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intervention, while she certainly took me to pediatricians when I wasn’t feeling well as a child—most doctors never learned to trust her.
    .  .  .
    Mine was not the first birth at which my mother was present. Mine was the third.
    In the year and a half between her return from Boston and my arrival in Vermont, two other women in that circle of friends northeast of Montpelier had children, and my mother was present at the first birth by accident, and the second by choice. Appropriately, the first of those births was in a bedroom in a drafty old Vermont farmhouse, not a sterile delivery room in a hospital.
    The first of those births—and my mother’s baptism to midwifery—was Abigail Joy Wakefield’s.
    The little girl was supposed to have been born in a hospital, but she arrived two weeks early. The six adults who were present the night her mother’s labor began, including the two people who would become my own parents, feared they were too stoned to try and drive any of the cars that were parked willy-nilly by the old house as though an earthquake had hit. Consequently, in a reversion to sex roles that in my opinion was part instinct, part socialized, the men agreed to run the three and a half miles up the road to the pay phone at the general store, where they could call an ambulance, and the women took the laboring mother upstairs to make her as comfortable as possible—and deliver the baby, if it came to that.
    Why all three men went, including my father, has become another one of those almost mythic stories that were told and retold among my parents’ friends for years. My father insisted that it was a spontaneous decision triggered by the fact that all of the men had dropped acid and simply failed to think the decision through properly. My mother and her female friends always teased him, however, that each guy had been a typical male who had wanted to get as far away from a woman in labor as humanly possible.Indeed, after traveling well over three miles in the dark, the men decided to wait by the main road for the ambulance, so they could be sure it found its way to the house.
    Fortunately, neither my mother nor Abigail Joy’s mother, Alexis Bell Wakefield, were tripping. That evening they’d merely been smoking pot.
    Initially, my mother and Alexis were joined in the bedroom by Luna Raskin. Unlike the other two women, Luna did have all sorts of synthetic chemicals in her body, and every time Alexis sobbed, “Oh, God, it hurts, it hurts so much!” Luna would grab my mother’s shirt and wail, “They’re killing her, they’re killing her!”
    For a moment my mother assumed Luna meant Alexis’s contractions. But when she elaborated, my mother realized with a combination of horror and astonishment that Luna was referring to President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whose photograph had been on the front page of the newspaper that day.
    At that point my mother threw Luna out of the bedroom and delivered the baby herself.
    My mother wasn’t sure what delivery tools she would need, and made one of those decisions that suggested she was indeed called to be a midwife: She concluded that women had been having babies for a long, long time before someone invented delivery tools, whatever they were. She imagined the female body had a pretty good idea of what it was supposed to do, if she could simply keep Alexis calm.
    Nevertheless, she did round up all of the washcloths and towels she could find, and she filled a huge lobster pot with boiling hot water. She had no idea what one should expect from a placenta, she had no comprehension of what it meant to push, and (in hind-sightthis probably was for the best) she had never even heard a term like cephalo-pelvic disproportion—an infant head a couple of hat sizes too big for mom’s pelvis.
    She turned off the overhead light in the bedroom, assuming Alexis would be more comfortable if she wasn’t staring straight up into a bright light; the lamp