The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,3

we embraced, tears were streaming down my face.

“There, there,” she said, patting my shoulder. “How is he?”

I sucked in a ragged breath and then exhaled.

“He’s sleeping, but his breathing sounds different. The hospice nurse said she thinks he has a week left, but I’m not so sure. She increased his morphine yesterday.”

Sophie’s comfort enveloped me.

“Finish your laundry and then go back and sit with him. I have a birth to go to, but I’ll stop back on my way home. I shouldn’t be long.”

I thanked her and waved. She was still slim and slight, but her hair was completely gray now, a silvery color under the Mennonite head covering—or cap, as I thought of it—that gave her an elegant look. At the base of her neck, her hair was twisted into a tidy bun.

Sophie had given me my very first job, hiring me as an assistant the summer I was sixteen to file papers, order supplies, and drive her to births when she was tired. I would also watch siblings, make tea, and wash dishes. She was a lay-midwife, initially trained by another lay-midwife, though she had never attended college or become a nurse. She did go to an occasional conference and took continuing education classes by correspondence, and she belonged to an association where she networked with other midwives. As a lay-midwife, Sophie had an Oregon license to do home deliveries, but that’s all she could do. When one of her clients ended up at a hospital, she couldn’t care for the mother or deliver the baby. A nurse-midwife or a doctor took over from there.

Some of my colleagues disapproved of lay-midwives, but I didn’t, at least not when it came to a normal birth. Even though I’d had six years of college, Sophie still knew more than I did. She knew remedies to start labor and to stop it, methods to soothe and relax the mother, and natural ways to calm her. She knew when to take charge and when to step back. In high school I’d written an essay about the history of midwifery and came across a quote by a second-century Greek physician. He said a midwife needed to be of a “sympathetic disposition, although she need not have borne a child herself.” That was Sophie. Never married. Never a mother. But always sympathetic.

It was because of her that I found the work I loved. Becoming a midwife was both my passion and my profession. Being a nurse-midwife meant I experienced all the joy of the delivery while being in the controlled environment of a hospital.

In the past few weeks, I had been so consumed with my father’s care that I hadn’t thought much about work. But I realized now that I missed it very much, missed the excitement and joy and even the heartbreak that were all part of the package.

Putting away those yearnings for now, I pinned the last towel in place, picked up the basket, and turned back toward the house.

Dad woke at six and asked for water. As he drank I offered him soup, but he declined. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Your grandmother loved you very much.”

I nodded. That was part of my story. And that my grandmother was tall, like me. She had told my parents then that my birth mother wasn’t in a position to keep me, but I was loved very much. That was what my grandmother most wanted me to know: that I was loved.

I thought it was odd how Dad wanted to talk about my adoption now. We hadn’t discussed it in years, not since I was a teenager. Back then, when I wrestled with matters of identity and religion, I asked my father if my birth grandmother had been concerned about his and Mama’s faith.

“Why?” he had asked.

I probably rolled my eyes, and then I said, “Mama’s head covering. Didn’t the woman think it odd?” I had stopped wearing my own cap the year before, telling my father it had no meaning for me.

Back then I spent a lot of time thinking about my birth family, creating a story of my own to pick up where the few facts my parents knew left off. My Oregon birth certificate didn’t have the names of my biological parents on it, but it did list my birthplace as Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which I found on a map, a tilted rectangle not far from Philadelphia. The atlas described it as one of the wealthiest