The Amish Rule About Calling a Doctor During Labour, I Broke It Twice in One Winter
The first time I broke it, the wind had already taken down two fence lines on the Yoder property, and the temperature outside was 14 degrees.
Inside the bedroom, it was worse in its own way.
The air hung thick with the smell of tallow candle and sweat. The kerosene lamp turned low because oil was dear that winter—forty dollars a barrel, my father had said at supper, and we did not speak of it again.
And Sarah Esch lay on her side on a mattress soaked through for the third time in an hour.
Her breathing had changed.
I had delivered eleven babies by then, and I knew the sound a woman’s breath makes when her body starts fighting something bigger than labor.
I pressed two fingers under her jaw and counted.
And the number I got was not a number that belongs to a woman lying quietly in a bed.
I looked at her husband standing in the doorway with his hat still on.
And I said the sentence that would end, in one way or another, everything I understood about my place in that community.
I said we needed a telephone.
My name is Rachel, and for eighteen years I was the midwife for our settlement.
The woman they sent for at two in the morning.
The woman whose hands had touched more newborns and more dying mothers than any doctor for forty miles in any direction.
I never held a license. I never sat in a classroom. My training was a woman named Edna, who trained under a woman before her, going back further than anyone could name.
And my authority came from something simpler than a diploma.
It came from the fact that when a family’s whole world narrowed down to one room and one bed, I was the one they let stay in it.
This channel exists to tell the stories from those rooms—the ones the community never intended for outside ears.
The births that went right and the ones that did not. The faith that carried people through. And the rule that, twice in one winter, I could not make myself obey.
If you are here for that kind of honesty, subscribe, tap the bell, and stay through to the end. I read every comment, so tell me where you’re watching from tonight.
Now, let me tell you what that rule was and why it existed at all.
In our world, a birth belongs to the family and to God and no one else.
A doctor is not called for labor. A hospital is a last resort, so distant from the ordinary course of things that even saying the word out loud in a birthing room feels like a kind of surrender.
The bishop said it plainly, more than once, at more than one funeral I attended for babies who did not survive their first day.
“The Lord opens the womb and the Lord closes it,” he would say, “and it is not for us to put our trust in machines over His will.”
I heard that sentence so many times it stopped sounding like a sentence and started sounding like weather—something you simply lived inside.
A midwife’s job, as it was explained to me by Edna on my first night beside her, was to be skilled enough that the telephone was never needed. Skilled enough, patient enough, faithful enough.
Edna herself had attended over three hundred births in her lifetime and had called for outside help exactly twice.
And both times were spoken of in our house the way other families spoke of house fires. Rare. Terrible. Something that happened to other people.
I grew up believing that skill and faith were the same muscle—that if I only trained it well enough, I would never have to choose between them.
The rule was not written down anywhere. It did not have to be.
It lived in the way a husband’s face changed if you said the word hospital out loud. In the way a mother-in-law’s hands would still on her lap.
The cost of that rule was never spoken of directly either. But I carried it in my body for eighteen years—the particular exhaustion of watching for the one sign that would force me to choose between what I had been trained to trust and what I could see in front of me.
There is a part of what happened that winter I cannot tell you here. Not fully, not on this platform. The algorithm has limits, and I have learned slowly and the hard way exactly where they sit.
So I wrote the rest of it down instead.
What I actually saw in that room with Sarah Esch, and in the other room three months later, without the softening the community would have wanted and without the cuts a video forces on a story like this one.
The book is called *The Births They Never Recorded*. Forty-six pages of what I witnessed at those bedsides over eighteen years, told the way I would tell it to another midwife—not the way I was permitted to tell it at the time.
The link is in the first comment beneath this video. That is where the part I could not say out loud in front of a camera actually lives.
By the time that January came, I had already delivered eleven babies inside our settlement without once reaching for a telephone.
And I want you to understand what that number meant to me before I tell you what broke it.
Ten months earlier, in the spring, I had sat through a thirty-one-hour labor for a woman named Katie Beiler—her first child—in a farmhouse so quiet you could hear the horses shifting in the barn through the wall.
Katie’s mother sat in the corner the entire time knitting, unhurried, because in our world a long labor was not an emergency.
It was simply a labor.
I remember the particular calm of that room. The smell of the beeswax candle Katie’s mother had brought. The sound of her needles clicking in a rhythm that seemed to slow the whole house down to match it.
When Katie’s son was finally born at four in the morning—pink and furious and whole—Katie’s mother did not stop knitting until the cord had been cut.
That was the kind of faith I had been trained inside of.
And for ten months of that year, it had worked exactly the way Edna always said it would.
I tell you about Katie Beiler because I need you to know that the rule was not cruelty dressed up as belief.
It was, most of the time, simply how births happened safely—the way they had happened for generations before any of us were born.
That is what made January so much harder to make sense of afterward.
The rule had not failed me eleven times.
It failed once, and then it failed again six weeks later.
And both times it very nearly cost a life I had been trusted to protect.
It was the second week of January when Sarah Esch’s labor started, three days before the temperature dropped low enough to freeze the pump handle solid.
She was twenty-six, expecting her third, and her first two births had been unremarkable in the way we hoped every birth would be—long, hard, ordinary.
I arrived at four in the afternoon with my bag and the lamp I always brought with me: a black kerosene lamp with a crack in the glass that I had never replaced, because Edna had given it to me and I liked carrying something of hers into every room I entered.
By midnight, Sarah’s labor had stalled at eight centimeters.
