delves into the depth of her being. She has locked herself into a private birth space, safely, and intimately with her midwife. I watch her evolve to her primal self. Her breath is heavier, her eyes sealed tightly. She has detached from civilization-blinded thinking. She is enmeshed in the abyss of pristine instinct, riveted to her own undiluted power. We shrink into complete silence, lest we be an interference and trespass Hindy’s authoritative instincts.

We let the birth unfold as it would if we weren’t there.

She grunts. Then stronger, longer. Her nightgown is lifted up just the amount so that the baby can emerge into Kristen’s waiting, loving arms.

Kristen’s humility draws G-d’s spirit to the birth. There is a palpable cloud of a sublime energy enveloping the midwives and mother. I was centered in the divine, my soul breathing the holiness of the moment. A baby is about to be born into the world, gently, lovingly. A whole new world into our world.

A large black head of hair emerges, growing larger. Kristen skillfully keeps the head well flexed, to protect tearing of its mother’s body. The head is born. The shoulders slide out. The entirety of the brand new, tiny human being wallows between its mother’s legs.

Kristen doesn’t plop the baby on its mother’s bosom. She peers at Hindy’s face, to follow her cues. It takes Hindy seven seconds to integrate that her body is emptied of the pregnancy and that her baby has emerged. Immediately, Kristen hands the tiny, vulnerable person to the beaming love of its mother’s beckoning arms.

“Is it a girl?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t check,” Kristen answers.

Hindy takes the ten-month-long awaited peek… “It is a girl!.”

“Can you please go tell my husband that the baby is born and that it’s a girl.”

I hesitated to blindly follow Hindy’s instruction. Who am I? I am a complete stranger to the family, a secondary midwife to my mentor, Kristen. Should I be the hero of the moment, the bearer of the good news? I don’t want to deprive Hindy of any aspect of this precious life experience.

“Do you want me to tell your husband the baby’s gender or should I just tell him the baby is born?”

Kristen offers Hindy that we can cover her, as culturally required, so that her husband can come in.

Hindy accepts happily.

“We have a new daughter.” The couple locks eyes. Their joy is knitted together. The moment is baked with love. The husband’s eyes pour forth gratitude toward his wife.

I am relieved that I didn’t rob the couple of their magic and bonding.

Kristen requests that the husband not call any family until the placenta is born.

The big, bloody, ball of life plops out. Kristen guides it with her bare, gloved hand, avoiding use of any clamp on the cord.

Kristen gazes at Hindy: “Mazel tov!”

The curly-haired toddler, Vishi, squats near Mama’s bed looking on curiously and happily at his mother’s new prize. He has no separation anxiety or displacement stress. He had only been separated from Mama for eight minutes! Intuitively, he knows that this moment is reserved for his new sister. He serenely stands by honoring his new sister’s encounter with Mama, not pining to be in the middle of it. He holds space for them. Sister hasn’t stolen Mama. Mama has been present at home throughout.

Kristen and I head to the kitchen to prepare a tea of nettles, dandelion, red raspberry leaf and alfalfa. It will boost Hindy’s iron levels and milk supply.

I’m relieved for the private moment. My speckled tears are clouding my clear blue eyes. My back mascara may smudge. I stuff my cry in. I was crying from the wonder and joy of humanized birth.

I was crying because of the deep love this baby is encircled with. Its journey was not encroached by medical authoritarianism or commercialized love hormone (pitocin).

I was crying because Hindy will never forget her experience. It will forever impact the way she views herself as a woman, bonds with her baby, and integrates her maternal role into her identity. The other children in the family will have an empowered, peaceful mother.

I was crying because I wish that as a baby, I could have had this baby’s birth and lovableness. I wish I could have been caressed by my mother, skin to skin during the most biologically critical moments for bonding.

I cried because Vishi’s enormous transition was gentle and seamless. I witnessed the human response to becoming a big brother in the most normal, natural, unimpeded, connected way.

I cried because I have spent thousands of hours of my life training in clinics and hospitals to become a certified nurse midwife. Yet had never once witnessed a feminized birth there.

I’m in a hormonal milieu that is underpinned by a cocktail of emotions ranging from awe, triumph, and confusion.

I get myself out of my own way and head back to Hindy’s bed. I bend on one knee to bring the straw of the tea to her lips.

