As a midwife, one of the things people most often say to me is "you're so lucky: you get to play with babies every day". Of course this brings to mind visions of what this "play" actually looks like--moans, sweat, and always so much blood. And yes, in the end I sometimes do get to run a finger over a soft, downy baby head while the mother basks in her oxytocin-glow of victory. But if all goes to plan, my interaction with babies rarely goes much beyond that.
If you are a midwife, who you really love is women.
I have been a woman for over forty-six years now, I have four sisters and three daughters, and have worked with women and heard their stories for twenty-five years.
And today I want to tell you something I have learned about women:
Women rise.
They do. They can get out of a bloody birth pool, rinse the sweat off, laugh, and nurse their newborn. They heal their bruises, find a way out of the abuse, and start a new life. They climb through the stages of motherhood, finding a handhold here, a new footing there, every time one of their babies drops a nap or starts a new school. They leave toxic relationships, they move to new places, they reinvent themselves, they start over again and again. They are scrappy, they are bold, they hold everyone's sorrows and joys, they bend into unbelievable shapes and yet bounce back. They find the cards stacked against them and learn to play the long game. And they usually do all of this with a child strapped to their chest or a teenager blowing up their phone.
Women rise.
They rise because they are in a hard place they never thought would be in. They rise because everyone is depending on them. They rise because they have to. They rise because they have been in this Valley of the Shadow before and know that the only way out is through.
Childbirth is a metaphor for life, you know; and even the menstrual cycle teaches women a lesson in painful endings and new beginnings every single month.
Women rise.
I have a distinct memory of consciously being aware of this fact for the first time. It happened when I spent the summer I was sixteen years old in Sierra Leone, West Africa. I was staying in the capital city of Freetown, during the time when rebel forces were in control of "the bush", and Freetown was an island of sanity, clinging to the coast, and struggling to keep from being overrun. The markets teemed with refugees, many of them handless--a testament to the unspeakable cruelty of the rebel forces. I am, to this day, amazed my parents let me go to a war-torn country at all; but in the spirit of third-culture-kid parents everywhere, they were generally in favor of adventure and so off I went.
Freetown lives in my memory in eternal technicolor. The flowers were magenta, the roads were a deep, loamy red, and the rain only came in torrents. The city tumbled down verdant green hills, to the bay below, where sunsets flamed across the sky and reflected in the water. There were no subtleties in Freetown.
One afternoon I tagged along with a woman from a local church named Victoria while she did visitation rounds, checking in on local families from her church. Victoria was gentle and soft-spoken, but also the sort of woman a teen suspects might be hiding a backbone of steel under her flowing sundress. She was very tall--an elegant, ebony queen--and I had noticed that anything she wore became stylish the moment she put it on. Of course I wanted to be just like her.
Our last stop of the day was to see a woman Victoria called Sister Modepe. As we wound our way towards her house, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. We strolled along the top of the bluffs, overlooking the city, enjoying the cool evening breeze and snacking on breadfruit chips from a roadside stand.
Sister Modepe, it turned out, was a strikingly beautiful woman, with a brilliant batik skirt and matching head scarf. She greeted us warmly, pulled up little stools for us to sit on, and brought us something cool to drink. Sister Modepe's little home clung to the hill, and was open to the air on the side facing the ocean. I watched her children laughing and washing dishes out back, while behind them the sun slowly sank in flaming red into the waters of the bay.
Victoria and Sister Modepe chatted on and on in Krio. My Krio was improving, but I still only caught phrases and snatches of the conversation. But there one thing I understood crystal clear: Sister Modepe stood, and her face lighted up as she told us, "Sistas, I tell you--I de grow!". She gestured to herself, and then flung her arms out wide, taking in her home, her family, her city. She repeated it, louder this time, "I de grow! I tell you, I de grow!"
To me it seemed an outlandish oxymoron to say "I grow" while literally overlooking a city ravaged by war. But there she stood, with the glow of the setting sun encircling her head for a moment in a halo of light, speaking words so true they were gospel--"I de grow". She was growing, and anyone could see it was true. Her home balanced precariously over a sea of turmoil that flooded the streets below; but sure enough, here she was, audaciously growing a giant tree of light and love in her living room.
As we left that evening, I kept looking back, printing Sister Modepe on my memory, trying to learn, to understand. Thirty years later, I still remember her and I am still learning that
Women rise.
They rise right up--through the war and and the pain and the poverty. They rise through the hardened ashes of broken communities, overwhelming grief, and trauma. They rise.
And they grow a big, audacious, rebellious tree of life right in the middle of an ocean of pain.
Women rise.
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