And by two in the morning, her fever had climbed high enough that I could feel the heat coming off her skin before I even touched her.
I have learned since then that there is a name for what was happening inside her body. But I did not have that word in January.
What I had was twenty years of pattern recognition and a growing physical dread that sat behind my sternum like a stone.
Her husband, Levi, stood in the doorway the whole time, turning his hat in his hands.
And when I told him what I needed, he said only, “We don’t do that here, Rachel.”
Four words. No anger in them. Just certainty.
The same certainty the bishop carried. The same certainty I had absorbed into my own hands over eighteen years of births.
I said his wife’s fever was past 104, and her breathing had changed, and I needed to use the phone in the shanty at the end of the lane.
He did not move from the doorway.
By three in the morning, Sarah had stopped answering when I said her name.
I remember the particular silence of that room—not peaceful, not restful, but the silence of a body conserving everything it had left.
I remember the lamp flame bending sideways when the door opened behind me, a draft finding its way in from somewhere.
I remember thinking very clearly that I would either walk past Levi Esch and out that door, or I would spend the rest of my life explaining to myself why I hadn’t.
I did not ask his permission a second time.
I said her name once more, low, and then I walked out of that bedroom, out the front door into fourteen-degree air with no coat, and I ran the quarter mile to the phone shanty in the dark.
The dispatcher who answered asked me questions I did not have good answers for—an address that wasn’t really an address, a description of symptoms I had never had reason to name out loud to anyone outside the community.
I said what I could. I said hurry.
Twenty-two minutes later, headlights came up the lane, and two paramedics who had clearly never been inside an Amish home before followed me back into that bedroom.
And I watched them do with equipment I had only ever heard described the thing I had been trained for eighteen years to do without.
There is a second story that belongs beside this one, and it belongs to a woman named Verna Miller, who lived two farms over from where I grew up and whom I attended for her fourth birth eleven years before that January.
Verna’s labor also went wrong—a hemorrhage, not a fever, but the same essential shape of crisis. The same silence in the room. The same husband standing very still.
Verna’s husband did not let me use the phone.
I was younger then, twenty-nine, only six years into midwifery, and I did not yet have whatever it was that let me walk past Levi Esch eleven years later.
I stayed. I did everything Edna had taught me.
Verna survived by what I have always understood to be pure chance more than skill, and she never fully recovered her strength afterward. Something in her that never came back all the way.
I think of Verna every time I tell this story, because she is the version of what could have happened to Sarah if I had stayed obedient a second time.
Verna never blamed me. She never said a word about that night, not once in the following years, and I have never known whether her silence was forgiveness or something else I don’t have a name for.
That is a thread I have chosen to leave where it is.
If this story is reaching you tonight, take one moment and like this video. It tells me it matters, and it costs you nothing but a second.
Now, let me finish telling you what happened that winter, because Sarah Esch’s fever was not the only night I broke the rule.
The second time came in March, six weeks after Sarah had come home from the hospital with a story the whole settlement had already heard in six different versions by the time she returned.
This time it was a girl named Rebecca Stoltzfus, seventeen, having her first baby.
A labor that had been progressing normally until it wasn’t.
Until the baby’s heartbeat, which I checked with a fetoscope the way I always did—every twenty minutes, every single labor—began to slow in a pattern I recognized from a stillbirth I had attended nine years earlier and had never forgotten.
Rebecca’s mother was in the room this time, not her husband, because Rebecca’s husband was young and frightened and had gone outside to walk the fence line the way men in our community sometimes did when they could not bear to be in the room.
Rebecca’s mother looked at me when I said the word hospital, and she did not say, “We don’t do that here.”
She said nothing at all.
She simply turned her face toward the window, and I understood that her silence was permission she could not give out loud.
This time I did not have to run to a phone shanty.
Sarah Esch’s family, after everything, had installed a telephone in their barn that January—an accommodation the bishop had allowed for reasons no one spoke about directly.
And Rebecca’s family was close enough that I sent Rebecca’s young husband running for it.
I made my decision.
He did not argue with me the way Levi Esch had. He simply looked at my face for one second, set down the lantern he was holding, and ran.
I have thought about that second many times since.
How much of what happened in both of those rooms came down not to rules or to faith, but to the particular face a person happens to make in the one moment that matters.
The eighteen minutes I waited with Rebecca were the longest eighteen minutes of my working life.
I kept the fetoscope pressed to her belly the entire time—counting, recalculating, counting again—while her mother stood at the window with her back to both of us, watching for headlights she could not yet let herself hope for.
Rebecca herself was quiet in the particular way exhausted laboring women go quiet. Not asleep, not resting. Simply conserving.
I held her hand, and I did not tell her what I was counting or why the numbers frightened me, because there was nothing she could do with that information except carry it.
And she already had enough to carry.
When the headlights finally swung up the lane, her mother turned from the window, and for the first time since I had arrived, spoke.
She said, “Good.”
One word. Nothing more.
Rebecca’s daughter was born by cesarean section forty minutes after they arrived at the hospital.
And the doctor who performed it told me afterward in the hallway that another hour would likely have meant a very different outcome.
I did not tell him that I had spent that entire eighteen minutes doing math in my head about how many minutes a baby’s brain could survive without enough oxygen.
Math Edna had never taught me, because Edna had never needed to.
What broke both times was not a single dramatic thing. It was quieter than that.
It was the space between what I had been trained to trust and what my own two hands were telling me.
And in January, that space closed all at once.
In the time it takes to walk past a man standing in a doorway.
The action itself both times took less than a minute. Walking past Levi Esch. Sending Rebecca’s husband running to a barn.
