Meredith

MEREDITH

11 YEARS BEFORE

March

I just barely make it to my nine o’clock vinyasa flow class on time. I start by grounding my class. I ask them to find any comfortable position. There we focus on breath. I invite my students into a deeper awareness of their current mental and physical state. I focus on mine. I use this time to try and shake off the fear I feel after having just received another threatening text. I’m not used to feeling so out of control, so frantic. But these text messages have me all worked up. I tell my class to breathe in through their noses. To let the air fill their bellies, then their chests. When they exhale, I want to hear them. I breathe as they do, trying to force myself to relax. There’s no one in the world who should want to hurt me. No one has any reason to wish me dead. I’m an extremely conscientious woman. I’ve done nothing wrong.

I lead my students in a short, guided meditation. We move into our warm-up. We work our way toward peak pose. I move around the room. I help my students find proper alignment, trying hard to distract myself from the thoughts inside my head.

The lights in the studio are turned down. The classroom is heated, the thermostat set to ninety degrees. There are humidifiers. Everyone sweats, including me.

We say, “Namaste,” and then everyone leaves.

After class, I have a meet and greet with a potential new doula client and her husband. Our plan is to meet at eleven. It’s standard protocol, to see if they like me and vice versa. We’ve made arrangements to meet at a public spot—a coffee shop—in case they turn out to be dodgy. For all the horror stories you hear about Craigslist—people being lured to strange homes by classified ads, only to be murdered when they arrive—it seems smarter this way. It makes me feel safer to meet in a public spot.

The coffee shop is new to me. It has scuffed wood floors, tin ceilings and tables the size of postage stamps. I spot my prospective client when I arrive. She’s easy to see. She’s the anxious, uncomfortable-looking one with a belly the size of a basketball. She waits at a table, alone. I go to her and shake her hand.

“Meredith Dickey,” I say, smiling.

“Shelby Tebow,” she says, shaking mine. “You want some coffee?” she asks. I do. The fatigue is taking over. Without caffeine, I don’t know how much longer I can last on my feet.

We drift in the direction of the counter. We order our coffees. Mrs. Tebow offers to buy mine. I don’t object. She asks if I want something to eat. I get a cinnamon scone because, on top of tired, I’m famished. I can’t remember the last time I ate, or if I even ate this morning. I remember feeding the kids and doing their dishes. I don’t remember having anything myself.

Mrs. Tebow gets nothing. “You’re not having something to eat?” I ask, feeling guilty all of a sudden. I take the scone from the barista.

She shakes her head. She harrumphs. “Look at me,” Mrs. Tebow says, showing off her very pregnant self. “I’m fat. The last thing I need is a pastry.”

“You’re not fat,” I scold. “You’re pregnant.”

We take our coffee to a table and sit. The coffee shop is quiet, small. There are only a handful of people here, professionals on laptops mostly. These meetings are as much about me trying to impress potential clients, as they are the other way around. If we like each other at the end of it, a contract gets signed.

“My husband says I’m never going to lose all this weight. I’ve gained thirty pounds,” she says. She says it like it’s grotesque, but thirty pounds is average. I gained at least that with each of my kids.

“Is your husband on his way?” I ask. I didn’t have time to change after class. I wear my yoga clothes, with a sweater on top. My eyes are heavy, the lost hours of sleep catching up with me.

Shelby fiddles with a ring on her finger. “He’s not coming,” she says uneasily.

“I’m sorry to hear that. He couldn’t make it?”

Husbands don’t always make it. Sometimes they’re at work, or on a business trip, and sometimes they’re uninvolved. It’s okay. Because the women who need me most are often those with husbands who show disinterest or inefficacy.

Shelby looks sheepish. She lets go of her ring. She rearranges herself on her chair, takes a sip of her coffee, which I overheard her order and know it’s not decaf. I don’t judge. I didn’t drink caffeine when I was pregnant. But every pregnant woman is different. Maybe a little caffeine is the one thing that gets her through the day. I’ve seen a lot of women over the years. Single mothers. Women who’ve been raped, but want to keep their baby. Women who choose to abort a fetus based on the result of genetic testing. Being unbiased is important. Every woman is not me.

Shelby shakes her head. Her hands are also shaking. Tiny ripples form in her coffee, ruining the latte art. “I didn’t tell him I was meeting with you,” she says. She’s nervous. There could be a million reasons why. Maybe she’s just timid or is trying to impress me. Maybe she feels badly about her husband or she’s terrified of the impending birth.

“Oh?” I ask. I don’t want her to feel strange. I reach across the table and pat her hand. Research shows the importance of touch on a person’s emotions, their physical well-being, the way they respond to others. Tactile stimulation is one of the most important.

I say, “That’s not a problem. It happens all the time, Shelby.”

“Really?” she asks. Only then do her eyes move to mine.

“Of course it does. It can be hard to get those men on board. It’s not like they’re the ones pushing a baby out of their bodies,” I say with an empathetic smile. Across the table, Shelby visibly relaxes. “After we talk,” I tell her, “you can talk to your husband and decide what you want to do. How far along are you?” I ask.

She says, “Thirty-six weeks.”

