The Frozen River

by Ariel Lawhon

I keep up with the journals because I enjoy it, but also because it is my job. One of the duties of my profession. As a midwife and healer, I am witness to the details of my neighbors’ private lives, along with their fears and secrets, and—when appropriate—I record them for safekeeping. Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without partiality. That, I believe, is why so few women are taught to read and write. God only knows what they would do with the power of pen and ink at their disposal.

The joy of falling into another life, another world, is the one thing that mitigates the frustration of a sleepless night.

“No baby is conceived apart from the will of God, May. If you are pregnant, it means that you have been touched by Providence, and you will never hear me say an ill word about the child you carry.

The act of mothering is not limited to the bearing of children. This is another thing that I have learned in all my long years of midwifery. Labor may render every woman a novice, but pregnancy renders every woman a child. Scared. Vulnerable. Ill. Exhausted. Frail. A pregnant woman is, in most ways, a helpless woman. Her emotions are erratic. Her body betrays her.