That was all it was.
The cost came afterward, slowly, the way costs in our community always did—arriving in pieces over months rather than all at once, the way I had almost expected it to.
Invitations stopped.
Two families who had always called on me for their births called Edna’s niece instead that spring, quietly, without ever saying why to my face.
My own mother did not speak to me about it directly for four months, though she never stopped speaking to me about anything else. And I learned to read the shape of what she was avoiding by the shape of what she chose to talk about instead.
A letter I wrote to my sister came back unopened three weeks later. No explanation attached—just the same envelope with new handwriting on the front, redirecting it home.
The bishop visited my father’s house twice that spring. And though I was never told exactly what was said in either visit, my father’s silence afterward told me enough.
I do not tell you this to make myself the hero of it.
I made mistakes that winter that had nothing to do with hospitals.
I was short with Levi Esch in ways I regret. I let my own fear turn into something closer to contempt for a system I still, in many ways, loved.
Because it was love, too. Not only fear and rule-keeping.
I think of the meals that arrived at my door without being asked for. Every single time I helped bring a baby into the world safely inside a bedroom, exactly the way the community believed it should happen.
I think of the goodness in people who genuinely believed, with their whole hearts, that trusting God more than machines was itself a form of love.
I do not know how to hold all of that at once, even now. I have simply stopped trying to resolve it into something simple.
There were years after I left when I wanted the story to be simpler than it was. A rule, a rescue, a clean line between the world that failed those two mothers and the world that saved them.
It has never once been that clean. Not for me. And I have stopped waiting for it to become so.
I sat in a counselor’s office in town eight years after I left the settlement for good. A small room with a box of tissues on the table between us that I never once used.
And she said something I have never forgotten.
She said, “You were carrying moral injury, not guilt. The difference is that guilt is about something you did wrong, and moral injury is about being forced to choose between two things you believed in at the same time.”
I had never heard that phrase before. Moral injury.
I sat with it the way you sit with a word in a language you didn’t know you needed until someone handed it to you.
I asked her to say it again, and she did, slower the second time.
And I remember the specific relief of it—the sense that someone had finally handed me a container for something I had been carrying loose in my hands for eight years, cutting into my palms without a name to hold it by.
Before that office, I had understood those two nights in the winter of Sarah Esch and Rebecca Stoltzfus as failures. Moments where my faith had not been strong enough, where my hands had not been steady enough to keep trusting what I’d been taught.
I had turned it over so many times in the years since that the story had worn smooth in places, the way a stone wears smooth in a pocket.
And every time I turned it over, I landed on the same verdict against myself.
After that office, I understood them differently.
I had not failed the rule.
I had been standing in a place where two entire systems of care—both of them real, both of them built by people who loved their families—had collided inside my own two hands, and there had been no way through that collision that did not cost something.
The lamp I carried into every birthing room for eighteen years, the one with the cracked glass that had been Edna’s before it was mine.
I still have it.
It does not light anymore. But I keep it on a shelf where I can see it.
And it does not mean what it used to mean.
It used to mean I was ready to serve.
Now it means I was there in the dark. And I chose to see clearly instead of only faithfully.
And both of those things cost me something real.
If you grew up in a place where the rules were never written down, but everyone somehow knew them anyway. And you learned to feel the edges of them before you ever heard them set out loud—I see you.
If you have ever stood in a doorway of your own, choosing between the people who raised you and the thing your own two hands were telling you was true. Weighing a lifetime of belonging against a single decision you would have to live with alone—I see you.
If you have ever carried a decision for years without anyone in your old life ever asking you about it directly. Learning to read their silence the way I learned to read my mother’s—I see you, too.
I do not hate the community that raised me and trained me and in its own way trusted me with more than most women in that world were ever trusted with.
What that world gave me—patience, steadiness, hands that do not shake in a crisis—I still carry every day.
And I am not interested in pretending otherwise for the sake of a clean story.
If you want to keep hearing what the midwife was never allowed to say out loud, subscribe and tap the bell so you don’t miss the next one.
Tell me in the comments if you had your own version of that doorway. The moment you chose to walk past what you’d always been told toward what you could see with your own eyes.
I read every single one.
What I carried out of that community, I carry here. So that what happened in the dark does not stay there.
—
*[End of Part 1 — Story continues in Part 2]*
—
**PART 2**
—
I want to tell you about the sound the phone made when it rang in the shanty that first time.
It was not a ring like you would know. It was a dry, mechanical rattle that seemed to come from somewhere inside the wood itself, and I remember standing there in the dark with my hand on the receiver, thinking that I had never touched a telephone in my adult life.
Not once.
I had seen them, of course. In town, at the feed store, at the doctor’s office where I had accompanied my father once when he broke his wrist falling from a hay wagon when I was twelve.
But I had never touched one. Never held one to my ear.
And when I did, when I heard the dispatcher’s voice come through the line—flat, professional, unimpressed by the magnitude of what I was doing—I understood that I had crossed something that could not be uncrossed.
The dispatcher asked me for the address.
I said, “The Esch farm. Off Route 340, past the Yoder place.”
She said, “Ma’am, I need a street address.”
I said, “There isn’t one. There’s a lane. There’s a mailbox with the number 114 painted on it in white.”
She said, “Is that 114 what? What road?”
And I stood there in that shanty with the wind pushing against the walls and I realized I did not know the name of the road I had lived on my entire life.
We did not name our roads. We knew them by who lived on them. The road to the Yoder place. The road past the schoolhouse. The road that flooded in spring.
