Open Features: She Made The Earth Move
…What a difference a generation makes. In a relatively short space of time midwifery has moved on and there are now so many gadgets, machines and interventions at a birth that I began to think the baby might arrive bathed and gift-wrapped. However I am pleased to say that the final stages are still the greatest miracle on earth and that the first cry of a newborn child continues to be the sweetest of sounds for all the obvious reasons…
Mary Basham experiences the immense joy of being present at the birth of a new grandchild.
This column is for Auriela Elizabeth born 27 February 2008.
Did the earth move for you when we had the recent earthquake? It certainly moved for me although it had nothing to do with seismology.
At precisely the moment eastern England was rocked by the biggest tremors since 1884 when an earthquake centred on Colchester sent church steeples tumbling and people running for safety, my tenth grandchild was making her way into the world and for the first time I was able to watch the wonder of birth.
As the mother of four children I have always been on the action side and never the privileged on-looker. When I was of an age to give birth it was not the done thing for the mother to be anything other than prone and to respond to the encouragement of the District Nurse together with a little help from occasional whiffs of gas and air.
Then at every previous opportunity to attend the arrival of one of my grandchildren I have sadly been elsewhere, sometimes missing the moment by literally a matter of minutes. (If my former editor is reading this please note than I was once daft enough to put my journalistic responsibilities before the dash to the hospital to see my first grandchild born. Shame on me.) This time I was determined to be there and luckily the parents-to-be agreed.
What a difference a generation makes. In a relatively short space of time midwifery has moved on and there are now so many gadgets, machines and interventions at a birth that I began to think the baby might arrive bathed and gift-wrapped. However I am pleased to say that the final stages are still the greatest miracle on earth and that the first cry of a newborn child continues to be the sweetest of sounds for all the obvious reasons.
Auriela Elizabeth yelled her way into the world at 01.34 exactly, just as the dust was settling on the rumblings of a dyspeptic tectonic plate. In the delivery room we never noticed a thing; our tiny world had just been emotionally rocked to the core by 7lbs 4oz of new life.
Every second, of every minute, of every day, somewhere in the world a baby draws its first breath and likewise someone takes his or her last. The circle of life rolls on and it’s only at the crucial moments of life and death we usually allow ourselves to dwell on the hugeness of it all.
In this age of DNA blue printing, stem cell research and cloning it is easy to become blasé about the fundamental uniqueness of creation. Yet whether the outcome is minute, such as an ant emerging from a tiny egg, or of enormous personal significance, like a child who carries the genes of the family tree, birth remains a miracle of such magnitude it defies description.
