What
inspired The Birth House?
When
my partner and I moved from Chicago to Nova Scotia we bought an old farmhouse
on the Bay of Fundy. While exploring an unfinished room over the kitchen, I discovered
the walls had been sealed with seaweed and horsehair plaster and then covered
with newspapers. Each layer of paper dated back to a different era. Advertisements
for 1930's appliances were pasted over pictures of the Hupmobile Coupe…cars
and washing machines gave way to testimonials for Lydia Pinkham's female toners
and home remedies.
Everytime
I turned a new patch of earth for my gardens, I uncovered some small relic of
the past. Medicine bottles, bits of broken china, and my favourite find - an old
silver serving spoon. It was used so often that the edge of the bowl of the spoon
had been worn down to an angle. As I stood at my kitchen sink, washing the dirt
out of the wheat stalk pattern in the handle, I began to daydream about the woman
who had once held this spoon so many days of her life, how she must have stood
over the stove, stirring, testing her work, giving tastes to a husband or child
as they passed through the kitchen.
By
spring I was pregnant. As word spread around the community of my "condition"
and that I was looking for a midwife to assist in a home birth, neighbors began
telling me tales about the history of my home, which was once a midwife's house.
I was captivated by their stories. Not only had the midwife, Mrs.Rebecca Steele,
traveled to other homes in the Bay, but she eventually opened her home to the
women in the community as a birth house. She took them in and saw them through
labour and delivery, and then both mother and child stayed in the birth house
for a week or more after the birth. During this time, I was privileged to meet
the midwife's adopted daughter, Mary. Her first words to me were "My mother
died when I was three days old. My father couldn't take care of me of course,
and there was no one else to care for me. The midwife, she couldn't have babies
of her own, so she took me in." Sitting with her at the nursing home, Mary
took a piece of paper from her pocket and began to read the names of all the women
who had given birth in her mother's house. The stories from the community and
Mary's memories led to a documentary and accompanying webumentary for CBC radio.
Although
I enjoyed writing and producing the documentary, I had also been frustrated in
my efforts to uncover the midwife's past. Having died in 1955, she had been gone
just long enough to start to fade from people's memories. I could find no photographs
of her, and although the older residents of my community could remember her kindness
and her round, matronly figure, there were no traces left of her life as a young
woman. A brief account in The Berwick Register mentioned that she had once taken
an extended stay in the U.S. but her only child, an adopted daughter now living
in a nursing home, couldn't guess why her mother had gone away from home in the
first place. Out of my need to fill in the spaces of Mrs. Steele's limited biography,
The Birth House was created.
