She writes in the ten minutes between one delivery and the next, in a notebook that fits in her coat pocket. The entries are short. A name, a weight, a line about the mother. Sometimes only a word.
The statistics we report are true, but they are not this. They cannot hold the woman who walked two hours in labour, or the grandmother who held a torch so the midwife could see. The notebook holds them, one line at a time.
We asked if we could share a few pages. She agreed, on one condition: that we not turn her work into a tragedy. It is not a tragedy, she said. It is a shift, and then another shift, and a reason to come back.
I write their names so that if the day is hard, I remember the day was also full. Every line is someone who lived.
Leila, midwife
There is no neat ending to a notebook still being written. There is only the next entry, and the woman who will fill it — and the work that continues because she keeps returning to it.
