Bloom Where You Are Planted | Tampa Florida Home Birth Midwifery
Midwife musings from 2013 that felt most relevant today…
There is a large piece of land in rural Florida where you will find the frame house where my grandmother, Mema, was born 75 years ago. In this home today reside my cousin and his family. Adjacent to this relic lives his father and Mema’s brother, my great uncle Buddy. If you look out of Uncle Buddy’s front window and across the yard you will find my Mema’s current home, and directly across from her front window is the house I spent my early childhood in. All separated by a dirt road and framed by giant oak trees. Surrounding the homes are acres and acres of farm land, rows and rows of strawberries, blueberries, cantelopes, or peppers depending on the season. No shoes are ever necessary, your rite of passage to a tractor seat arrives at the ripe age of 7, and there are ain’t nothin’ a biscuit can’t fix. This land has been cared for by my blood line for nearly a century now. This land is where I was planted, where my roots spread deep, and where I learned how to grow.
Mema is, to this day, the local church secretary. I was raised in the pew every Wednesday and Sunday (twice.) I knew hymns before I knew how to read. We all gathered around her table for from-scratch Sunday dinners after church, only after the blessing had been said of course. Mema is the epitome of strong Christian faith and deep southern love. Rarely does a negative word slip through her lips, and to this day I don’t think I have ever heard her even mutter a curse word.
Mema and Pepa’s love gave way to my mother, who then brought up three of us girls. We all fell right in line with the southern traditions of our grandparents. With my Pepa’s untimely passing when I was a preteen and the dissolving of my mother’s second marriage we became a family of exclusively women. Stronge and fierce women. Women who had the grace and hands of ladies Mema blessed us with, all the while possessing the hearts of lions to make it in a “man’s world.”
It was in these years that I came to realize how strong we were as women. How wrong the church I was raised in was, and how much there was to learn outside of those acres of land. I became a questioner of all things. A seeker of knowledge, and an explorer all things taboo. The universe brought beautiful people into my life that taught me important lessons and opened my mind to things I had never even began to think about. I felt fierce and free and so in love with the entire world. I felt like the widest, most porous sponge- the most open of any book. Nothing was too taboo, too extreme, too radical to consider. I felt the intense pulling and shifting away from the way I was raised into a new view of the world and where I belonged in it. This was the time that would serve me well when being called into birth work.
I extended the long line of strong women when I gave birth to my daughter. Her entrance into the world gave way to my journey into birth work. When I began my descent into the depths of birth culture, I suddenly felt the strangest serendipity. Many of the ideals at the core of midwifery heavily resounded with the ideals I had grown into in my teenage years. I felt connected as an independent woman, in charge of my own body- supporting other women to do the same. I could support women in finding their own autonomy in their path to motherhood. I was with women going against the machine, and what a liberating feeling it was!
As I continued into birth work, I began to feel more and more connected with those deep southern roots…the opposite of where I thought I would end up during those highly progressive early years. The juxtaposition I thought had previously existed between my upbringing and current path seemed to become harder and harder to define. My grandmother was born at home, lived simply and honestly, and held firm to tradition. Is that not exactly what we are constantly trying to duplicate and preserve with midwifery care? While the way I was raised disagrees fundamentally with my current opinions surrounding reproductive rights, I began to see that it was not the ideas and philosophies, but the basis of everything else. It was building a community, holding women’s hands in their bedrooms while they work hard to bring their babies earthside, and speaking up for what is right and fair. These were all the same as my southern ancestors before me. I was walking down an ancient path that my other ancestors below the Mason-Dixon walked as well- except with a modern day belief system in place.
Suddenly the idea of “staying put” and blooming where I had been planted made sense. This was my community, my home. I don’t have to believe the same things, vote for the same people, or go to the same church as everyone else. Even beneath Mema’s quiet, beautiful, southern-in-every-way exterior lies one fierce woman who is a feminine force to be reckoned with. I can still be authentically myself and provide competent, loving, and supportive care to a community that I, from my deepest of roots, am connected to. While the idea of a highly progressive city in a mostly liberal state may have seemed appealing at some points in my life, it is not my home. I feel like this acceptance has made for the most beautiful blending of direct opposites within my soul giving way to real balance.
I am now so pleased to authentically offer sensitive care to women throughout all reproductive issues without judgement, the “y’alls” and “yes ma’am’s” are just an added bonus.
