Three: Disconnection

On the wall of the hospital I spent most of the waking hours of a decade of my life in, used to be an enormous poster of me taking a woman's blood pressure. I walked past it recently, still there several years after I stepped back from my NHS midwifery role.

In the image, I'm grinning at the woman and she's smiling back at me. The photo is posed, but the warmth in those smiles is real. I was a student midwife, on my first placement on the postnatal ward. I was exhausted, terrified, perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time and couldn't remember the last time I'd been for a wee. But huddled at her bedside, swathed in jaundice-yellow light and surrounded by a sea of disposable blue curtain, we grinned at each other. Neither of us had a clue what we were doing and we both knew it. We were in it together, she and I. I was with her as she surveyed the enormity of new motherhood, and she was me as I wondered whether the resulting image would immortalise the fact I still wasn't actually sure how to take a blood pressure.

Despite the very real and pervasive feeling of fear and anxiety I felt as a student midwife, I already knew that I loved those moments of true connection with women: the grinning, the knowing, the holding, the hugging. The moment, in a cramped hospital bathroom, I helped a brand new mum shower and get dressed after a caesarean birth. She reached into her bag and pulled out a lacy red thong she had thought, just a few days earlier, would be appropriate post-baby attire. We both stared at it in horror and dissolved into laughter. 'No-one tells you, do they' she eventually gasped between snorts, as I went off to find some more appropriate giant disposable pants. No-one had really ever told me, either.

Over the course of a decade, the blood pressures got easier to take, yet the pressures of NHS midwifery got less and
less so. Over time I walked back and forward past that giant smiling photo on the wall. Walking in, full of energy and hope and out exhausted and anxious. Walking in to 18 hours of non stop labour care, and out with head pounding and feet burning. In, exhausted on a fourth back to back 12 hour shift with no breaks. Out, elated at the birth I'd just witnessed. In, a student, out, a midwife. In, a midwife, out, a mother.

And when I left the NHS, a decade on, with two young sleepless toddlers and no idea how to make the juggle work for a moment longer, I walked past that poster on my way out once more. I stopped and looked at my giant smiling face. I felt exhausted, conflicted, deflated. I felt relieved, terrified and somehow that I was disconnecting from my whole identity. If I wasn't working as a midwife any more, then who was I anyway?

I had come to midwifery to be with women, but before I could gather up the emotions, stories and experiences of all the other mothers, I had to gather up my own. Because in becoming a mother, I'd realised that the woman I had to truly figure out how to be with, before any other, was myself.

Two: With Women

The word midwife means 'with woman', a fact that landed heavily with me some time into my midwifery training, when I realised with a huge exhale of relief, that in becoming a midwife, I had surrounded myself with the women who I most needed to be with me.

These women were brave, funny and almost unshockable. They were feminists and fearless leaders, compassionate carers, stoic warrior women armed with gloves, tea and patience. They loved a drink, never said no to a carbohydrate, and most importantly of all, between shifts could communicate across a dance floor through only the medium of ridiculous moves and terrible miming of half known lyrics. These women were my tribe.

A decade earlier, my awkward teenage years had been spent at an all girls school in which I was endlessly attempted to force my metaphorical square corners into a round hole, losing bits of myself with every effort. Self conscious and self effacing, abandoning myself for approval of all the girls who seemed to effortlessly just understand how to fit in. And yet in becoming a midwife, a career almost entirely defined by one's relationship with other women, I had finally found a perfectly square hole I sank into with relief.

Together, we started to understand the language of birth, and the complexities of holding women through it. We became a family, with its own memories and shorthand. We found each other sobbing in laundry cupboards, commiserated at our various failures to learn basic examination techniques, celebrated major milestones together and hid cans of diet coke in each others bike baskets as we swapped over on shifts.

The last time we gathered, over a year ago now, coronavirus was a story on the news as we cooked breakfast together in the kitchen of a house we shared for the weekend. Our kids ran around and our husbands sat chatting around the breakfast table. 'Should I be worried about this coronavirus thing?' one of my friends asked, as she casually flipped a pancake. 'Yes, you should', we all chimed. The conversation turned to someone's latest shift, and we were back into the storytelling, sharing the experiences only they could truly understand.

Through night shifts and nightmare labours, through drunken nights out and half drunk cups of tea, through pushing, panting, parting, parenthood and pandemic. They are forever my midwives, my 'with women' and I cannot wait to gather with them when all this is over.

One: Beginnings

As my baby's head began to crown, the gathering around me reached its crescendo. My midwife guiding my efforts and husband exclaiming in relief as he began to see his daughter for the first time, millimetres more of her perfectly wrinkled head visible with every roar of involuntary effort.

My friend, another midwife, puffed into the door in a sweaty, breathless 'ohmygodyoureamazing'. I'd heard my husband call her as my body began to bear down and I urged him to get her here. 'I don't think you'll make it' he said, but she appeared in the next moment as if by time travel, defying physics to be there to gather with me as my baby entered the world. Just as I had stood by and witnessed her become a mother a few months earlier. Just as we had both witnessed so many women as they made that same, life changing transition.

Her eyebrows are perfect, said my husband. Her eyes are perfect. Her nose is perfect. Each feature revealing itself in its miniature glory, and to his relief. A gleeful "Marvellous" rung out from the doorway, as two more midwife pals arrived and took their places. One clapped her hands together with pleasure as she knew that this new mother was so nearly already born. The other stood poised, ready to act should I need it. My eyes shut tight as my body exploded in half, my mind focused only on surviving this red hot moment.

And then she was here. And the gathering silenced, or roared, I'm not sure. All I could hear was the relief pounding through my head. I have survived. I am still here. It's over and I have survived. Somewhere in the edges of my awareness the midwives did all the doing and I stared at my baby and I concentrated hard on being alive.

I have thought in many moments since then about all those who had birthed before me. How every human on the planet is a result of a mother going to the edge of herself to bring them here. Of the gatherings that have held birthing mothers through this moment through all of time. Holding her space, holding her nerve, holding her as she holds her new baby.

Though I've mothered through the pandemic, I didn't become a mother during it. The stories of solitary labour and abandonment in that most vulnerable moment of birth, of the lonely milky, tearful, swollen early days, those stories are not mine to tell. But when I remember the warm huddle of those who welcomed me into motherhood, I cannot help but also wonder what of the women who, through Covid or trauma or through shortcomings of our systems around birth, were not held as they made this same journey. I wonder often, how can we hold them now, and will that be enough?

This is part 1 in a 21 part writing series: Why Gathered? Why Now? By Rachel Barlow @rachelb.gathered

Why Gathered, Why Now?

Our Gathered theme for May 2021 is 'Beginnings', and there are so many to choose from. From beginnings of pregnancy to parenthood, to lockdown. From beginning our lives as mothers and as new families, to our new relationships with grandparents.

Encouraged by the ridiculously insightful Megan Macedo, one of our founder Gathered members, I'll be posting a series of writing pieces across the next few weeks that are in many ways about the origins of Gathered for me. They are about the beginnings of my motherhood, the beginnings of gathering with other women, of being with woman as a midwife, of being with other mothers and finding connection in my community. They are about beginnings my understandings around feminism and matrescence and a whole heap of other things in between.

I hope these will give you more insight into why Gathered means so much to me, in to how it came to exist, and perhaps there will be some aspects of my experience that you can connect with or would like to explore. I hope you find them useful.

Rachel B