11/08/2025
Dear new midwife,
You will never be fully ready for this work.
No number of births, no degree, no exam, no clinical hour will prepare you for the way this calling will split you wide open and remake you, again and again.
There is no course for what it means to witness the first breath-or the absence of it.
No manual for the way your hands will tremble when they first catch a baby, or when they don’t.
You will witness things no one warned you about.
The silence when a baby’s first cry does not come.
The birthing woman whose lifetime of unspoken trauma floods the room mid-labor.
The partner whose face turns away, unable to hold what’s unfolding.
The birth that unravels into loss, and the task of steadying your own grief while holding theirs.
You will be asked to carry far more than your hands can hold-
grief, terror, joy, the impossible weight of walking between life and death.
You will lose sleep.
You will doubt yourself.
You will wonder if you are built for this.
You will think of leaving.
And still-you will show up.
Because somewhere in the marrow of your bones, you’ll remember that this is not work you chose lightly.
It chose you.
And in those moments when you feel utterly unmade, birth will offer something back.
It will give you ordinary miracles so holy they will split your heart open.
A pair of tiny fingers wrapping around yours.
A birthing woman’s eyes locking with yours in that wild, unrepeatable moment when the world stands still.
The hush that falls in the room when a baby slips earthside, and for one breath, everything feels possible.
You’ll learn that birth was never meant to be controlled.
That you are not here to rescue anyone.
That your charge is not perfection, but presence.
To steady yourself in the storm,
to remember the way home when no one else can.
To carry the lineage of those who came before,
and to honor the birthing woman whose story you are being written into.
And yes-you will learn that sometimes the community of midwives is as hard as the work itself.
The sharp tongues.
The unspoken hierarchies.
The betrayals that come not from strangers, but from those you once called sister.
The grief of lateral violence wounds deeper than any public scrutiny.
But-and this matters-there is beauty too.
There are elders who will reach for you, when you think no one sees you drowning.
Midwives who will call you sister before you believe you’ve earned it.
Clients who will mark you forever, in ways they’ll never realize.
And moments when your hands will remember the ancient work they were made for.
So stay.
Not because it’s easy.
Not because it won’t break your heart.
But because it matters.
Because birth is sacred ground, and there is still room for you in this circle.
Because we need midwives who remember that it was never meant to be a business first, but a sacred trust.
A covenant between women.
A remembrance of the old ways.
Keep going, beloved midwife.
Because you were called.
And you are not alone.
With fierce love, blood-sister solidarity,
and the memory of standing exactly where you are now.
A midwife who remembers.
~Midwife Alyssa
For Those That Walk Between Worlds
