“No,” she says, “sit up a little bit.” And then the way she does to me, my legs like that. When I get contractions, she’d look, eh, “Well, my girl,” she says, “not too long from now, the baby’s going to be born.” Then she says to me, “I don’t want you to lay back, to lay right down.” You know, it was something, that old lady. And then she’d get a cloth and she’d put hot water. She got to be clean she was a clean woman. And what she used to do, too, she’d get hot water, that’s what she’d do with me, hot water all the time, clean. I didn’t have no trouble with my deliveries, I never did. So they come here now, all the time, all the time in Marathon. Nobody was born in Mobert in the reserve, none of them. My grandchildren, some of them were born in Thunder Bay most of them were born in Marathon. I don’t think none of my sisters-no, they all had them in Marathon and one in Terrace Bay. She had them all in the hospital, every one of them. My daughter Cheryl, † in her time, I don’t think she never had babies right on the reserve in Mobert. My mom, she always had her babies at home. I think I’m the only one out of my family. I guess I’m the only one to have Grandma deliver my babies. Four of them were born with me on the reserve. * My brother died and then I was the oldest. Only 5 daughters and the rest were brothers. I never heard anything that went wrong, eh, as far as I knew. They call her, lots of people call her, in Heron Bay and then Longlac, and White River. She’d get in the canoe and go out camping by herself. She was on crutches all the time she was born a cripple, but that didn’t stop her. My grandmother, she delivered me, she delivered all of us. We invite readers to see the accompanying research paper for more on the Marathon Maternity Oral History Project. All of the narratives in this series were edited from the interview transcripts, then reviewed and approved for publication by the women involved. This narrative is one of a series of stories that resulted from the Marathon Maternity Oral History Project. In 2008, we interviewed women about their experiences of childbirth and maternity care in Marathon, a rural community in northwestern Ontario.
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