I believe that the decision to become a nurse-midwife had to do with it being in my genes. My mother was in maternity nursing, and then she went into newborn nursing and then into pediatrics. I know when she was pregnant with my second sister, she was working full time in a labor and delivery unit. She told me that the doctor actually had to take her out of the labor and delivery unit for a little while because she had so much sympathy with the mothers that she kept going into premature labor. Now, that tells you something about how dedicated she was.
I think I carried that on because the very first day I walked onto the maternity floor as a student nurse, I knew I had come home. I don't know how to explain it. I just knew that's where I was supposed to be. I loved being around birth. When I first became a midwife, I worked such long and hard hours, that I didn't have a chance to be away from it. Then, after about six years, I went away to study Spanish for about six weeks. When I returned, I noticed that there was this deep longing to be around birth again, that I had to do that. I just had to do it in order to build up the energy inside me. As I have grown older, I have begun to notice that if I do a lot of administrative office work and see the clients only in the office area and don't get a chance to be at birth, that I have to stop every now and then and be there. I don't necessarily have to do it anymore, but I have to be around the energy of birth. I somehow think that being a midwife is in my genes. It's actually inside me.
What I want people to know more than anything, is that I feel privileged, I feel blessed, I feel honored that I was able to know what my vocation was and to follow it - that it was truly a calling for me. It wasn't hard to become a midwife. It was easy. From nursing school, I graduated in the top quarter of the class, so I was smart enough, it's just that studying was something you had to go through to get there. When I was in midwifery school, I would spend hours studying. It was not drudgery because I loved the subjects so much. In midwifery school, it was like every day was a new discovery. Every day there was more to learn. There was some sense inside me, driving me, that as a midwife I would have responsibility for life and death in a new kind of way that I never had had before. I loved management. I loved being able to have something to say about how birth went and to create an atmosphere that made a wonderful, loving, birthing experience for a family. I always looked at my goal, where it was I wanted to be. So, I kept moving toward that goal and it always motivated me.
Within one year after graduation from midwifery school, I came to Texas, so my immediate exposure was to Hispanics. I was so touched, not only by the way they birthed, but also the way they thought about birth. It was truly a family matter. It was something where all of the women of the family came together to be present at birth. There was a huge cultural expectation to bear children, so, in giving birth, the mother was doing something she wanted to do and she was right within her culture to have babies. Hispanics consider the possession of land and the production of children, having big families, to be the base of their culture. Well, I was absolutely drawn to that. It was so wonderful to watch it and to see it flower and blossom. I also liked the idea that you could work with people to keep them healthy and normal. I came to the realization that I could direct - move things in a direction - where the mother herself could make good decisions, where she could come to some of the decisions that she needed to make in order to have a healthy baby. I wrote an article about three years after I was into midwifery practice, one of the few articles I ever wrote, and I talked about the fact that our program had such a low rate of premature babies and low birth weight babies. That hasn't changed. Here I am 25 years later, still practicing, helping mothers produce healthy babies, and still feeling that same way.
Birth centers came to be part of my practice because to me a birth center is the ideal place there is to practice. It's a home away from home. Its a place where you can keep the atmosphere in the totality that it needs to be, where birth can be the central focus. It's like setting up a set for a theater, so that you know exactly where people's eyes are supposed to go. Photography is that way. All of the arts are like that. Well, birthing is a lot like an art and you need to have a central place, where everything is focused on the mother and the birthing process and everything else moves away from it in concentric circles. That is exactly what a birth center did for me.
I practiced in a culture where people didn't know the words birth center. Centro de Maternidad simply meant a place where you went and had a baby, but they didn't think of that as a birth center, as such. Traditionally, Hispanic families did not have their babies at home. They had their babies at the home of the midwife. Every midwife maintained a room in her house or little rooms outside the house, a place in the back that would have a bathroom and a bedroom and so on. When a mother was ready to give birth, that's where she went to have her baby. So, when I began to work with the migrant clinic, they gave me a whole wing of a building they weren't using. It had a lot of small rooms in it. When we started Holy Family Services Birth Center, giving birth there wasn't foreign to them at all. They were coming to the place of the midwife to have their baby. In a lot of ways, you feel called to midwifery, but there's not only that call, there's a sense of growing into your vocation. I remember in the early days being almost awestruck because the children would come up and kiss my hands and that puzzled me and I would say, "No, no, no; don't do that." Their mothers would tell me, "Whenever we pass by your house, I always say to - Juan or Jose or Maria or Gloria or whatever the baby's name was - that is the home of your other mother. Those kinds of things help you to know that, as a midwife, you are something meaningful in your community.
Just recently, I was in a little fishing town called Port Mansfield. I came in from fishing, cleaned up and went to a little local restaurant to have dinner. Now this is a very small town and a lady got up from the table, came over and said, "Sister Angela? Do you remember me?" She then proceeded to introduce herself. She had said to the waitress, "That looks like Sister Angela." Now, this lady delivered probably 23 years ago and it was so wonderful to have her remember me. I never tire of that kind of affirmation of my work or of looking at babies.
People greet you after church. Just last Sunday, I was at the big shrine to the Virgin de San Juan here in the valley. It is a very religious place for many of our people. We were driving our vehicle with the Holy Family Services logo on the side and when we came out of the shrine, there was a lady with her four children standing by the side of the car. She said, "I had all four of my babies at Holy Family. I knew there would be somebody here I would recognize." She then pointed out which of the four children I personally had delivered.
I think that the birth center is a particularly wonderful place for me because it has been an amalgamation or a bringing together. It's a flowing together - like two rivers - of a life that I chose, to be dedicated to God and to give service to others. That service has been the Holy Family Services Birth Center. I have been able to join with a lot of other people, not only other midwives, but other nurses and outreach workers and all kinds of people to try to make this possible, so that the life I live and the work I do are one. If you can come to that as you enter into the more silver years of your life, then there's really a sense of fulfillment. I know that I will know when its time not to do this full time anymore. I am perfectly ready to have my life taken and to return to the Lord because I have done well. I have done well in what I've tried to do not because I did it, but because by the grace of God, I've been Gods instrument to make good things happen. I have a real sense of accomplishment and a sense of realization about a lot of things — especially that God runs the universe and we're simply here to do our part.
I really believe that you can do a little thing well and it will make a big difference in the long term, and that just seeing your example can influence people. I watch other midwives and young nurses develop and change. I watch my own staff be able to get more education, change their positions, do more than they could do before, to make the best of themselves, just as I have been given those opportunities. I was given those opportunities so that I could become not just a good midwife, but an excellent midwife. All I can do now is say, "Thank you, Lord, thank you for these opportunities that You and You alone gave me." I think that if I were to say any last words, it would be that I want my gravestone to read, "Here lies a nurse-midwife who had the good fortune of knowing what her vocation was and God gave her the grace and energy to fulfill it.