Heartfelt Journeys
As a traveling midwife, I encounter diverse families and cultures. Each journey brings new lessons and stories that enrich my life.
Connecting with Communities
Every place I visit offers a unique perspective on family and care, reminding me of the beauty in our shared experiences.
Epic Birth Story:
One way I connect with people is through birth stories. It doesn’t really matter where I am. If someone finds out I’m a midwife, I usually end up hearing a birth story. It always reminds me of geometry class and those “if-then” statements. In geometry, a conditional statement has a hypothesis (the “if” part) and a conclusion (the “then” part). Theorems are written that way to show that if certain conditions are true, then a certain result must follow. In the same way, if a woman who has given birth finds out Marinda is a midwife, Marinda will hear a birth story.
I’ll share my first birth story here. It was uneventful, but in hindsight it had a little drama and humor. It was 2005, so some details are a little blurry now. My water broke while I was standing in my mom’s kitchen, eating watermelon. I felt a pop, then a huge gush of fluid. After that, the contractions started. Before my water broke, I had no contractions. After it broke, the contractions came on strong. I called my midwife, and she told me I had plenty of time since it was my first baby. I took a shower and even tried to watch the rest of American Idol, the season with Carrie Underwood.
I was bent over the back of the couch, breathing through contractions the way I had learned in Lamaze and prenatal yoga classes. My mom kept telling me to calm down because I still had a long way to go. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out what stage of labor I was in. Was I already in active labor, or still in the early phase? We stayed home for about two hours, but eventually the pain intensified, and the contractions became so regular that we headed to the hospital. By the time we got there, I was already 6 centimeters dilated, so we went straight to a labor room. I tried to get into the Jacuzzi tub for a little while, but that didn’t last long. We were only there for about two hours before I was ready to push, even though no one else seemed ready. I remember someone still trying to set up the table while I was already pushing. About 14 minutes later, my first son was born.
My whole life changed after that, and my identity shifted into being a mom. This month, he’s making me a grandmother.