I knew that I wanted to be a midwife when I was kneeling on the floor of a birth room, cleaning up birth mess with white hospital towels, and I thought –

‘This is the most raw and wild thing I have ever seen. And I get to be a part of it. This is my calling’

Five years later, I was a fully fledged novice midwife, registered and employed at one of Australia’s best maternity hospitals.

Seven months later, I quit.

There was a lot that was really hard about midwifing. Lots that was incredible too. I loved the feeling of someone leaning into your hands as you pressed their back against the pain. I loved watching and sensing the build of labour as contractions strengthened hour to hour. I loved the education, explaining what was happening inside to the worried faces outside. I loved being there for them, in any way I could, with words and silence and closeness and space. I loved the rush of touching a baby’s head with my fingers before anyone else in the world had touched them. I loved watching families evolve and entire worlds shift as baby after baby slipped so impossibly into my hands and to their parents. It was a Privilege with a capital P.

But I couldn’t keep doing it. Because the thing that I didn’t learn as a student was that not only did time pressures and bureaucracy harm people, but as a hospital-based midwife, I had to be part of that. Lack of antenatal education meant that almost everyone asked ‘how long until the baby comes’ and let me tell you, explaining the possibility of multiple days of labour to a labouring person is a rough gig. And lack of knowledge about birth meant that MOST births I attended and MOST families I cared for followed the same awful formula of birth:

Induction of labour>epidural>’failure to progress’>caesarian

Again and again and again.

And when all that happens, there is not enough time and too much paperwork for any actual midwifing. Instead, it’s obstetric nursing, delivering endone, bothering obstetricians, observing instrumental births and caesarians. There’s barely time to let families in on what’s happening to them, let alone provide them with the knowledge they really need to make informed decisions. Trying to explain options to families who are exhausted, stressed and terrified is a hard task.. and a painful one when you know that there is no way they can understand what impact these options will have on them, their bodies, their births, their relationships, their lives. The amount of trauma people are experiencing from birth at this time is not because birth itself is inherently traumatic, it is because going into birth without any knowledge or preparation is unimaginably terrifying, and that is traumatic.

So, I wrote a childbirth education program. One that doesn’t laugh at men or assume to know anything about you or your life or your baby, but which instead shows how birth works and how an Australian hospital works, as best I can explain it. When you are informed about birth, you prepare your body and your baby and you will labour better, quicker and with less fear.

You don’t need to know everything, to be a doctor or a midwife, to have a good birth (in fact, trying to know everything will probably create problems). You can’t control birth, it is chaos. What you can do is learn the basics of how people are born. So stay posted. I’ve got some lessons for you.