I said, “Just send someone. Please. Send someone to the Esch farm off 340. You’ll see the lane. There’s a sign for eggs.”
The dispatcher was silent for a moment. And then she said, “Ma’am, is this an emergency?”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “Is the patient breathing?”
I said, “Barely.”
And I heard her type something. I heard the clatter of her keyboard through the phone line, and it was the strangest sound I had ever heard in my life—the sound of a machine recording a human emergency.
She said, “We have a unit on Route 340 now. They’ll be there in fifteen to twenty minutes. Can you stay on the line?”
I said, “I have to go back inside.”
She said, “Ma’am, I need you to stay on the line.”
I said, “There’s a woman in that house who needs me more than you do.”
And I hung up.
I want you to understand what that cost me. Not the hanging up. That was nothing.
What cost me was the running.
Because I ran back down that lane in the dark with no coat, and the cold was so sharp it felt like something with teeth, and I remember thinking: this is what it feels like to be outside.
Not just outside the house. Outside the agreement.
I had lived my entire life inside an agreement I had never signed, and I had never once thought to question it, because everyone I loved was inside it with me.
And now I was running through the dark, and the agreement was back there in that bedroom with Levi Esch standing in the doorway with his hat in his hands, and I was out here alone.
When I got back to the bedroom, Sarah was still on her side on the mattress. Her lips had gone the color of ash.
Levi had not moved.
He stood in the doorway exactly where I had left him, and his hat was still in his hands, and his face was the face of a man watching something he could not stop.
I said, “They’re coming.”
He said nothing.
I said, “Levi. They’re coming. You need to decide right now whether you’re going to stand in that doorway or whether you’re going to help me.”
And he looked at me then. Really looked at me. And I saw something in his face that I had not expected.
Relief.
He had been standing in that doorway waiting for someone to make the decision for him. Waiting for someone to carry the weight of it. And I had carried it. And he was relieved.
He stepped aside.
I want to tell you that I understood him in that moment. That I forgave him. That I saw the fear behind his stillness and I loved him for it the way Christ would have loved him.
But the truth is that in that moment I did not feel anything for Levi Esch except a cold, clear anger that I would carry for years afterward.
Because he had stood in that doorway for an hour while his wife’s fever climbed past 104. He had stood there while her breathing changed. He had stood there while I counted her pulse and got a number that did not belong to a woman lying quietly in a bed.
And he had not moved until I moved.
That is what I could not forgive. Not the rule. Not the bishop. Not the community. Him. Standing there. Waiting.
I have since come to understand that Levi Esch was not a bad man. He was a frightened man in a world that had taught him that the worst thing he could do was act. That faith meant waiting. That trust meant stillness.
But understanding that took years. In that bedroom, at three in the morning, I only had the anger.
And I used it.
I said, “Get me every clean towel in this house. Get me hot water. Get me a pair of scissors from your wife’s sewing basket. Now.”
And he went.
He went because I had walked past him and come back, and something had shifted between us in that quarter mile of dark and cold.
I was no longer the midwife he had let into his house. I was the woman who had left and returned. And whatever authority I had carried before, I carried something different now.
The paramedics arrived at 3:22 in the morning.
I know the time because I looked at the clock on the mantel when they came through the door, and I remember thinking that I had been gone for nineteen minutes. Nineteen minutes between the moment I walked out of that bedroom and the moment two strangers in blue jackets came into it.
Sarah was alive when they loaded her into the ambulance. She was alive when they put the oxygen mask over her face. She was alive when they asked Levi if he wanted to ride with her, and he said no, he would follow in his buggy, and I said, “Levi. Get in the ambulance.”
He said, “I’ll follow.”
I said, “Your wife might not be alive when you get there.”
That was cruelty. I know that now. I knew it then, too, but I said it anyway.
He got in the ambulance.
Sarah spent four days in the hospital. She had what the doctors called a uterine infection, and they used a word I had never heard before—sepsis—and they told me afterward, when I visited her on the second day, that if she had come in even two hours later, they would have been talking about a funeral instead of a recovery.
She came home on a Thursday. Her mother came to stay for two weeks. And I was not invited to visit.
I heard about her recovery the way I heard about everything after that—secondhand, through my mother, through the women who still spoke to me at the grocery store, through the slow network of information that moved through our community like water finding its way through stone.
Sarah was fine. The baby was fine. A girl, born by emergency cesarean, seven pounds two ounces, named Mary after Sarah’s grandmother.
And the rule, the rule, the rule—the rule was still there. Unspoken. Unbroken.
I had broken it twice now, and the world had not ended. The bishop had not come to my door. The Lord had not struck me down. The sun had risen on January 16 and on January 17 and on every day after, and the rule had not changed, but I had.
That is what nobody tells you about breaking a rule you have lived inside your entire life.
The rule does not break.
You break.
—
The second time, in March, I did not run through the dark. I did not have to. But I want to tell you what I did do, because it was not brave. It was not even particularly skilled.
It was a decision I made in about the time it takes to blink, and I made it because of the face Rebecca’s husband made.
He was twenty years old. His name was Aaron, and he had a soft face that had not yet grown into its beard, and when I told him I needed him to run to the Esch farm and use the telephone in the barn and call 911, he looked at me for one second.
One second.
And in that second, I saw him decide.
He set down the lantern he was holding—gently, carefully, the way you set down something you are afraid of dropping—and he ran.
He ran out of that house and down the lane toward the Esch farm, and I later learned that he ran the entire quarter mile without stopping, and that when he got there, he could not speak for a full thirty seconds because his lungs were burning from the cold air.
