Articles by Meghan Simkins

A 2009 – 2010 Acumen Fund Fellow, Meghan is currently working with LifeSpring, a growing network of affordable maternal and child healthcare hospitals in India. She has a background in public health and business administration. Meghan also holds a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University.

Cross Posted on India: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

As I mentioned in a previous post on my personal blog, one of the best things about working at LifeSpring is the fact that whenever you are feeling a bit low you can go two floors down and check in on new mothers and their babies, the clients of the hospital.

The past Saturday, as I was trying to leave the hospital (due to local political agitation), I had the wonderful opportunity to see a new mother and child, whom I watched delivered through a C-section recently. The mother and her child had returned to LifeSpring for a post-surgical checkup.

An older woman, who I would soon learn is the young mother’s own mother, immediately handed the newborn to me. She looked so much better and was beautiful in every sense of the word. She had grown a full head of hair, and looked so gentle. Perhaps the most interesting or amazing thing about her was the way she slept, with such intention. Having never been around a newborn, I have never realized how intently they sleep, as if sleeping is their only job on earth. Her little hands were clenched in tight fists and as I looked at her I couldn’t help but sort of fall in love with the little thing. She was spectacular.

I turned to the mother, “she is beautiful.”

The mother solemnly replied, “she is?”

“Yes, she is looking so healthy and happy,” I said.

The mother then looked at me and said, “No one has come to see her - my husband and his family refuse to see her because they are angry and upset she is a girl.”

I was astounded and shocked. I simply had no idea how to reply. What do you say? All I could think was here is this perfect little human being, who is, thus far, unmarked by life. But then I thought, is she really?

Coming from the Western world, I was once again forced to swallow the reality of my own privileges. In India, the male child is still favored outright. He eats before any female children, he goes to school before them, and he is valued more than the female children in every other respect. End of story. And this gender bias is a major catalyst for certain malnutrition problems women face. It is also a major factor in many other social woes. In India, it is illegal (at least on paper) to have any test performed which identifies the sex of the child, because of the ever present risk of female infanticide.

And these thoughts don’t even touch on the way it must feel to be the mother of the child, who is a female herself and the mother of the child.

As I am holding this dear baby, I can’t help but think how ridiculous this whole notion is, and all I can wonder about is how this cultural-social bias still exists, even though I fully understand why it exists, and the history behind it.

I continue to hold the child and just say, “she is happy and healthy and that is what matters.” But now I sort of feel like a fraud because, clearly, this is not all that matters. In fact, what matters most is that she is a girl.

The mother slowly dabs away of couple of tears and just remains still, eerily quiet. She is neither disagreeing nor agreeing with me. She is just there - she is just stuck here, a week after major surgery, with an infant no one feels is good enough.

“Is this your first baby?”

“Yes.”

“Will you have another?”

“I don’t’ know,” she shrugs as she looks away from me.

As she looks away, she puts her hand on top of mine, and I turn to her and say, “it will be okay.”

And, honestly, from that moment forward to the moment I find myself writing these words, I have been thinking about that coy little phrase: “it will be okay.” Here I am, white, educated, free and female. So who am I to say this, so palliatively and comfortingly? In reality, it might very well not be okay. And it is not okay now, at this moment. This mother has been abandoned, thus far, by the father of her child. She has been made to feel inadequate, unworthy and shamed. This child I am holding, so small and gentle, has hardly begun life and yet she has already been condemned to a certain sad reality: she is female.

I don’t know why I said “it will be okay.” The more I think about it, the more I begin to believe that I said it more for myself than for this mother.

Each year as part of their training in New York, the new class of Acumen Fund fellows is sent out into the city armed only with a $6 metro card, a $5 bill, and their IDs. Their mission is to experience the challenges of obtaining basic services with these meager, minimal resources; in the course of the day, they stand in soup kitchens, visit shelters, and attempt access to medical care. Over the next week, we will be sharing their experiences on our blog. The last entry in this series comes from Meghan Simkins.

After training, Meghan will work with LifeSpring, a growing network of affordable maternal and child healthcare hospitals in India. She has a background in public health and business administration. Meghan holds a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University.