We clean the mild mess. We meet Hindy’s mother and niece who come over to greet their freshest family member. I wrack my brains for all the Yiddish words I know, to showcase them and be relatable to the family. I sneak a second peek at the 16-year-old niece. Oh how lucky she is to learn and celebrate the normalcy of birth as a family centered, private event. She is empowered to break free of socialized views of childbirth. Her robust aunt, snuggled in her own cozy bed, did not get deported to a germ-ridden hospital to bring her healthy baby forth.

The cherubic, vernix-coated baby chomps at its mother’s breast. Pure colostrum flows, untainted by an epidural’s opioid.

We clamp the cord an hour after the birth. The cord is now white, limp, and bloodless.

The baby had received her complete, rightful, natural blood transfusion, augmenting her body’s health reservoir. The bubby (grandmother) is honored with cutting the cord.

My phone buzzes. Jesse, my partner midwife is calling me to Raquel’s homebirth.

Kristen tells me that I should go. I have a multiparous woman in labor.

“Thank you, Hindy, for letting me participate at your birth. It was a humbling privilege. You have taught me so much. Have a lot of nachas (joy) raising this child.”

Hindy’s glowing face stares back at me. She is a freshly minted postpartum mother but has no trauma to process. Rather, she is absorbing serene love and peaceful triumph. Her body is intact; the first time in six births to not require stitches.

Hindy thanks me effusively. I hadn’t even done anything, though. She had done it all. All we did was let her do it.

I guess she is thanking me for not interfering.

Isn’t birth a birthright?

I know I am embedded in Hindy’s memory for perpetuity. That is the privilege of being a birth worker.

And its responsibility.

I grab my color-block, straw pocketbook and await my Uber on the street corner. Hassidim around me are bustling about their usual business. It is an ordinary Monday in Williamsburg. I try to reconnect with society. But I can’t. I am living on a different wavelength. The spirit of this most extraordinary event is clinging to me. I clutch it close to my heart. I ought to preserve it for Raquel’s birth.

As I wait, a pregnant Hassidic woman passes me. I peer at her twice. I dream of sharing with her the exquisite perfectness of what I have just beheld. Oh! If she could have only witnessed it too! She and her baby deserve it.

I cringe at the way she may finalize her pregnancy and what may await her in a local hospital.

The woman is wearing 60 denier tights in 92 degree weather. Does she recognize the surrender of modesty during hospital delivery? Does she comprehend the donation of bodily autonomy and personal authority in the clutches of the medical patriarchy? Does she know that every injection, incision, and stitch into her body generates profit for the capitalist institution? With a bulging belly will she bend to peek under the labor and delivery bed to spot its outfitted wheels? Wheels that make it more easy and convenient to ship off laboring women to the operating room? What a toxic, paranoid space to host a spiritual birth.

Her hospital likely has an over 30% c-section rate. Is she prepared to gamble with her body? A body that will need to nourish her new baby, recover from a pregnancy, care for a helpless infant, and bear more babies?

What is driving her to outsource her most intimate, critical moments of motherhood? Why isn’t she seeking to birth in a way that displays a woman’s strength?

The time is now to demystify home birth to women in insular communities. We need to reclaim the fidelity of normal human childbirth. Does she know that commercialized childbirth is the largest uncontrolled experiment in human history? Is she acutely aware that almost nobody who works in a labor and delivery unit has ever witnessed or experienced an undisturbed, physiologic birth?

I am a powerless bystander. Should I approach her and divulge this all? Already, I look like a weirdo here. I am clearly an outsider. Should I create a bigger scene? It is challenging to try to rescue people from themselves.

My approaching Uber intrudes on my thoughts. I hop in. My heart is at Raquel’s home birth. My mind is swaying with the flow of her labor, absorbing the intensity of her journey.

I escort in Kristen’s energy. I step into my courageous role as primary midwife. A baby will be born. A mother will be born. A family will be reborn. And I will be the lucky midwife to be woven as part of it.

Judy Ribner, DNP-C, CNM is a midwife and currently completing her doctorate at NYU. She is a home birther mother to three children, two of whom were born into her own waiting, loving arms. Her integrative gyn and home birth practice caters to women in Long Island and New York City. Judy can be reached at office@holisticmidwiferynewyork.com.