And then he said, “Sarah Esch’s phone. We need 911. Rebecca’s baby is dying.”
And the dispatcher who took that call was the same dispatcher who had taken mine six weeks earlier.
She later told me—when I met her at the grocery store in town two years after I left the settlement, when I was no longer Rachel the midwife but just Rachel, a woman buying coffee and cereal like anyone else—she told me that she had recognized the address.
She said, “I remembered you. The woman who didn’t know the name of her own road.”
I said, “I know it now.”
She said, “I’m glad you called. Both times.”
I said, “I almost didn’t.”
She said, “You did.”
And that was it. That was the whole conversation. Two women standing in the cereal aisle of a grocery store in town, talking about the two nights that had changed everything, and one of them saying “I’m glad you called” and the other saying “I almost didn’t” and both of them knowing that “almost” was the whole story.
Because I did almost not call.
Both times, I almost did not call.
The first time, I almost stayed in that doorway. I almost said to myself, “He is the head of this house. He has made his decision. I must respect it.”
The second time, I almost waited another twenty minutes. I almost said to myself, “The heartbeat will recover. It has recovered before. Give it time.”
I almost did not call.
And if I had not, Sarah Esch would have died. And Rebecca’s daughter would have died. Or worse.
So when I tell you that I broke the rule, I want you to understand what I am actually telling you.
I am not telling you that I was brave.
I am telling you that I was lucky.
Lucky that I had the training to recognize what I was seeing. Lucky that I was close enough to a phone. Lucky that the dispatcher was patient with a woman who did not know the name of her road. Lucky that the paramedics found the lane with the egg sign. Lucky that Levi Esch stepped aside. Lucky that Aaron ran.
Lucky.
That is what broke the rule. Not courage. Luck.
And that is what I cannot forget, even now, even eight years later, even standing in that grocery store buying coffee like a normal woman.
All the women who did not have my luck. All the Sarahs who did not have a midwife who ran. All the Rebeccas whose husbands did not run.
I cannot forget them.
—
**PART 3**
—
There is another story I have to tell you, and it is not my story, but I carry it.
Her name was Fannie, and she was my mother’s cousin, and she died in 1981 in a settlement in Indiana that was not much different from ours.
She was twenty-three years old. She was having her fourth child. And she died because the midwife who attended her did not call for help until it was too late.
The baby died too. A boy.
I was seven years old when it happened, and I remember my mother getting the letter and reading it at the kitchen table with her hand over her mouth.
I remember her saying, “They waited too long.”
I did not understand what that meant then. I understood that Fannie was dead. I understood that a baby was dead. But I did not understand that there had been a decision. That there had been a moment when someone could have picked up a phone and did not.
My mother never talked about it again. Not once, not ever, not even when I was grown and training to be a midwife and she must have known—she must have known—that I would face the same choice.
She never warned me. She never said, “Rachel, if you ever find yourself in that position, the way Fannie’s midwife did, you must make a different choice.”
She said nothing. Because saying something would have meant acknowledging that the rule could fail, and in our world, the rule could not fail.
The rule was the rule.
And so Fannie died, and the baby died, and the rule was still the rule, and nobody said anything, and that was how it was.
I think about Fannie when I think about what I did.
I think: I did not want to be Fannie’s midwife. I did not want to be the woman who waited too long. I did not want to be the reason my mother read a letter at the kitchen table with her hand over her mouth.
But I also think: Fannie’s midwife was not a bad woman. She was trained the way I was trained. She believed the way I believed. And when the moment came, she did what she had been taught to do—she waited. She trusted. She kept her hands where they were.
And it killed someone.
I never met Fannie’s midwife. I do not know her name. But I think about her. I think about her the way I think about Verna, the way I think about all the women who stood in doorways and made the choice I almost made.
I do not judge her. I cannot judge her. I was her.
I was her for eleven births. I was her for every woman I attended before that January. I was her every time I decided not to call, because calling was not what we did, because trusting was what we did, because God’s will was God’s will and who was I to interfere.
I was her.
And then I was not.
—
There is one more thing I have to tell you, and then I will let you go.
After the second time—after Rebecca, after the hospital, after the doctor told me in the hallway that another hour would have meant a very different outcome—I went home and I sat in my kitchen and I did not light a lamp.
I sat in the dark.
I sat in the dark for a long time, and I thought about the lamp Edna had given me, the black kerosene lamp with the crack in the glass, and I thought about how I had carried it into every birthing room for eighteen years.
I thought about the light it made. Small. Yellow. Warm.
The light of a faithful woman doing faithful work in a faithful way.
And I thought: that light is not enough.
That light is not enough to see by. That light is not enough to save by.
The light Edna gave me was the light of obedience. And obedience, I had learned that winter, was not the same thing as care.
Care was louder than that. Care was rougher than that.
Care was running through the dark in fourteen-degree air with no coat. Care was hanging up on a dispatcher who wanted you to stay on the line. Care was walking past a man in a doorway and not asking his permission.
I sat in the dark that night and I understood something I had not understood before.
I had spent eighteen years trying to be good enough.
Good enough to never need the phone. Good enough to never face the choice. Good enough that skill and faith would never have to be separate things.
And I had failed. Not because I was not good enough. Because the choice was not about being good enough.
The choice was about being human.
A human woman, in a human room, with a human mother dying in front of her, and no amount of faith or skill or training could make that decision anything other than what it was.
A choice. Between two things I believed.
