Paradise Visited
from A Midwife's Story by Penny Armstrong & Sheryl Feldman
It would have been all right to have stayed at Booth as a resident midwife. Not only did I like Booth, but I had Richie nearby; he even went to Midwifery Association meetings with me. He was settled in a comfortable room in a big old boarding house, and pretty much thrilled at the idea that he was driving people around in the sky. While Richie flew, I got to do a lot of deliveries in a humane hospital.
The trouble was, Booth had taught me to question what I was doing. For example, in our cubbyhole discussions at Booth, other midwives would sometimes argue from a book called Spiritual Midwifery . ‘They say don’t rupture the membranes until . . .’ or ‘They say there is no such thing as an arrested labor.’ I learned that Spiritual Midwifery was a book written by a hippie midwife for a colony of hippies who’d followed ‘Stephen’ in a bus from Berkeley and settled on farms in Tennessee. I knew they intervened in deliveries far less than we did and they depended a lot on the relationship of the midwife to the mother. In hippie talk, that was a ‘birthing energy’ issue.
I’d consciously avoided buying the book. I suspected the author understood some processes better than we did in the hospital, but they were things I didn’t want to have to work out while I was studying at Booth. Also, I had a good idea that ‘spiritual midwives’ might be flaky; I’d seen so many flat babies – that is, babies who were slow to breathe – so many mothers whose labors had just plain stopped, to believe that you could safely and sensibly deliver babies on somebody’s porch.
But I kept thinking about how Spiritual Midwifery said that a woman did better if her birth people stayed with her all the way through: ‘The Vow of the Midwife has to be that she will put out one hundred percent of her energy to the mother and the child that she is delivering until she is certain that they have safely made the passage.’*
I didn’t care for the hippie vow, but I was having a terrible time leaving women before they had their babies. I’d just get to the point where the woman’s body and mind were intertwined with mine and she was trusting me and we were beginning to work together like we’d been at it for a lifetime, and I’d look at my watch. ‘End of my shift, girl,’ I was supposed to say in Glasgow style and then walk off. Every time I had to do it, I felt as if I’d wronged the mother and her child.
I was leaning on the counter at the nurses’ station staring blankly into space, when the phone rang, a nurse talked for a minute, then put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Some GP out in the boonies wants to know if we have any midwives who want to come join him in his private practice, including home deliveries. Anybody here want to talk to him?’
‘Why not?’ I said.
I had never been to Pennsylvania Dutch country. Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, plain people, farmers, cultists, whatever – it was all the same to me. I had seen pictures in National Geographic of women wearing below-the-knee dresses and aprons; of men with beards who farmed with horses. Everybody was supposed to drive around in buggies instead of cars. One image stood out – a line of buggies in procession across a hill at sunset. I thought the whole thing was a little overdone, but what could I say? At Booth I’d learned some tolerance.
I drove out the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a cloudless morning. I was contented, looking forward to a break in routine. I buzzed along, cutting in and out of traffic. An hour later, at exit 23, I pulled off the turnpike. A matching pair of two-story brick houses with Federalist porticoes and green shutters faced me across the intersection. In this part of Pennsylvania – that is, anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Gettysburg – you feel like you’re about to see either an eighteenth-century cannonball hurtling over a stone wall or George Washington himself. What I saw, actually, besides the Revolutionary homes, were gas station signs and restaurant billboards.
I was on my way to Intercourse. Dr. Kaufman’s office was in Paradise, but I figured that as long as I was coming out this way, I would go to Intercourse, which is a village in the heart of Amish country. It’s impossible not to be curious about a place named Intercourse.
On second glance, the restaurant billboards didn’t look the same anymore; they were simpler and cruder than they would be in Gettysburg. That was serious indication that I was getting near the country. I drove past a row of trees, a few more brick homes, a vacant lot – and then farmhouses started appearing by the side of the road.
These weren’t just any old farmhouses, they were white two-story farmhouses like in the old Maine – farmhouses with barbered lawns and immaculate flower beds. Grape vines, not yet showing any leaves, were pinned in swags to porch roofs and were waiting there patiently for warmer days. Neat concrete paths led in a straight line to each front door and even here, along a major thoroughfare the dirt between the edge of the roads and the edge of the lawns was marked by the teeth of a neatly handled rake.
Billboards and store-bought signs were fewer; pieces of plywood painted white and hanging from a simple post-and-arm affair replaced them. In black hand lettering, the signs read CABINETMAKER, APPLE CIDER, BLACKSMITH, HANDMADE FURNITURE, EGGS, HOMEMADE BREAD AND HONEY, QUILTS, VEGETABLES. Most of the signs had a note at the bottom: NO SUNDAY SALES.
A black buggy, pulled by a leggy and spirited horse, bounded along the edge of the road.
I was softening up.
Then I got to the village of Intercourse.
