I’m a little shamefaced when I look at the date of my last post and realize it’s been over 2 months, and that in that time, we’ve read two books and had two meetings, and the blog, well, the blog says it’s still May.  It’s so not.

Let’s dig in and talk about the Birth House. The inspiration for the book came when the author, Ami McKay moved into a historic Scots Bay, Nova Scotia house. During its renovation it was discovered that the house was once the home of a local midwife, and had served as a sort of maternity house at the turn of the 20th century. A story began to take shape in McKay’s mind. Her protagonist, Dora Rare, is the first daughter in five generations of Rare families, and the middle child in a family of six boys. Dora was born with a caul – a sort of membrane over her face, which, depending on whom to believe, made her either very lucky, or a witch. Her community tended towards the latter, and as a teen, she finds friendship in another social outsider, the local midwife, Marie Babineau. Dora’s tired mother, at a loss for what to do with her daughter, decides to apprentice her to Miss Babineau, and Dora begins her education. A doctor moves to town and the battle begins between the old ways of delivering babies and caring for women, and “modern” medicine. Dora agrees to an arranged marriage, and Miss Babineau disappears, leaving Dora with a midwifery book and a rapidly disintegrating marriage.These events in a small Maritime town are set against a backdrop of World War I, the Halifax Explosion, the Spanish Flu Epidemic and the Great Boston Molasses Disaster.

Our discussion centred around some of the major themes in the book, namely about women’s reproductive and life choices. It was somewhat surprising to learn that women did have methods for preventing, spacing and ending pregnancies even when their choices for education, marriage and career were so severely limited. We wondered about the female characters in the book and their aversion to Miss Babineau. She was the person they ran to for help and advice, and yet these very women would avert their eyes and cross the street to avoid her in public. We were bothered by Dora’s reluctance to leave her husband because she wanted a baby, but it was at times easy to forget that Dora was still a teen herself. Some of the characters in the story were disturbing, such as poor Experience Ketch and her evil husband, Dora’s hypocritical Aunt Fran, and of course, the newcomer Dr Gilbert Thomas, with his promises of modernity and painless childbirth. I for one, felt at times that I was being hit over the head with the conflict between Marie Babineau/Dora and Dr. Gilbert.  He is ultimately revealed to be a greedy, unscrupulous and incompetent man, but I did wonder how I might have felt about him and this unending (and still current) debate had he been portrayed as a more kind-hearted doctor who honestly believed he was helping these women. Using his character as a strawman for the money-grubbing and insensitive medical industry diverts attention from the fact that maternal and infant mortality rates have fallen significantly in the last 100 years, in no small measure due to advances in medicine. It is also true that the medical industry has not always been, and is still not sensitive to the needs of women, however, we all agreed that there is much to be learned from each side of what sometimes appears to be a manufactured divide between the old ways and the new.

One of the interesting things about the book was its format.  It is a compilation of storytelling, diary entries, newspaper clippings and advertisements, invitations, and old-wives recipes from the Willow Book. It gave the book a sort of scrapbook appeal which made it that much more intriguing. We all had a good chuckle about the advertisement for the cure for “hysteroneurasthenic disorders” (the White Cross Battery Powered Vibrator), and laughed even more when someone mentioned that she had seen one for sale at the Beaumont Antique Mill in the Glen.

We enjoyed the book’s epilogue, and knowing how life had turned out for Dora and the other characters in the book.  We liked that Dora lived life on her terms, with her daughter, her career, and especially with Hart. 

The discussion that evening seemed the perfect setting for a frank discussion with one of our members who is going through a struggle of her own. Thank you, G, for your candor and openness, and for letting us ask you questions. We are all thinking of you, and look forward to seeing you at the table at our next meeting.

“To my mind, a miracle is that something that could go one way or another.  The fact that something happens, when by all rights it shouldn’t, is what makes us take notice, it’s what saints are made of, it takes the breath away. How a mother comes to love her child, her caring at all for this thing that’s made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that made her wish she were dead….that’s the miracle.”  from Ami McKay’s the Birth House