I called it breaking the rule. And it was. I broke the rule, and I would break it again, and I will spend the rest of my life breaking it in small ways and large ways, because once you have seen what I saw in those two rooms, you cannot unsee it.
But I also stopped calling it breaking.
I started calling it choosing.
I chose Sarah Esch. I chose Rebecca Stoltzfus. I chose their babies.
And I chose the cost. The invitations that stopped. The letter that came back unopened. The four months of my mother’s silence. The bishop’s visits to my father’s house. The life I left behind.
I chose it all.
And I would choose it again.
—
Eight years later, I still keep the lamp.
It does not light anymore. The glass is cracked, and the wick is burned down, and the kerosene is long gone.
But I keep it on a shelf where I can see it every day.
And when I look at it, I do not think about Edna. I do not think about the births that went right. I do not think about the thirty-one hours with Katie Beiler, or the calm of that room, or the sound of knitting needles.
I think about the two nights that broke me open.
I think about the quarter mile of dark. I think about the dispatcher’s voice. I think about Aaron setting down the lantern and running.
I think about what it cost, and what it saved, and what I still carry.
And I think: this is what it means to be a midwife. Not to be skilled enough that the phone is never needed. But to be human enough to know when it is.
That is what Edna never taught me. That is what the rule could never teach me.
I learned it in the dark, in a bedroom, in January, with a woman’s pulse under my fingers and a number I could not make right.
And I have been learning it ever since.
—
*[End of Part 2 — Story continues in Part 3]*
—
**PART 3**
—
I want to tell you about the after.
Not the after of that winter—the months of silence, the invitations that stopped, the letter that came back unopened. You know about that. I have told you.
I want to tell you about the after that came eight years later. The after I am still living in.
I left the settlement in the spring of 1993. I was forty-one years old. I had been a midwife for eighteen years and I had no license, no diploma, no formal training of any kind.
I moved to a town about forty miles away, a town where nobody knew me, a town where I was just another woman in a grocery store buying coffee and cereal.
I got a job at a nursing home. I worked the night shift. I cleaned bedpans and changed sheets and held the hands of old men who were dying and whose families had stopped visiting.
It was not midwifery. But it was care. And I was good at it.
I was good at it because I had spent eighteen years learning how to be in a room with someone who was frightened. I had spent eighteen years learning how to hold a hand without speaking. I had spent eighteen years learning how to watch for the small signs that meant something was changing.
The nursing home did not care that I had no license. The nursing home cared that I showed up on time and did not steal and was gentle with the residents.
I was all of those things.
And I was something else, too. I was a woman who had broken a rule and survived. And that survival had made me quieter. More careful. More willing to sit in silence.
I do not think I was a better person after I left. I think I was a more honest one.
Because I could no longer pretend that I was good enough. I could no longer pretend that skill and faith were the same muscle. I could no longer pretend that the rule was anything other than what it was—a rule, made by men, for reasons that had nothing to do with the women in those beds.
I was just a woman who had seen too much to go back.
—
There is a question I get asked a lot, when people find out I was a midwife in an Amish community.
They ask: do you regret it?
And I never know how to answer.
Do I regret the births that went right? The thirty-one hours with Katie Beiler? The sound of her mother’s knitting needles? The moment Katie’s son was born, pink and furious and whole?
No. I do not regret those.
Do I regret the two nights I broke the rule? The quarter mile of dark? The eighteen minutes with Rebecca? The doctor’s words in the hallway?
No. I do not regret those either.
What I regret is the eleven births before them. The years I spent believing that skill and faith were the same muscle. The years I spent waiting for the rule to fail, and dreading it, and praying it wouldn’t, and knowing—knowing—that one day it would.
I regret the years I spent being Edna’s midwife instead of my own.
I regret the woman I was before that January. Not because she was bad. Because she was blind. Because she trusted a rule more than she trusted her own hands.
And I regret that it took a near-death—two near-deaths—to make me see.
But I do not regret walking out that door.
I do not regret running through the dark.
I do not regret hanging up on the dispatcher.
I do not regret setting down the phone and going back to Sarah Esch.
I do not regret any of it.
Because that is what it means to be a midwife. Not to follow the rule. To know when to break it.
And I knew. Both times, I knew.
And I broke it. Both times, I broke it.
And I would break it again.
—
There is a moment I have not told you about.
It was the day after the second time—after Rebecca, after the hospital, after the doctor’s words in the hallway. I was sitting in my kitchen, and it was morning, and the sun was coming through the window and making a square of light on the floor.
And I was thinking about the lamp. The black kerosene lamp with the crack in the glass. The lamp Edna had given me.
I was thinking about how I had carried it into every birthing room for eighteen years. How I had set it on every bedside table, every dresser, every windowsill. How its small yellow light had filled every room I had ever worked in.
And I was thinking: that light is not enough.
That light is not enough to see by.
And then I thought something else. Something that surprised me.
I thought: it never was.
It never was enough. Not for Sarah Esch. Not for Rebecca Stoltzfus. Not for any of the women I attended, not for any of the births that went right, not for any of the births that went wrong.
The lamp was never enough. The skill was never enough. The faith was never enough.
Because birth is not something you can be enough for. Birth is something you can only be present for.
And presence is not the same thing as obedience.
Presence is seeing what is in front of you and responding to it. Not what the rule says. Not what the bishop says. Not what the community expects.
What is in front of you.
A woman. A mother. A life.
That is what I learned in those two rooms. That is what I have carried with me for eight years.
Not the rule. Not the breaking of it.
Presence.
