Arms wide open A midwife's journey

Nurse-midwife Harman pens a sort of prequel to her first memoir, The Blue Cotton Gown (2008), in which she revealed the trials of her patients and of her and husband Tom's Appalachian ob-gyn clinic. This time she recounts, via a combination of personal journals and memory, the sometimes rocky road she took from being a card-carrying hippie/Vietnam War protester to matron midwife mentor. In the dusky haze of Harman's recollections of the 1970s, the fact that there really was a movement espousing sustainable living and peace to all people easily gets lost. But Harman's crystal-clear depiction of her not-so-halcyon days as a struggling earth mother living in a remote log cabin without electricity or indoor plumbing in a bona fide commune serves as an eye-opening reminder of an entire generation's idealism. Moreover, as Patsy and Tom have aged, so, too, has their idealism, jaded by the hard facts of life in the medical profession. Harman is as candid as ever in this meaningful account of a woman dedicated to the service and support of her sister women.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Harman's first memoir, The Blue Cotton Gown, revealed the struggles of a modern midwife who began with no training but eventually became a certified nurse-midwife (CNM) in practice with her OB-Gyn husband, Tom. Her wonderful second memoir is ostensibly about discovering her calling as a midwife, but it is just as much about her life-with lovers and friends, in communes, raising her young children, struggling, flawed, and free. While she may have been disaffected by the times (sections 1 and 2 span the 1970s), she's not bitter, or hardly even negative. It's a tough line to toe. Songs well-worn in our collective memory punctuate chapters, profound moments, and the many births that Harman recounts. The facts of her subsistence life in Appalachia both push the reader away and draw them in (as when the almost unbearable cold of winter makes sap break in the trees so that the forest sounds like a symphony of marimba music). Since she has drawn from her color-coded, time-stamped journals ("From the Red Journal: Little Cabin in the North Woods, 1971-1972, Fall," for instance), there are more honest, revealing moments here than in many memoirs. Harman, whose prose is sparse but not simple, covers a span of decades, deftly revealing her own youthful struggles with identity through the children we witnessed her raising earlier in her book, revealing, in short, a full life. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Prelude All the way down Route 119, past Gandeeville, Snake Hollow, and Wolf Run, I'm thinking about the baby that died.   I wasn't there, didn't even know the family. It happened a few days ago, with another midwife, at a homebirth in Hardy County, on summer solstice, the longest day of the year.   Word on the informal West Virginia midwives' hotline is that the baby's shoulders got stuck, a grave emergency. The midwife, Jade, tried everything, all the maneuvers she'd studied in textbooks and the special tricks she'd learned from other practitioners, but nothing worked. They rushed, by ambulance, to the nearest hospital thirty miles away, with the baby's blue head sticking out of the mother, but it was too late. Of course it was too late.   Homebirth midwives in West Virginia are legal, but just barely, and there's no doubt the state coroner's office will investigate. Jade is afraid.   We are all afraid.   We whip around another corner and I lose my supper out the side window. Who do I think I am taking on this kind of responsibility? Why am I risking my life to get to a homebirth of people I hardly know? What am I doing in this Ford station wagon being whipped back and forth as we careen through the night?       I awake sick with grief, my heart pounding. I'm lying on a pillow-padded king-size bed with floral sheets. A man I hardly recognize sleeps next to me. This is Tom, I remind myself: my husband of thirty-three years, a person whose body and mind are as familiar to me as my own. I prop myself up on an elbow, inspecting his broad shoulders, smooth face, straight nose and full lips, his short silver hair, in the silver moonlight. One hairy leg sticks out of the covers. One arm, with the wide hand and sensitive surgeon's fingers, circles his pillow. It's 3:45, summer solstice morning.   When I rise and pull on my long white terry robe, I stand for a moment, getting my bearings, then open the bedroom door that squeaks and pad across the carpeted living room. Outside the tall corner windows, the trees dance in the dark. Once I called myself Trillium Stone. That was my pen name when I lived in rural communes, wrote for our political rag, The Wild Currents , taught the first natural-childbirth classes, and started doing homebirths.   Now I'm a nurse-midwife with short graying hair, who no longer delivers babies, living with an ob-gyn in this lakefront home, so far from where I ever thought I would live, so far from where I ever wanted to live. I search the photographs on the piano of my three handsome sons, now men. Do I wake? Do I sleep?   OK, my life has been a wild ride, I'll admit it, but the image of this hippie chick lurching through the night, on her way to a homebirth, with only a thick copy of Varney's Midwifery as a guide, disturbs me. What did she think she was doing? Where did she get the balls?       On the highest shelf in the back of our clothes closet, a stack of journals gathers dust. For seventeen years I carried them in a backpack from commune to commune. They've moved with me across the country three times, through midwifery school, Tom's medical school and his ob-gyn residency. I can't get the diaries out of my mind, a mute witness to my life . . .   I slip back through the bedroom. Tom snores on. By the dim closet light, I find a stepladder and struggle to bring down the shabby container. The journals have been closed for twenty-five years; pages stick together and smell faintly of mold.   I'm on a mission now, trying to understand, but I'm surprised to find that I started each entry with only the day and the month, no year. This is going to take a while. It seems I never expected anyone would want to reconstruct my life, not even me. I'm an archaeologist digging through my own past.   With narrowed eyes, I flip through notebook after notebook, daring that flower child to show her face. When the alarm goes off, Tom, dressed in blue scrubs for the OR, finds me asleep in the white canvas chair, with a red journal open, over my heart. Excerpted from Arms Wide Open: A Midwife's Journey by Patricia Harman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.