I think the most important thing that happened to me in my life is having my son Douglas. I was very fortunate because I had an obstetrician who encouraged my husband to be a part of the experience. As a result we had a labor together and a delivery together and even in 1959, when Douglas was born, we were permitted to stay in the delivery room for an hour after the birth took place so that we could bond with Doug. We were left alone as a threesome. The nurse was a good nurse, watching carefully what went on. She gave me a partial bath right there on the table and showed me how to breastfeed and encouraged me to do that. This was very unusual and I am grateful to the obstetrician for offering this to us. It is interesting to me that there were midwives on staff at the hospital where I gave birth but they were not permitted to function during the intrapartum period. I had very good teachers for my prenatal education (Betty Hosford and Vera Keen), but midwifery was not given full status even though the hospital had rooming-in, which was a great advance. I was permitted to keep Doug in the room with me for longer periods of time but I was not in the actual rooming-in unit.
Douglas was very much a wanted baby. We had tried for four years before he had appeared on the scene. After my experience of having him, I began to think that my career in medical surgical nursing was not really the place where I could give the most to families, and to the people that I was serving. So, I began to think about maternity care and on one of my postpartum visits to my obstetrician he suggested to me that I go into midwifery. I said, "What's that?" I knew nothing about midwifery. I'd heard nothing about it in my experience as a nurse. So he encouraged me to call Maternity Center. I did and I spoke to Aileen Hogan there. In turn I was referred to the Columbia Program which Kitty Ernst was running at the time. Kitty gave me of herself, which she always does with wanderers trying to find their way. She spent a long time on the phone with me and finally concluded that, since I already had a master's degree in nursing, it would be the most sensible thing to for me to enter the MCA Program, which was a certificate program. She was running the Columbia Program - which was a Masters Program. So once again, selflessly, she sent me off to what would be the best for me and not what would be the best for her program, in the sense that she would have another enrolled student.
So, I enrolled in the Maternity Center Association Program. There were six of us in the class. There were two of us who had basic diploma nursing. One of us had a bachelor's degree when entering the program and then the other three already had masters in some other area of nursing.
When I reported that first day we had our meetings at the house on 92nd Street, where Maternity Center was located from 1952 until 1995. And then the second day, we went out to the county to meet the rest of the clinical faculty and to be shown the rest of the facility. One of those instructors was Edith Baldwin, known now to everybody as Edie Wonnell. I remember Edie very well because she came across as a very calm and supportive person. After we had our tour and instruction we went to a local coffee shop just to have a little social time together. Well, the discussion, of course, centered on the experiences that we had all had in maternity and, in my case, the experience of becoming a mother.
Edie did something very important for me, although she didn't understand it. We were just talking in general and she mentioned that she thought that a primagravida posterior labor was the worst labor that you could have. Well, that was the kind of labor that I had had. I always felt a little as though I had not done a good job at it because it took me so long and also because of a chance remark that the obstetrician made to me the morning after Douglas was born. The doctor had said, "I bet you're very glad that this isn't 24 hours before." Women can be so sensitive, and his remark made me think "Oh I must not have done a good job in that labor." It was a very long labor. It started on a Tuesday evening with my water breaking. Contractions did not start until the following evening but he was not born actually until Friday morning and after a use of Pitocin. So Edie reassured me and wiped that slate very clean, making me feel good about myself and my behavior in labor, and my abilities as a laboring woman and a woman giving birth. That was a very important thing to me.
It's interesting how Kitty Ernst and Edie Wonnell started out with me and have continued through the years being part of what we all want for women, and for families, which is an empowering experience.