I was present with Sarah Esch. I was present with Rebecca Stoltzfus. I was present in a way that the rule would not allow and the community would not forgive and the bishop would not bless.
And it saved two lives.
Not because I was brave. Because I was present.
And that is the whole story.
—
I still have the lamp.
It sits on a shelf in my apartment, next to a photograph of my mother and a stone I picked up from the lane at the Esch farm the day I left the settlement.
I do not light it. It does not light anymore. The glass is cracked and the wick is burned down and the kerosene is long gone.
But I keep it where I can see it.
And when I look at it, I do not think about Edna. I do not think about the thirty-one hours with Katie Beiler. I do not think about the births that went right.
I think about the two nights that broke me open.
I think about the quarter mile of dark. I think about the dispatcher’s voice. I think about Aaron setting down the lantern and running.
I think about Sarah Esch’s pulse under my fingers, and the number I could not make right, and the moment I walked past her husband and out into the cold.
I think about Rebecca’s mother at the window, her back to both of us, watching for headlights she could not yet let herself hope for.
I think about the doctor’s words in the hallway: another hour would likely have meant a very different outcome.
I think about all of it. And I think: this is what it means to be a midwife.
Not to follow the rule. To know when to break it.
Not to be good enough. To be present.
Not to trust the light. To be the light.
And I was. Both times, I was.
And that is why I am telling you this story. Not because I am brave. Not because I am good. Not because I did something remarkable.
Because I was there. In the dark. With my hands. And I chose.
And so can you. Whatever your doorway is. Whatever your rule is. Whatever the thing is that you have been told to trust more than your own two hands.
You can choose.
You can walk out the door. You can run through the dark. You can hang up on the dispatcher. You can set down the lantern and go.
You can be present.
And it will cost you something. It will cost you everything, maybe. The invitations will stop. The letters will come back unopened. The people you love will go silent.
But you will have been present. And presence is not nothing.
Presence is everything.
—
The wind had taken down two fence lines on the Yoder property that January.
The temperature was fourteen degrees.
And I walked out of a bedroom, out of a house, out of a life, and I ran a quarter mile in the dark to a phone shanty at the end of a lane.
I picked up a receiver I had never touched.
I said, “We need help.”
And help came.
That is the whole story. That is all of it. That is everything I have to tell you.
The rule was the rule. And I broke it. Twice. In one winter.
And I would do it again.
I would do it again right now.
—
*[End of Part 3 — Story continues in Part 4]*
—
**PART 4**
—
There is a question I have been avoiding, and I think it is time to answer it.
The question is: why did I stay as long as I did?
Eighteen years. Eleven births before that January. Hundreds of births before that. A lifetime of following a rule I knew, somewhere deep down, could fail.
Why did I stay?
I have thought about this for eight years, and I think the answer is simpler than I want it to be.
I stayed because I was loved.
That is the part nobody talks about. The part that makes it complicated. The part that makes it impossible to just say “the community was wrong and I was right.”
I was loved in that community. Deeply. Truly. In a way that I have not been loved since.
When I was fourteen years old and my father was sick with pneumonia and we thought he might die, it was the women of the settlement who came to our house every day for three weeks. They brought food. They brought blankets. They sat with my mother. They prayed.
When I was nineteen and I had my first birth as a midwife’s apprentice—a difficult one, a breech baby, a night I thought would never end—it was Edna who held my hand afterward and said, “You did well, Rachel. You did well.”
When I was thirty and I had a miscarriage of my own—a pregnancy I had not told anyone about, a loss I had not known how to grieve—it was my mother who came to my house without being asked and sat with me for three days and did not say a word about it, because she knew. She just knew.
That is the love I am talking about. The kind of love that does not need to be spoken. The kind of love that shows up.
And I have not found that love anywhere else.
I have found kindness. I have found decency. I have found good people in the town where I live now, people who would help me if I needed help, people who would bring me food if I was sick.
But I have not found the love of a community that has known me since I was a child. The love of people who remember my mother’s wedding. The love of people who know what I looked like at seven years old, at twelve, at sixteen. The love of people who have prayed for me and with me and over me for my entire life.
That love is real. And it is not a small thing.
So when I tell you that I broke the rule, I am not telling you that I rejected the community. I am telling you that I chose something over it. And that choice cost me that love.
I did not know that when I walked out that door. I did not know that I would spend the next eight years missing the women who had taught me to knit, missing the sound of the hymns we sang on Sunday mornings, missing the particular smell of a farmhouse kitchen in winter.
I did not know any of that. I only knew that Sarah Esch was dying, and I had to do something.
And I did.
And I have paid for it every day since.
—
There is something else I want to tell you, and it is harder to say.
I do not know if I would do it again.
That is the truth. That is the thing I have been carrying for eight years. That is the thing I told the counselor in the office with the box of tissues I never once used.
I said, “I saved two lives. And I lost my whole world. And I do not know if it was worth it.”
She said, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
I said, “I mean I do not know if I would make the same choice again. I do not know if I would walk out that door. I do not know if I would run through the dark.”
She said, “Why not?”
I said, “Because I am lonely. Because I am fifty-one years old and I live alone and I work the night shift at a nursing home and the people I loved will not speak to me. Because I have saved two lives and lost a hundred relationships. Because I do not know how to hold both of those things at once.”
She was quiet for a long time. And then she said something I have never forgotten.
She said, “Rachel, you are asking the wrong question.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
She said, “You are asking if it was worth it. But worth is not a thing you can measure. Worth is not a thing you can weigh. You saved two lives. That is a fact. You lost your world. That is also a fact. You cannot put those things on a scale and see which one is heavier. They are not the same kind of thing.”
