Joni speaks of that birth with a marked reverence.  “It was so exquisite,” she says, a wide smile opening across her face.  It had been a hot, dry summer.  On a day it clouded over and threatened to rain, Joni woke knowing she would have her baby.  “I got everything ready,” she says.  She boiled the tools she would need, set out the dental floss, her hemostats, her scissors.  

Childbirth education, Joni tells me, is about control.  It’s about telling a woman to be quiet, to be still, to be well-behaved.  “I learned to be without that,” she says, “I just let the baby come through me.  It feels within you like instinct.  It feels like a knowing.”  Her hands dance around each other and glide toward her uterus, as if guiding an infant down her birth canal.  Joni remembers feeling her baby fill her completely.  She did not have the urge to push.  When Quail crowned, Joni reached between her legs and touched the top of her baby’s head.  “On the next one, be ready,” she told her child.  And then, a moment later:  “Hello, baby,” when her new daughter came into the world.    

It is particularly poignant that we are talking today about birth.  A year ago Joni and her apprentice, Kate, delivered my closest friend’s first baby.  I was present for the birth, recorded as an official “assist” in the midwives’ records.  Nothing would have prepared me for the intensity of my participation.  I sat on the arm of a futon as my friend Jenny, naked and on all fours below me, grabbed my hands and ground her head into my crotch through some of her most intense contractions.  She roared into them with an utterly unselfconscious voice.  She smelled like sweat and like something, to this day, I cannot identify.  I had never seen a baby being born and was awed by the simple and miraculous fact of a living person emerging from another.  I remember meeting Joni’s eyes and knowing she recognized my astonishment.  

Jenny, through the wildness of birthing her daughter, remembers Joni’s presence.  “Joni brought so much wisdom with her,” Jenny told me later.  “I remember some of the most intense moments, looking into Joni’s eyes and seeing.”  No examination was performed that day, and the midwives never checked Jenny’s dilation.  “She just let me have my baby,” says Jenny.  And Jenny was as loud as she needed to be.  “Joni always emphasized the fact that labor isn’t quiet,” Jenny says, “‘It’s okay if you’re screaming,’ she’d tell me.” 

So much of Joni’s approach to midwifery centers on empowering a woman to both find -- and lose -- herself in childbirth.   She won’t say “push now,” or “you should be breathing like this.”  And she’ll never, ever say “we need your feet in these stirrups.” Jenny was squatting on the floor when she delivered her daughter, Ronja.  Afterwards, she sat on the futon with her husband and nursed her child.  Joni had reached into Jenny and removed the placenta, which lay in a mixing bowl at Jenny’s feet.  Joni stuck her hand and a flashlight inside the amniotic sac to show everyone its sunset burst of colors – pinks, purples, yellows, all in pearly translucence.  That night, the newborn slept between her parents. 

Joni’s is a seemingly impossible craft to put a price on, but this is how she makes her living.  Her rates, though, are whatever her clients can afford.  She often trades her services with people who cannot afford her at all.  Sometimes she receives payments from clients years after they’ve had their babies.  It wasn’t always this way.  To support what she calls her “midwifery habit” when she was newer in the craft, Joni worked a variety of jobs: house cleaner, telemarketer, waitress, personal assistant to a developmentally disabled person. 

When I arrived at her house, Joni was interviewing a potential client, a man whose partner is pregnant.  The man emphasized that he and his partner wanted the birth to be a “spiritual, conscious experience.”   Joni might not have considered contradicting him at that moment, but she believes that consciousness flies out the window during birth.  “Birth is your experience of divine chaos,” she says.  “Birth is your own Big Bang theory.”  Birth is so raw, Joni says, so real.  It is as if a woman is balancing on a fine edge between two possibilities – to bring life into the world, or to die trying.  

No one under Joni’s care has died trying, but there have been rare instances when she had to resuscitate an infant.  When Joni sees one of these children months later (all of them have been healthy), her breasts begin to swell.  “We are just animals,” she says. “We are all just animals.”