It was as if there was a line and it ran from me to you

There is a feeling that happens when you're very scared and everything turns out okay. It's like all the fluid in your body rushes out through your belly button. All your tears, lymph, plasma, urine fall out of you onto the floor and you're amazed you can still walk after all that.

My right pant leg was covered in amniotic fluid and blood and shit and it was up my arms too because I'd just reached in there and pulled the baby out. God, when you know what's coming and that purple floppy body comes out, limbs askew and not breathing. Just like that, hands on her, rubbing rubbing rubbing until the cord is cut and she's getting breaths on the cart. I'm sitting there with D, telling her to talk to her baby, one eye on the cord between her legs, watching for the pooling blood, just trying to welcome the baby, just trying to call her back into her body.

Then we're okay and the baby's crying and then they're crying and then someone takes one look at me and says, go clean yourself up and come back.

So I take one step out the room and I'm crying too and just shaking with adrenaline, rinsing body fluids off of me, trying to wash 24 hours of labor off of me.

When I was so tired I couldn't stare into your eyes anymore, I let my body do what my heart had been doing all night, I just tried to hold you up. Bravery is when you're fighting so hard against every contraction, fighting so hard against letting your body open and your baby fill you, but you still choose to do it. This is the worst pain of your life and I'm trying to make it easier for you, trying to make it better for you. But I'm also trying to keep my mind fresh and not exhaust every resource I have because I have to think, okay, what if there's a resuscitation, what if there's a hemorrhage?

Fuck, what if there's both?

What the fuck is a good midwife anyway?

Then later we slip plastic tubing into her to give back the fluids which fell from her. Blood which came so dark, I wasn't sure at first where it was from, my hands on her uterus which was firm and yet still out it came, this slow, frightening trickle. And I was so tired, but still vigilant and when I looked between her legs again, more carefully this time, there it was, a ruptured vein. Slow dark venous blood on its leisurely return. Not like arterial blood, which I would have known right away, in such a hurry to make it to the extremities, instead pooling on the bed, but dark, like uterine blood, moon bleeding. Anyone could have missed it and we did check and she was so strong that I didn't see the exhaustion at first until I felt the horse hoof heart beat of her pulse.

Gave her fluids and I was on her, making sure she was eating, drinking big glasses of water, trying to blow prayers into each bite of burrito until she stabilized.

Now her baby is fat and her belly is thin and she's marrying him, the man who called her puta, who left those alarming bruises on her arms, that large round one on her thigh I didn't see till she was in labor. She says they still remember what we all talked about together, the day she came to my clinic crying.

But my friend told me that she heard her talking in the waiting room, as someone's granddaughter was suffering in labor. She said, "I was like her, I didn't think I could do it, but I did it, I really did it and if I can do it, she can do it too."