Leila Breton: How and why did you decide to become a Midwife and practice in Vermont?

Erin Ryan, LM: I didn’t know what a midwife was until I was in college. I was actually taking a sociology and medicine course abroad in England and the professor asked me to write a paper on the history of midwives. So I got started researching it and it seemed so familiar and exactly what I wanted to be doing. When I came back (from England) I started doing research on the different paths to midwifery to find which one called to me more and first I thought I’d do CNM (Certified Nurse Midwifery) because I was going to school at UC Berkeley and it seemed like the next academic step but then the more I learned the more I realized that, to me, that wasn’t really birth, that wasn’t trusting in the process. So I worked on a post-graduate program, a 3 year program, to get my national certification. I ended up in Vermont because my husband and I decided to leave the Bay Area and we looked at all our choices of states of where to live and Vermont was the state that fulfilled the most requirements, including midwifery being a legal profession.

Katherine Bramhall, LM: I think I decided when I was 19. I lived in a small town in NH that had a one room schoolhouse. That setting woke up something in me about what I knew the natural order of human development should look like. From there I got pregnant young and had a midwife for my first pregnancy, only because I didn’t have insurance. I got such exquisite care that I knew that’s how the process of birth should be. The second time I got pregnant I had insurance and went to an obstetrician and got the exact opposite quality of care, even though I had a really wonderful, natural birth. All of those experiences implanted in me and woke something up. When my kids were 4 and 5, I was the only person in my circle of friends who was married, let alone who had children, and a friend of mine who was 9 months pregnant called me one night in labor. It was before cell phones and her husband hadn’t come home and she said, “I think I’m in labor, can you come.”  I attended her in birth and that was when I knew I would be a midwife. I decided to wait for my training until my children were grown.

 

LB: Why have you continued to be a midwife?

ER: It absolutely fills my heart. It’s my total passion. I absolutely love it. I can’t imagine doing anything else and I’ve tried doing other things and I keep coming back to this. I love women and babies and it works.

KB: Katherine was a doula for 20 years, so she answers why she has stayed in the birth community. I can’t help it. It’s the kind of job where I learn so much about humanness. The process of labor and delivery and pregnancy and years postpartum, as well as the development of the family shows so much about humanness that I can’t help but feel compassion for all of us waking up everyday and continuing to do life, regardless of the joy OR the heartache. I learn so much through the places that I see women go when they are in labor.

 

LB: Erin, how did you create this partnership with Katherine?

ER: I met Katherine on a day when it was about 3 degrees, like today, at the (Kellogg-Hubbard) library. The library was doing a program on childbirth options. I decided to go.

KB: I had put this gathering together. I moved from a really active doula practice in Boston and when I got to Vermont I wanted to get to know the birth community in central Vermont. I contacted Kellogg-Hubbard and said I wanted to gather birth professionals of all kinds in one room and do a community forum.  I invited lactation consultants, doulas, CNM’s, all sorts of people and the day of the event many of the birth professionals showed up but there was only one person from the community.

ER: Then I heard Katherine, sitting two seats down from me, answer a question saying, “I just think my job is to love the mothers.” And I thought, well, I’ll just work with HER. It took us over a year to get organized and begin doing births together. Then I was going to be done going to births because I was having my third baby. But I couldn’t stop midwifery altogether. Besides the fact that I love working as a midwife, I can’t stand when there’s limited choice of homebirth midwives in the community. So I called Katherine and said we had to start our professional affiliation now. (Katherine took her licensing exam and is now a licensed midwife.)

KB: We all get into this for different reasons. I’ve worked with a lot of different midwives all over the world. I feel very lucky working with Erin because she’s got such a commitment to offering good care and good choice to women. She has a nice blend of heart and head.

ER: And I was really excited to work with Katherine because she has so much experience working with people as a result of her background as a holistic health practitioner in Boston. Also, her kids are grown so she’s a midwife who has a lot of experience and is going to be more available than, say, I will be with my 3 young kids.

 

LB: What is unique about the care you provide?

ER: We are coming from personal experience. We have birthed 5 children between the two of us.  Katherine had a cesarean birth with a midwife after a long trial of labor and a VBAC (Vaginal birth after cesarean) so we’re coming from a place where we’ve got a lot of information to come in with. Katherine has a lot of experience in bodywork and holistic care; I’ve taken the path to study Chinese medicine and Herbs and dabble with homeopathy. I think we bring uniqueness to our practice because we both bring in all these different things. The fact that Katherine’s kids are grown and my kids are young offers a full lifespan scope of information and care for people.

We treat every client individually. Every client gets to make their own decisions with our help. We don’t take 10-12 clients a month so we can really focus on people and give them individualized care.

KB: We really work to hear them. Not just to listen but to hear everything that they’re saying.

 

LB: Erin, what will your practice look like during your maternity leave?

ER: I will take 6 weeks to honor myself and my family and I feel lucky I have Katherine who can cover as much as I need or want. After that I’ll just bring my baby along with me. What better thing for some of the first-time moms to see than a baby nursing and a mom slinging a baby around comfortably and happily. It’s a good way to show how you can transition from single life to a parent smoothly and with some joy.

 

LB: How will it work on your end Katherine?

KB: I will have an assistant come with me to the births. At the end of April I have a full time apprentice coming to live here for 18 months and work with me. She has a long history of working with women in all settings and has completed her academics at a midwifery school, as well as one semester of clinical.

 

LB: Do you find any demographic similarities among your clients?

ER: I came from the Bay Area in California and even though it was a more diverse place, I had a smaller circle of clients. They were very well educated, older women who were making an educated decision that they had researched and almost all of them were planned pregnancies and almost all of them were over 35 and I think almost all of them were white. Here I’ve had 18 year olds, 43 year olds, Mennonites, home churchers, hippies, back-to-the-earthers- I actually have a wider diversity since I’ve been here 7 years practicing. It’s a large group of people and they come for different reasons and they all have great births.

 

LB: What services do you offer and where are you located?

ER: Right now we’re practicing in Barre. Our clients will have to be within an hour to an hour and a half of that space so that we can provide thorough and comprehensive care. We provide services including pre-conception and prenatal care, labor and birth, and post-partum.

KB: And I do prenatal massage and lifestyle counseling.

 

LB: If you could tell people one thing about midwifery, what would it be?

ER: I would say that I do think that women should like and connect with your midwife.  Also, my job is to hold the space so that women can give birth because they’re the one giving birth. It isn’t about me. It isn’t about the midwife. I encourage people to reclaim their births that way instead of putting so much emphasis on “the wonderful midwife”.

 

LB: If you could tell people one thing about homebirth, what would it be?

ER: I support women to choose where they want to birth. I just can’t imagine personally giving birth any place but home.