Moms Book Club to the Rescue!

Our exciting 3rd selection for our Project Motherhood Book Club readers!

Editor’s Post by Deborah Hetrick Catanese

Can it still be January? Aren’t we done with this breezy, freezy, sleazy month yet?

Are you going stir-crazy like I am? Of course you are, so what better time to pick up a good book and turn your back on what is going on outside the windows?!

Our next Moms Book Club selection is a fantastic read: Ms. Jennifer Worth’s Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times. Keeping our pattern of alternating non-fiction with fiction, we turn to a true account of a woman who, in her younger years of the 1950’s, worked as a midwife in one of the most poverty ridden areas of post war London. The tenements in the Docklands of London’s East End had been damaged by bombs, yet still provided housing, both for rats and for poor families, all living there in close proximity, often too close. These tough, mostly Cockney people might have been struggling, but they held onto a tenacious determination to raise their heads and lift their hopes high. And where are hopes and dreams encapsulated more than in pregnancy and childbirth?

The author is our personal eyewitness to one slice of the incredible drama the western world was living through then, as everyone tried to pull themselves out from under the atrocities of the war. Our author’s view is that of a young woman working out of the neighborhood nunnery, learning how to refine her nursing skills in order to provide good pre- and post-natal care to poor, pregnant women. And, by serving these women and their families, she found her way into her patients’ stories and became part of their childbirth dramas, as she spent hours and sometimes days helping them deliver their babies at home.

The first book of a trilogy, all of which deal with the astonishing variety of situations Ms. Worth was sucked into, has been made into a PBS series, called “Midwives”. Some of you who have watched the series will surely want more of the details that can be found in the book. Others will want to start watching the show after you read this poignant, historical, and sometimes jaw-dropping book (check out the story of the woman who bore more than 20 children, all to one husband, but they did not share the same language. Since they could not understand a single word the other spoke, this might explain everything, lol!)

Not only did I like the attention grabbing aspect of this book for our winter survival plan for our Moms Book Club, but I also liked that it ties into Allison’s post about “The Business of Being Born”. Since the medical and technical sides of childbirth during Post War times were vastly different than today’s delivery options and pressures, I am certain it will serve as a stunning eye-opener for our younger readers. Yet, I am also quite sure that every mother reading this book will be instantly drawn in by the overwhelming similarities…the pain, the fear, and the love that rains upon us as we bear our children and how we are swept by those waters into a new life.

When I picked up the book, I was immediately taken by the Preface, where the author describes her motivation for writing:

“…Fictional doctors grace the pages of books in droves, scattering pearls of wisdom as they pass. Nurses, good and bad, are by no means absent. But midwives? Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all. Why then does she remain a shadowy figure, hidden behind the delivery room door? …I accepted the challenge [of giving midwives their place in literature], and took up my pen.”

After reading Ms. Worth’s reasons for writing this book for yourself, I’m sure you’re ready to join our great escape into amazing stories of other mothers before us, stories that will surely help us survive at least a snow squall or seven.

Please send along your thoughts and comments as you immerse yourself into Ms. Worth’s world!  We will have a Moms Book Club Discussion Post on February 24th when we will bandy our ideas about. Til then, warm reading!

Fashionably yours,

Deborah