Well, now. It wasn’t that the village wasn’t fine. In fact, it was just what you’d hope for in a charming country village: a quilt shop, a candle barn, a couple of general stores, a post office, Brubaker’s Garage, old oak and maple trees lining the street and (as all tourists learn), a hitching post out in front of the converted-to-computer bank.
What startled me were the Amish women; I’d never seen anything like them. White, stony faces, one after another along the sidewalks, in the general store, going in and out of the fabric shop. Each and every last one of them – girl or ancient – marched purposefully along, as if conscripted for duty. Each wore a massive black bonnet with a huge black bill that all but encircled her face and stuck out maybe an inch and a half from it. Most wore black shoes, black stockings, and a black cape worn over a black apron, which was worn over a black dress.
Not one smiled or so much as looked at me or anybody else. They had their eyes drilled into the sidewalk. All of their faces were very smooth, as if they’d never been broken in by laughing or kissing or crying. It was a wonder to me they would ever need a midwife.
Frankly, I didn’t think I could deliver their babies. Midwifery is an intimate profession. In order for me to help a woman have her baby in the way that is easiest and healthiest for her, I have to see some of her interior composition – her physical and emotional strengths and weaknesses – and I need to see them quickly and surely. My whole manner – my touch, my words, my knowledge, my joking, my gossip, my instruction, and my silence – adjusts to her and to what I learn about her as we go along, and so each delivery is different since each woman has her own way to strength. The more a woman trusts her body and trusts me, the easier things are. The less obstructed the woman is, the less shielded she is from her body and from her emotions, the better her delivery.
That’s why the births of those inner-city girls went so well. Being so young and so clearly in need of help, they had to trust us. They revealed themselves, gave up control, and allowed us to guide them to their bodies.
These Amish women – as cold, joyless, and ascetic as they seemed to be – would shield themselves from the intelligence of their bodies. Not only did they keep outsiders at a distance, but judging from their scarlike lips, they kept themselves at a distance too. You would probably have to use dynamite and a pickaxe to dislodge their babies.
I was glad I’d taken a half-holiday attitude toward this trip because the chance of my taking a job with Stephen Kaufman, doctor to the stony-faced women, was very slim. Not only would the deliveries be difficult and the babies reluctant to live, but I would have to spend my time with these dreary types. No thank you. Give me back my reggae mamas.
Still, I thought I would go ahead and talk to the doctor. No reason not to. I left the commercial roads and cut over to Paradise on farm roads.
The farms stopped me. They were perfect. They were absolutely exquisite. Each one was minutely cared for, as if the rows were pulled up straight each morning and the corners tucked in at nightfall. The soil was looser than at other farms; it was lighter, fluffed up, as if it had been given a good beating in a copper bowl.
I drove along a stream bed bounding with spring rains and watched where it widened into a pool by a farmhouse. Ducks sailed across the pond as if in serene possession of their affairs. I watched. There was no traffic and so few sounds. I rolled down the window and let the smell of the earth fill the car. I thought I could hear a duck paddling across the pond. I was awestruck.
I stared at the ploughed earth, at the breathing, fertile soil all around me. And then I began to cry. After the assaults I had felt and seen in the cities, assaults of man against woman, woman against child; after the endless asphalted city floor; after the heavy metal-dust smell of power coursing along boulevards and into dark buildings, here – here, all this time, these people had been taking care of the soil.
I drove around a curve of a hillside. On it, a boy of ten or eleven years, barefoot on an unsaddled white mare, was riding up ploughed rows. The horse pulled a plough and behind the plough, the boy’s father walked. He carried a little girl on his back and stepped, barefooted also, up the rows of newly turned earth. I continued, afraid to breathe for fear of disturbing what I saw on the road to Dr. Kaufman’s office.
Amish couples sat side by side in matching costumes in Dr. Kaufman’s waiting room. In addition to their black pants, the men wore black coats with hook-and-eye closings. Their black, flat-brimmed hats hung from pegs by the door. The women had taken off their outdoor bonnets.
Here I need to explain something. Indoors, each woman wears a white organdy ‘covering,’ a gathered and banded cap that is shaped like a heart at the crown and covers the back of her head. It is secured to her hair with a straight pin, which is driven through a narrow band of organdy that runs across the top of her head and down either side. The combination of the straight pin and the severe stretching of the hair away from the center part often causes a pool of baldness at the top of a woman’s head. That these women were able to secure their covering to the few thin remaining hairs seemed impossible to me at first. I was fascinated; I found myself studying the pins and bare skin, and stray hairs the way a child studies the first deformed person they ever see. ‘What is that, mama?’ or, in this case, ‘Mama, does she put the pin in her skin?’ Like the child, I was uncomfortable in seeing this unnatural arrangement, but more than anything, I was brazenly curious. I stared at every opportunity.
Just so you’ll know, the caps are fastened without causing bleeding.
