Fiona is always on me about learning the old stories. If you want to read many variations of familiar and even unheard-of tales, go to D. L. Ashliman’s Electronic folk texts at http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html . 

This week I read about midwives, those who are called out to attend the birth of a fairy child. In each story, one of two things happen:

 1) the midwife is counseled to ask for the floor sweepings or is given a load of coal for her trouble. When she gets home, the payment is in gold. Sometimes she is wise enough to get it all home, and other times she has thrown most of it away only to discover her loss when she gets home.

2) the fairy mother has the midwife rub the child with an ointment as soon as it is cleaned up, and the midwife gets  a bit of the ointment in her eye. Then later when she is at the open market, she sees the fairies stealing from the booths. When she cries out and they realize she can see them, they blind her in that eye.

Now I don’t see any great psychological message in these stories, but maybe you do. It does remind me of the equivalent of the mafia don having someone rubbed out because he or she saw too much.

The fairies, however, only take the sight of the eye that can see them.  Apparently the ointment both makes them invisible and reveals them to those who have treated their eyes. I do wonder how many of us turn a blind eye to the magic in the world and just refuse to look at it, perhaps for fear of seeing how often we are victimized by thefts–as in the case of the fairies–or if there is other magic we just don’t look at.

Midwifery is probably the third-oldest profession, after prostitution and pimping. It is a field of much knowledge that is arcane to many of us who “don’t know nothing about birthin’ no babies” even if we have birthed one or two ourselves. The midwife does her best to stand between the delivering mother and death.  Something the “right to life” crowd does not understand is that birthing a baby is dangerous to the health of the mother. So is abortion, of course, which the “pro choice” crowd seems to ignore. Then there are the anti-vasectomists….all those poor little sperms!  Any way you look at it, sex is dangerous.  There’s a magic this culture does not want to consider very deeply.

Not so many women die in childbirth these days now that doctors have learned to wash their hands and keep things in the delivery room clean, but that was once not the case, unless a midwife was there to help.  Perhaps that is why there are so very many step-mothers in the fairy tales to start with.

Maybe the real story is infant mortality. My author lives in a state (SC) that has an infant mortality rate that rivals Latvia and Costa Rica, so I’ll think about that when helping my clients get together. There are lots of stories about evil mothers-in-law trying to do away with the new princess’s offspring.  The midwives are likely to know more than they are telling about that.

I know that at least one of my clients, Vivienne, will soon be in a family way if she has not accomplished that task already, and I wonder what sort of midwife she will need, given the nature of her siginificant other.  Daisy too, and perhaps Ashleigh, by the time the second part of my story comes out. 

 I wonder where one can get a handful of that invisibility ointment, and if one can manage not to see something that is supposed to be invisible?

Comments are welcome!