If You Love a Midwife (or a midwifery student)

For all the parents, partners, children and friends who have a midwife or midwifery student in their lives.

Midwife means “with woman”.  This means midwives have a calling, a passion, a compelling to spend their days and nights supporting birthing families during the life changing and intense season of childbirth.

Midwives also live their lives exposed to unusually high levels of estrogen and oxytocin. If you are lucky enough to have one as a part of your family or close friend group, here are some things you need to know.

Estrogen is a group of a steroid hormones. It is the primary female sex hormone.

Oxytocin’s nick name is “the love drug”.

So living on this cocktail, means midwives – assuming they are female- are essentially goddesses.

JK, but feel free to bring food and drink offerings.

Most people don’t realize there is a lesser known dark side to oxytocin.  While it makes us feel more loving and cuddly (the reason midwives sometimes want to come home from births and make babies) if a person experiencing higher levels of oxytocin simultaneously has a negative or stressful experience, this hormone activates a part of the brain that intensifies the memory. This means the midwife may have a greater susceptibility to internalizing the traumas they manage - a potential "side effect" if you will. 

It’s no wonder that midwives who live on this hormonal cocktail while dealing with many extremely stressful events on a daily basis have a high statistical likelihood of anxiety, depression and burn out. 

Studies have shown that primary factors that make a midwife more likely to burn out are lack of personal support and lack of professional recognition.

So everyone who is a primary support person for a midwife is on the front lines of helping to offset the extra potential they have for burning out.

Think for a minute about the significance of this term "burn out".  Something can burn out sooner because it is burning brighter and hotter and at faster rate than usual.

I cannot conjur a more apt image of what it feels like to give your life to the practice of midwifery.

In one room, I use my doppler to help a first time mother hear her baby's heart beat for the first time and she and her partner cry tears of joy.  I walk directly into the next room to cry tears of grief with another woman having a miscarriage. Then I stay up all night to sweat with a third woman screaming to push her child triumphantly out of her body, and leave the room covered with her bodily fluids to take a phone call from yet another woman who is struggling to breastfeed and having postpartum depression.

It's quite a fire.  It warms me, fuels me and gives me unspeakable joy and great satisfaction to serve in this way, but also uses me up and some days leaves me charred and brittle. 

So helping to maintain this fire is an extremely important job. When you support a midwife, you are also supporting every birthing family and baby she cares for.

And in case you haven’t heard, we don’t have enough midwives in the world as it is, so it becomes even more important to sustain and preserve the ones we have.

With that in mind, all midwives have a few important love languages.  They include

Lack of judgment for being gone for long hours and missing events

Nourishing food

A made bed

Listening to birth stories

Understanding that they pour gallons of their souls out into the well of their profession, and come home mostly empty, fragile, and without much to give for a bit. 

Awareness that they feel some degree of conscious or subconscious guilt every time they leave their own family to care for someone else’s. 

Water (We are chronically dehydrated)

Partners, I know you’ve been “holding down the fort”. I know it’s been hard.  But realize what they’ve been doing is hard too, super hard, and it doesn’t end the second they get back.  They aren’t ready for you to hand everything they usually do at home right back to them. 

Part of the support is not just what you do for your midwife person when they walk out the door, but how you receive them when they walk back through the door.

They are often tired, hungry, nasty, empty, drained, missing family and wanting to be with them, but also desperately needing down time or sleep.

You see, midwives gets lots of affirmation outside their home, from their clients/patients, but then often come home to folks who are grouchy, whinny or disgruntled that they have been gone for so long.  It’s a hard thing, to be so exhausted, feel like you’ve done something wonderful and important, and then to have it indirectly (probably unintentionally) discounted and minimized by those closest to you in such short order.

Fortunately, it isn’t complicated to remedy this.  Here are some simple starters that will go a long way.

What a midwife needs to hear:

I’m so proud of you.

What you did today was awesome.

Your work is important.

You are amazing

I’m so lucky to be married to/have a parent/have a friend/have a partner who is a midwife.

You must be exhausted.

You must be hungry –can I bring/make/heat up some /food for you? (extra points if you bring this to them at a long birth).

Drink this water

I’ll bet you can’t wait to shower.  How about I make you some food while you get cleaned up, then you can eat and tell me about your birth/day/ night/ shift before you go to bed.

What do you need most right now?

Just some things to think about, if you love a midwife.  You are actually pretty lucky.  

After all, how many people get to make dinner for a goddess?

PS- Big thank you to my adult kids: Cassandra (who made this food for me after my last birth), Sabrina and Daniel who have learned over the years all the best ways to support their midwife mother.