Cambodia- while I was becoming a midwife and mother

While I was becoming a mother

I was not present at the birth of all of my children.  It is true that I carried some inside me and pushed them out in a state of trance like ecstasy and held them to my breast for many years as they learned to first walk  into the world.  These children, with skin and features like my own were born of a long line of ancestors who they themselves had wandered the world as hunters, gatherers, immigrants and later farmer, merchant and soldier

As a midwife, I would say to women in labor, “all over the world women are giving birth just like you. “  I liked to say this as a way of providing some sort of universal support for her efforts but I had no idea what that meant I remembered feeling the mother spirit with me at my own births; that feeling of a hundred million mothers all over the world whispering welcome in the air around me.

I first pushed a baby out into the world in the spring of 1970.   My college years had been marked with protests against the Vietnam War and a few days after the birth, before my milk had fully come in, protestors were killed at nearby Kent State University and the word Cambodia came into focus for many people in the United States.   I was a new, young mother with very few resources and no idea what I should do.   I was no longer free to move about and protest.  I was a mother and this new baby needed tending.   I had no television or internet and so what I knew was spotty at best.  Still I was firmly opposed to the bombing of Cambodia even if I had no idea what I was talking about or what was being bombed. I lumped Vietnam and Cambodia together with no idea how very different their leaders were.  

My oldest Cambodian son was born in 1963.  I was a freshman in high school and President Kennedy had just been assassinated.  He was born in the province where I am staying now in Cambodia.  We drive by the burnt down frame of a house where his father was a tailor;  a home they shared with many people  on the way to the mountain top temples.  Behind it is a lake and flooded lands where he too fished and caught crabs for an afternoon snack.  At the time of his birth,  the Cuban incident and bomb shelters and Sputnik were all on the minds of my country.  We were taught the domino theory without exactly being taught that the French had already used this to capture one Indochinese country after the other including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.   The people there were already weary of western colonization and the constant threats from Thailand, China and Vietnam over land and resources.    Countries who had fought for centuries became allies against US forces. By the time of Kent State and the time of my first birth,  my son in Cambodia was fleeing his rural province and moving to Phnom Penh.    His province, like many, were being taken over by the Khmer Rogue.   All over the country small villages were already being terrorized by the local cells of Phal Pot.  

In 1970, the year I first gave birth, the United States and south Vietnam invaded southern Cambodia to drive out the Khmer Rogue under the leadership of General Lon Noi who had overthrown pro Communist president ( and former King )    The former movie star king went to China where he and the Chinese government supported the Khmer Rogue.  Decades before we  would hear about Phal Pot marching into Phnom Penh, my Cambodian children were packing up and fleeing the Khmer Rogue as well as US bombs.   They ran, like thousands of other Cambodian families from place to place leaving work, homes and a way of life behind.

In 1973, my daughter was born in the north near the Ho Chi Minh trail.  Her house was spared the bombs but it is surrounded by the burnt down skeletons of trees hit by bombs.   The red clay pots of her mother’s bean sprout business that were quickly left behind, remain where she left them in the back yard.  

I had not understood that the Vietcong and the Khmer Rogue had become partners against the United States and when we stopped fighting the Vietcong and all our troops came home, we left my children to the Khmer Rogue who killed their parents and grandparents and most of their brothers and sisters. 

In the time they were running around the jungle trying to survive, I like many protesters in the US had retreated.  I started a rural commune dedicated to social change and simple living.  I volunteered in the local prison, worked to support farm workers and became a Head Start director.   We told ourselves that the problem had been that we had not figured out how to live ourselves and then had interfered in southeast Asia.  We grew organic food and started food co-ops.  I sewed clothing from old bed spreads and we all started to recycle. 

In 1975, when my daughter was just three, a friend told me that the Khmer Rogue had invaded Cambodia and was forcing everyone out of the city.  I always remembered that I was kneeling down and planting seeds and I looked up and shrugged.  If they wanted to become a rural, peasant society that was their right.  I cringe when I think of that moment. I did not stand up or go to town and buy a paper.  I planted my garden and later made bread while my children were being taken by train to the north; separated from their families, starved and constantly presented with the possibility of being killed.

In 1977, when I had my second baby at home, Phal Pot had become the prime minister and it would be still another year before Vietnam would invade and stop the war.  At that time, I was a Head Start director and was coming to understand Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.  My focus was on a poor New Jersey neighborhood and the mothers who drank when they were pregnant and whose children were so wounded by the time they made their way to our center.   In this way I began to consider pregnancy and birth and to attend births with the mothers there and to begin my path to being a midwife.  

By the time my third baby was born, Phal Pot and the Khmer Rogue had fled to China and Thailand and the northern regions of Cambodia.  Famine spread throughout the country.   My children, orphaned, made their way to Thailand, over land mines and without food, to the refugee camps where they lived and one day were put on a plane and sent to me where they joined the children I had given birth to as well as other children of that war to make a big, crazy, loving, wounded, smart, ball bouncing, rice cooking family.  

In those days I was a busy midwife, soccer coach and mother.  I listed to their stories but in time they faded as they learned English, played soccer, did homework, got their first jobs, fell in love and started their own families. 

It would be many years, many books and several trips to Camboda before I could begin to comprehend their childhoods. Every mother wants to protect their children.   From the moment they first kick, within us, we feel waves of warmth and care, but I sit here 40 years later and  think where was I and what was I doing while these now grown children were running around this country trying to survive the very people who I had, with so much ignorance supported.  Why was it such a mess? 

People say all the time, “ why didn’t anyone help them or stop the Khmer Rogue?”  I say that I am sorry and that I think we were just tired of war and thought communism in Vietnam was the same as Cambodia.  We retreated into creating ecological life styles and things like daycare, women’s rights and better food systems.  I try to say that many of us cared but were self absorbed and did not want to know what we felt we had no control over.  

It does not seem a very good excuse for the world letting millions of people die.  Phal Pot lived in a jungle retreat, supported by Thailand and China, for another twenty years without ever going to trial.  In that time, I caught hundreds and hundred of sweet, bright eyed babies and placed them in the arms of good and loving mothers. I was midwife to my grand children and to my friends children.  It was a good life but one day I said I would return and look at what I had not looked at before. 

I try to say that when you are a mother your first job is to raise those children and care for that community.   I say this in part because I believe it and part as a way of excusing myself for not protecting my children in Cambodia; for not taking care of them when they were so young.   For adding my voice to the voice that said don’t bomb Cambodia when I had no idea those bombs, however poorly executed, were for the already ruthless Khmer Rogue.  I was raised a Quaker and a pacifist.  I am not sure, all these years later, what the solution was but only that I did not know enough.

I talk with an old friend who describes his years of acid dropping, pot smoking stupor.   Everyone was calling for people to “drop out.”    We were advised to leave other countries to care for themselves and go get high on a porch in the country.  

But in 1980, my then husband and I, guided by the spirits they so believe in, here in Cambodia, agreed to become parents to the orphaned children of that war.   It has taken me a long time to return to the places of their birth and to allow myself to understand what happened both in Cambodia and in my own life.  

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It must be the strangest thing to be a child in a refugee camp and through a random selection end up with one family over another. They try to explain to their relatives that they are going to drop  me off and I am going to teach midwifery skills to people in the small, rural villages of Cambodia.   They are grown now with successful careers and families.    I say, “I  was not there when you took your first breath, when your parents were killed and so I offer this very small, simple gift to the children of that war of my youth; the war that defined my generation and my family.