ABSTRACT
Although I had been a midwife for about five years before having this experience, I don’t think I had really understood what being a midwife was truly about until then. I had been drawn to midwifery because of the autonomy of the role and the fact that its focus was not illness. In my early years of practice, exclusively in a large maternity hospital, I found that autonomy hard to realise. In addition, although everyone talked about normal birth, most of what I saw and experienced was not normal. I was living with considerable dissonance and, during those years, my practice was mostly about resistance to the biomedical model and the steady accumulation of physiological birth skills within the relative privacy of the birth room. That prepared me for the opportunity outlined above.