For more formal times, like going to the doctor, the Amish woman is sure to tie the ends of the bands of her covering not tightly under her chin, but loosely, so that a small white bow rests on her chest just below the hollow of her throat. The effect is sweet and virginal. When she’s busy or just around the house, she often leaves the little bands running free, instead of tied, and they blow and play about her shoulders.
The Amish, Dr. Stephen Kaufman explained, were quiet and reserved around physicians, as they were around any English. They go to a doctor, it was glibly said, for ‘birth, death, and when they cut their hands off.’ Dr. Kaufman didn’t know much about their beliefs, and, like a lot of people in the area, he thought of them as a simple, plain people without any education who, he observed, didn’t always take his advice.
His idea was to build a bigger general practice among the Amish by delivering more of their babies. A midwife was a way to increase his access to them and they seemed to like the idea, he said. I was to talk to some of his prenatal patients after he was done with them.
‘Are you thinking of coming here?’ Priscilla asked. She had no scar mouth. She had no captain’s face, no infantryman’s single-mindedness. Instead of black, she wore a bright blue dress. She smiled gaily, her face shone with eagerness. It seemed as if the idea of my coming was quite wonderful to her.
‘Yes, I am,’ I said and waited, wanting to get her purest response.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’d be glad to have a woman to deliver our babies again. Dr. Kaufman is a good doctor, but it’s different with a man. Men don’t understand. Ever since Dr. Ruth had her accident, we’ve had to have men. And then some of us would like to have our babies at home. Dr. Kaufman said you might deliver babies at home.’
And then she asked me if I knew how she could get her figure back again.
When I asked Stephen what he told the women about weight, he said, ‘I didn’t think these women ever thought about things like that.’
Men! I could certainly understand that these women got doughy and didn’t like it. It was being a farmer’s wife: too much cooking all the time and no one probably ever bothered to explain about calories to them. It would be easy to help these women lose a few pounds.
We drove out to visit some patients.
Since it was Monday, we stepped under the weekly wash. In each and every farmyard the wash snapped on the lines in the same order: black pants from big to small; shirts – lawn green, sky blue, lavender – from big to small; dresses, the same; and then on to less distinguished items – shorts, socks, sheets, and dozens and dozens of diapers. Stephen warned me to be careful not to drive over the buggy shafts (the long poles that attach the horse to the buggy) either coming in or, more likely, backing out.
Each Amish kitchen we visited was immaculate. The floor, always of linoleum, shone back at us. The countertops were clear, the sink scrubbed, and all the dishes put away. The walls were painted green – the same color they used to have in hospitals – and the cupboards were pine. The kitchens were big – the center of virtually all activity in the house – and furnished with a big table in the center. There might be a couch and a chair too, but the table was the thing.
Children assembled willy-nilly at the corners of the room and stared wide-eyed at Dr. Kaufman and me. After a while a little one would break ranks and come over to his mother and crawl determinedly into her lap. The woman would talk quietly and cheerfully but without show. She would laugh and smile and stroke her children’s hair. Shortly after we’d arrive, her husband would come in from the barns or fields, and pulling up another chair, he would talk with us too. They’d offer us ice cream, custard, cookies, and pretzels. We’d slow down and talk at a farmer’s pace – with more space between words and ideas. I liked it; I remembered it from Westford Hill, Maine.
Over and over again I heard about Dr. Ruth, the woman who’d been doing home and hospital deliveries for the Amish for thirty years. She’d had an accident and ended up in a wheelchair, and the women were stuck. ‘Dr. Ruth was rough sometimes, she’d give the babies a hard pull sometimes, and she made mistakes,’ they told me, ‘but she was terribly busy and she worked hard. We feel she cared about us and our babies. She’d get us to the hospital if there was going to be a problem, like if there were going to be twins or something.’ Dr. Ruth delivered five thousand babies before she retired.
‘Now we only have these other doctors – not Dr. Kaufman, but the other ones – and we’re not sure they always handle things the best. My cousin had her labor start early – she was only seven months – but she was having contractions. She called the doctor. She and her husband, they thought maybe they should go to the hospital, but the doctor said that it was okay and he came out to her house and delivered the baby. It weighed just a little more than three pounds.
‘My cousin and her husband, they wanted to know what to do about the baby after it was born because it was so tiny and they thought maybe they should go to the hospital with it. The doctor said just to put it in a box on the oven door and don’t worry about it anymore.’
The woman spoke softly, without rancour.
‘Their baby died in the oven. And that was after the husband had carried the placenta out of the house to bury it. He found a second baby in the placenta, which the doctor had never bothered to check for or deliver. They had a hard time giving themselves up to that.’
Stephen and I stumbled out of the house after hearing that. We looked at each other in shock. Stephen said it made him ashamed of his profession and it made him think that sometimes it wasn’t such a good idea that the Amish don’t sue.
At the last house, the husband said to me, ‘Is it true that if you came here you would sit with the woman through her labor?’
© Penny Armstrong & Sheryl Feldman
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