Most of my clients come to me newly pregnant. Rarely do they come at thirty-six weeks. She tells me why, how she and her husband just moved to town. She had an obstetrician she loved, but now she’s two thousand miles away. She also had a close family, a large support system, but now they’re gone, too. In essence, she’s alone with the exception of her husband.

I tell her why I became a doula. I tell her about my experience giving birth to Leo. What I remember is that the hospital staff didn’t pay much attention to me that night. Josh had to beg and plead for a nurse to check on me. I felt alone. I felt like I was a burden. After it was done, I wished I had had someone to advocate for me, someone other than Josh, whose emotions were running on high like mine.

I’ve since seen things happen in a labor room that appall me. My own birth experience was a cakewalk in comparison. A common belief during labor is that a baby’s needs supersede that of the mother’s. Women don’t always know they have options. Or they aren’t given a choice in their care. If they are, they aren’t allowed ample time or information to come to a decision themselves. Choices are made without their consent. Too many women don’t want to be a burden and so they say nothing. The mistreatment is subtle, too, and falls under the guise of medical care.

Doctors do things that verge on sexual assault to me. They stick their hands inside a woman’s vagina without telling her first. They disregard a woman’s pain. They use forced or invasive practices. In the labor room, no doesn’t always mean no.

Most times labor ends with a happy ending. Women put aside whatever negative feelings they experienced during birth because they got what they wanted in the end: a healthy baby. That doesn’t make it right. One of the reasons I do what I do is to advocate for women during birth.

“Continuity of care is important. To have someone who is there for you and only you during your labor.” I leave it at that.

We talk about a birth plan, what she wants out of this birth. “A healthy baby, that’s all,” she says. She reaches down to set a hand on her midsection. I ask questions. I learn that Shelby doesn’t want to deliver at home. She wants to deliver in a hospital. “I don’t need any of that new age crap,” she says. “I mean, I want the epidural. I don’t want a C-section, unless I need it. Then I want it. But I won’t be eating my placenta any time soon.”

That gets a laugh out of me. It feels like the first in days.

There isn’t any definitive research into the benefits of placentophagia that I’ve been able to find. But if a client wanted to eat her own placenta, I wouldn’t stop her.

We talk awhile. As we do, I find that I like Shelby Tebow. I really like her. She’s practical, not pretentious. She’s matter-of-fact. She’s young, and it shows. I was once young, too. She has dreams for the rest of her life. She likes helping people. She’s not working now that she and her husband have relocated. But when she’s able, she wants to get back to work. Her husband doesn’t want her to work. He likes it better when she’s home.

“Tell me about your husband,” I say. It feels like a good transition.

“What about him?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Anything.”

Her husband is an insurance agent, she tells me. He was a linebacker in college. He wanted to go pro, until a knee injury sidelined him. He’s still bent out of shape about it. He’s three years older than her. They started dating in high school, when she was a freshman and he a senior. When she turned eighteen, they got married. Shelby never went to college. She tells me how much he loves kids, how he’ll be a great father one day. I just don’t get the sense that one day means four weeks from now, when their baby is due to arrive.

After a while she gets down to brass tacks. She isn’t sure she can trust her husband to be there for her during the birth—physically, emotionally or otherwise. He’s kind of hard core,as she calls him. I’m not sure what she means by that. But it’s why she needs me there.

The next time I see Shelby is two days later. We meet again at the same coffee shop. This time I offer to buy her coffee, but she says no; she can’t stay. She’s jumpy. She brings the signed contract. She presses it into my hand. I take it. Both she and her husband have signed the document.

“You were able to get him on board,” I say, smiling.

“He had his reservations,” she says. Shelby doesn’t smile.

“Like what?”

She waits a beat before she tells me. “He thinks you’re a con. He thinks you’re ripping us off. He looked up people in your line of work. He wants to know why you charge so much. At first he said I was out of my damn mind if I thought we were going to pay that much for a babysitter.”

An image of her husband forms: cynical, candid, lacking trust.

I’ve been asked this question before. I’m not agency-based or hospital-based. I work alone, which is the reason my fees may be more than most. I provide services not everyone provides. You don’t get just any doula when you go into labor, dependent on who’s on call. You get me.

“He found one online that charged only three hundred dollars,” Shelby says. “But I said I didn’t want that one. I want you.”

“Why’s that?” I ask. Shelby doesn’t know me from a bar of soap. Why would she pick me over any other doula?

She shrugs. She smiles. “I like you,” she says. “But Jason said if I could talk you down to a thousand, that would be even better.”

“Talk me down to a thousand?”

“Or even eight hundred. I mean, he’s right. It’s a lot of money for one day of work.”

I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t like where this conversation is headed. It’s not one day of work. It’s a prenatal appointment, meetings like this, the labor and delivery, a postnatal visit, endless phone calls and texts. It’s also my livelihood, me putting my own life and family on hold for hers.

I don’t tell her that.

“I’m sorry, Shelby, but I don’t negotiate on my fees.”

Another shrug. Another smile, this one far more brazen. I get the sense that there’s more to this woman than I originally thought. For as nervous as she was the other day, there’s none of it today. Today she is assertive and sure. Which side of her am I to believe is true?

“Yeah, well,” she says, “it doesn’t matter. I got him on board either way, didn’t I?”

What I notice is that Shelby wears sunglasses, though we’re inside and outside the day is gloomy and gray.