“He’s just so heavy, isn’t he?” the young mother says to me as she looks solemnly at the wailing child in the stroller in front of her. His fists are clenched and his two front teeth, the only in his mouth, do little to modulate his scream, directed right at us. I look carefully at her and wonder if her question is a rhetorical or literal one – or if it is both at once.

The emergency room we are waiting in is full and the lines seem only to be metastasizing, threatening to burst, not unlike like the feral will of the wailing child between us.

“Did you try the pediatric ER, it might be quicker” I ask?

She soberly nods her head, replying, with no small amount of resignation, “yeah, they sent me here because his fever is so high. Now I’ll have to wait here for the nurse. And then move to the next line. Then finally a real appointment. I’ll be waiting all day.” She sighs, aggrieved in a mild way, though with little expressed shock. Clearly she’s been in this position before.

My first instinct is to feel bad for her plight, to pity her. Yes, my first instinct is to pity this young woman, and to pity her suffering, shrieking, toothless son. I feel like I should pity the circumstances that have led her to this burdensome position, in an ER with a child ‘so heavy,’ and a wait so taxing.

I feel pity because this is exactly what I have been taught to think. My response to her is by this point almost conditioned, reflexive. Whether or not I had ever encountered a situation such hers in person, her story was utterly familiar. Whether I had read about young single mothers without health insurance in school, heard tales about women such as her as a kind of grave warning growing up, or somewhere else entirely, I am sure that I have heard her story before. And I realize waiting here with this real young mother, no longer just a story, case, or class, but flesh and blood and screaming child, that I had been taught to react with some form of condemnation.

“Well, you should have known better before you got yourself into this situation,” I faintly hear myself saying, suddenly aware of my own judgmental inner voice. I have heard her story and I have been taught to react with a stream of stinging “you should have known betters.” Of course, the ultimate judgment is about me: I knew better than you and now I’m not in your situation.

The boy continues to thrash about screaming, increasingly impatient, uncomfortable, and ill.

“May I touch him too see how hot he is?” I ask.

“Yea, sure,” the young mother replies.

I bend over and gently touch his head with the palm of my hand. The boy is hot, very hot. As if spurred on by my touch, the young mother picks the child up into her arms and caringly nestles him against her shoulder. Soothed almost instantly, he quickly quiets.

With the child pacified, the young mother seems to relax. A kind of ease comes over her – an ease bearing the mark of both routine and talent. She’s done this before and she does it well. In the place of the resignation that earlier pervaded, I begin to notice a certain resilience, determination, even pride in her and in her child. She smiles at me and offers a slight nod; she seems encouraged, bolstered by the skill with which she had provided succor to her sick child. With her nod she also encourages me. She has encouraged me to step outside my conditioned, judgmental assumptions, and my pity. I start to see her differently, as skilled, talented, and dignified. Perhaps it is the new, relaxed silence between us or perhaps it is the way my palm still feels the heat from her son’s forehead.

I start to notice her manicured nails, each with a miniature and vibrant design – a personal statement so foreign to me, but so alluring. I notice her immaculate cleanliness and the precise care she clearly takes in her self-presentation. Her hair, I notice, is skillfully swept away from forehead and more sophisticated by far than the ponytail I have sloppily swept mine into. Her jewelry, though minimal, is well thought out and tasteful. Here also, I start to really realize, is her own dignity. As she stands in line surrounded by impatient, ill people she does not know, with a sick, crying, ‘so heavy’ child, this young mother sends an unmistakable statement both to herself and to me: I have dignity. Hers is a conscious choice; there is nothing incidental about it.

Dignity is elusive. We often find ourselves speaking of it, but seeing it in real life, in unexpected places like a street or a crowded ER is a different experience altogether. Dignity is about retaining one’s essential humanity by making choices that at times might seem less than essential but on which one’s sense of self rests. It is about boldly maintaining one’s identity precisely in the spaces where identity is often lost, even stolen through a series institutional indignities. This young woman forced me to remember her, to share her story here. Not because she represented a human being behind another sad statistic and not because she had a screaming baby. I remember her and share her story because of the care with which she painted her nails and styled hair. I remember her for the proud way in which she looked at me while holding her child. And I remember her for the skilled, seemingly effortless way she brought her sick child comfort while waiting on an interminable line. I remember her because she did all of this while retaining a strong, unmistakable sense of self. Her dignity made her memorable.