The hazy blue of this poor quality cell phone photo represents the day. This message was scribbled on the white board by the 21 year old husband of the 17 year old girl who was in labor when they first came in. She, then, was dressed, walking slowly, but barley breathing heavily.
Over the course of the next 4 hrs, she transformed from a young Mexican, looking girlish in jeans and a sweater, with gorgeous long black shiny hair in a braid swinging behind her, to a powerful woman - pushing out a baby with a grunt and a moan with no pitocin, no pain meds, clutching the arms of her husband on one side and her cousin on the other, and me at her perineum, grinning behind my plastic mask. In the interim, she learned to be intimate with strangers, to try rolling on the birthing ball, and to listen to and trust her body.
The baby, Shanelle (pronounced like the perfume), came out spinning, with her fist raised up and held high, yelling her way into this big beautiful world. I did nothing more graceful than just hold on and slip the slippery wet cord around her slippery wet head and - oops - that hand. We laid her on her mama's belly and reveled in her wales.
Who knows what her life will grow into, if she will have her first baby at 15 like her strong mama, or if she will be the first in her family to speak English, go to college, and keep her fist raised high in the fight for immigrant rights, for human rights, and for being fully human.
Life is precious indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment