Educated

to stand next to her and watch, so I could say, “You already added the
lobelia. Next is the blue vervain.”
Mother began to doubt whether she would ever midwife again, and while
she was saddened by this, Dad was devastated. His face sagged every time
Mother turned a woman away. “What if I have a migraine when she goes into
labor?” she told him. “What if I can’t remember what herbs I’ve given her, or
the baby’s heart rate?”
In the end it wasn’t Dad who convinced Mother to midwife again. She
convinced herself, perhaps because it was a part of herself she couldn’t
surrender without some kind of struggle. That winter, she midwifed two
babies that I remember. After the first she came home sickly and pale, as if
bringing that life into the world had taken a measure of her own. She was
shut in the basement when the second call came. She drove to the birth in
dark glasses, trying to peer through the waves distorting her vision. By the
time she arrived the headache was blinding, pulsing, driving out all thought.
She locked herself in a back room and her assistant delivered the baby. After
that, Mother was no longer the Midwife. On the next birth, she used the bulk
of her fee to hire a second midwife, to supervise her. Everyone was
supervising her now, it seemed. She had been an expert, an uncontested
power; now she had to ask her ten-year-old daughter whether she’d eaten
lunch. That winter was long and dark, and I wondered if sometimes Mother
was staying in bed even when she didn’t have a migraine.
At Christmas, someone gave her an expensive bottle of blended essential
oils. It helped her headaches, but at fifty dollars for a third of an ounce, we
couldn’t afford it. Mother decided to make her own. She began buying single,
unmixed oils—eucalyptus and helichrysum, sandalwood and ravensara—and
the house, which for years had smelled of earthy bark and bitter leaves,
suddenly smelled of lavender and chamomile. She spent whole days blending
oils, making adjustments to achieve specific fragrances and attributes. She
worked with a pad and pen so she could record every step as she took it. The
oils were much more expensive than the tinctures; it was devastating when
she had to throw out a batch because she couldn’t remember whether she’d
added the spruce. She made an oil for migraines and an oil for menstrual
cramps, one for sore muscles and one for heart palpitations. In the coming
years she would invent dozens more.
To create her formulas, Mother took up something called “muscle testing,”
which she explained to me as “asking the body what it needs and letting it