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I WASN’T THE ONLY ONE whose feet were searching for solid ground. For six months after the car accident, Mother had improved steadily and we’d thought she would fully recover. The headaches had become less frequent, so that she was shutting herself in the basement only two or three days a week. Then the healing had slowed. Now it had been nine months. The headaches persisted, and Mother’s memory was erratic. At least twice a week she’d ask me to cook breakfast long after everyone had eaten and the dishes had been cleared. She’d tell me to weigh a pound of yarrow for a client, and I’d remind her that we’d delivered the yarrow the day before. She’d begin mixing a tincture, then a minute later couldn’t remember which ingredients she’d added, so that the whole batch had to be tossed. Sometimes she would ask me 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 answer.” Mother would say to herself, aloud, “I have a migraine. What will make it better?” Then she would pick up a bottle of oil, press it to her chest and, with her eyes closed, say, “Do I need this?” If her body swayed forward it meant yes, the oil would help her headache. If her body swayed backward it meant no, and she would test something else.
As she became more skilled, Mother went from using her whole body to only her fingers. She would cross her middle and index fingers, then flex slightly to try to uncross them, asking herself a question. If the fingers remained entwined that meant yes; if they parted it was no. The sound produced by this method was faint but unmistakable: each time the pad of her middle finger slipped across the nail of her index, there was a fleshy click.
Mother used muscle testing to experiment with other methods of healing. Diagrams of chakras and pressure points appeared around the house, and she began charging clients for something called “energy work.” I didn’t know what that meant until one afternoon when Mother called me and Richard into the back room. A woman named Susan was there. Mother’s eyes were closed and her left hand was resting on Susan’s. The fingers on her other hand were crossed, and she was whispering questions to herself. After a few she turned to the woman and said, “Your relationship with your father is damaging your kidneys. Think of him while we adjust the chakra.” Mother explained that energy work is most effective when several people are present. “So we can draw from everyone’s energy,” she said. Mother pointed to my forehead and told me to tap the center, between my eyebrows, while with my other hand I was to grab Susan’s arm. Richard was to tap a pressure point on his chest while reaching out to me with his other hand, and Mother was to hold a point in her palm while touching Richard with her foot. “That’s it,” she said as Richard took my arm. We stood in silence for ten minutes, a human chain.