It all started with a Thank-You note.
I’ve been a scribbler since I was a kid. My mom gave me my first diary when I was eight. It was covered in forest green velvet and I wore the key to its lock around my neck, always. My early obsession with keeping my writing “safe” from the rest of the world set the stage for the next twenty-five years. All through high school, university, grad school, and into motherhood, I kept my thoughts, ideas, and short stories in notebooks - hiding them between mattress and box spring - like letters from a secret lover, or a college-boy’s porn mags. Writing was an affair of my heart, not something I could bring myself to consider a legitimate pursuit.
As the year 2000 approached, my husband and I began to talk about New Year’s resolutions…he knew about my secret writing habit (I’d even been brave enough to share a paragraph or two with him from time to time). He urged me to put some of my writing out into the world.
I teased and replied, “OK, I’ll write thank-you notes. I’ve always been poor with correspondence.”
He quickly put a stop to my teasing. “That’s not what I meant.”
I came back with. “Thank-you notes to people I don’t know?”
He shrugged, giving up his good-natured prodding for the day. “Fine. But the first thank-you had better be to somebody BIG.”
So, I declared the year 2000 as, “The year of sending thank-you notes to people I don’t know.” My first letter led to a featured guest appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. (I know - go ahead and say it – “aren’t you supposed to write a novel first and then get on Oprah?”)
Long story short: I went on the show, had an insane but wonderful adventure, and walked away feeling that I could do just about anything, including writing a novel and submitting it for publication.
And I had plenty to write about.
We had moved from Chicago to Scots Bay, Nova Scotia (from a city of 6 million people to a seaside village of about 250 year-round residents) and by the following spring I was pregnant with my second child.
As word spread through the community of my “condition”, the older women 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 traveled to other homes in Scots Bay, but she eventually opened her home to the women in the community as a birth house. My neighbour encouraged me to visit a woman who had grown up in my house, the daughter of the midwife. Nearly 90, her mind and words were clear, her eyes bright. While I sat with her, she spoke of her mother’s calling as a midwife, how she cared for the women, keeping them at the house for a week or more after a birth, and how the house had become a meeting place for the women in the Bay. She then began to recite the names of all the women who had given birth in the house as well as the names of their children. I was so inspired by her stories that I decided to have a midwife assisted home birth. (Talk about research!) My son was born at home in the middle of a March snowstorm, another child in the long lineage of babies born in the house. Not long after his birth, I began to make the first notes towards what would become The Birth House.
As I wrote, I found myself asking a lot of questions. What happened to midwifery? What happened to the community of birth? Why is there so much fear around birth today? At the same time I began to research women’s lives during the WWI era. While it’s no secret that the suffrage movement was at its peak during that time period, I soon discovered that the women’s fight to win the vote was tangled up in every aspect of their lives, from emotion, to sex, to childbirth. If a woman read too many novels or spoke her mind too often, she’d likely be diagnosed as being hysterical. (And might even be prescribed vibratory treatments to alleviate her hysteria.) If a woman enjoyed sex, she was a slut. If she tried to find some form of contraception, she was breaking the law. If she didn’t acquiesce to the new science of obstetrics and experience childbirth in a prescribed manner, she was a danger to herself and her child. The fight to be counted as a person of consequence was only a small part of a much larger fight…the battle for a woman to have the right to have control of her own body.
From the history of my house, the history of the women of my community, and my many questions about women’s lives past and present, came the voice of Dora Rare – a young woman destined to become a midwife, a healer, and a real sh*# disturber - a young woman living in Nova Scotia on the cusp of WWI. The Birth House is her story…writing it was my journey.
To learn more about The Birth House please visit my web site:
Incidental Pieces is my blog:
http://www.amimckay.blogspot.com
And if you think you might be feeling a bit hysterical, you’ll want to take the following quiz to see how many ‘treatments’ you need. ;-)
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Posted by: Robert | July 26, 2007 at 11:07 PM