I said, “Then what do I do?”
She said, “You stop asking. You stop weighing. You accept that you made a choice, and that choice had consequences, and the consequences are what they are. And you live.”
I said, “How?”
She said, “One day at a time. Like everyone else.”
—
I have thought about that conversation a thousand times since.
I have thought about it when I am lonely. When I am sitting in my apartment with the lamp on the shelf and the photograph of my mother and the stone from the Esch lane. When I am remembering the sound of knitting needles. When I am remembering the taste of my mother’s bread.
I have thought about it when I am not lonely. When I am at the nursing home, holding the hand of an old man who is dying. When I am at the grocery store, buying coffee and cereal. When I am at the park, watching children play.
I have thought about it and I have come to this conclusion.
She was right.
Worth is not a thing you can measure. Worth is not a scale you can balance.
There is no scale that can tell you if saving two lives is worth losing your world.
There is only the choice. And the living.
And I am living.
—
I want to tell you something about the nursing home.
I work the night shift. I have worked the night shift for eight years. I work from eleven at night to seven in the morning, and I am the only person on my floor, and I walk the hallways with a flashlight and I check on the residents every hour.
I know them all. I know their names. I know their stories. I know which ones will be awake when I come in, and which ones will be asleep, and which ones will be somewhere in between.
I know the man in 214, the one who was a farmer, the one who talks about his cows as if they are still in the barn. I know the woman in 217, the one who was a teacher, the one who still corrects my grammar when I talk to her. I know the man in 103, the one who never speaks, the one who just holds my hand when I come in and does not let go until I have to leave.
I love them. Not in the way I loved my community. But I love them.
And they love me.
Not in the way my community loved me. But they love me.
And that is enough. That is not everything. That is not the love of a mother who knows what I looked like at seven years old. That is not the love of a woman who held my hand after my first birth. That is not the love of a community that had known me my entire life.
But it is enough.
I have come to believe that enough is all any of us can hope for. Enough love. Enough meaning. Enough purpose. Enough presence.
And I have those things.
—
The lamp is still on my shelf.
The photograph of my mother is still next to it.
The stone from the Esch lane is still next to that.
And every night, before I go to work, I look at them.
I look at the lamp and I think: I was there in the dark.
I look at the photograph and I think: I loved you.
I look at the stone and I think: I walked that lane.
And then I go to work.
And I hold hands. And I change sheets. And I sit with people who are dying.
And I am present.
That is the whole story. That is all of it. That is everything I have to tell you.
The rule was the rule. And I broke it. Twice. In one winter.
And I have paid for it. And I have been paid for it. Both. At the same time. All these years.
And I still do not know how to hold that. I have just learned to live inside it.
—
There is one more thing.
I went back to the settlement two years ago. For the first time since I left.
I did not go to see anyone. I did not knock on any doors. I did not go to any funerals or weddings or Sunday services.
I just drove through. In my car, on the road that I did not know the name of until I was forty-one years old.
I drove past the Yoder place. I drove past the schoolhouse. I drove past the lane that floods in spring.
I drove past the Esch farm. The sign for eggs is still there. The barn is still there. The telephone that Sarah Esch’s family installed that January—it is gone now. The bishop allowed it for a few years, and then he did not, and then it was removed.
But I remember it. I remember running to it. I remember picking up the receiver.
I drove past the Stoltzfus farm. Rebecca’s daughter would be nine years old now. I have never met her. I have never seen her face. I do not know what she looks like.
But she is alive. She is nine years old. And she is alive because I broke the rule.
I drove past my mother’s house. She died four years ago. I did not go to the funeral. I was not invited.
But I drove past her house. The garden is still there. The roses she planted when I was a child are still there. Someone is taking care of them.
And I sat in my car outside her house for a long time. And I cried.
I cried for my mother. I cried for the years I did not have with her. I cried for the four months of silence. I cried for the letter that came back unopened.
I cried for Sarah Esch. I cried for Rebecca Stoltzfus. I cried for their daughters. I cried for the midwife I was and the woman I became.
I cried for all of it.
And then I drove away.
I drove back to my town. I drove back to my apartment. I drove back to the lamp and the photograph and the stone.
And I went to work that night. I worked the night shift. I walked the hallways with my flashlight. I checked on the residents.
I held the hand of the man in 103. I corrected the grammar of the woman in 217. I listened to the farmer in 214 talk about his cows.
And I was present.
That is the whole story. That is all of it. That is everything I have to tell you.
The rule was the rule. And I broke it. Twice. In one winter.
And I would do it again.
I would do it again right now.
—
*[End of Part 4 — Story continues in Part 5]*
—
**PART 5**
—
Let me tell you about the second time one more time. The way I remember it. The way I dream it. The way it comes back to me.
It is March. It is cold but not the same cold as January. The cold of March is a different thing—softer, wetter, the cold of melting snow and mud.
I am in Rebecca Stoltzfus’s bedroom. She is seventeen years old. She is having her first baby. She has been in labor for sixteen hours.
I check the baby’s heartbeat with the fetoscope. I do this every twenty minutes. I have done it every twenty minutes for every labor I have ever attended, for eighteen years.
The heartbeat is slow.
I check again. Still slow. Slower than before.
I know this pattern. I know it from a stillbirth I attended nine years earlier. I have never forgotten that stillbirth. I have never forgotten the sound of that mother’s voice when she realized her baby was dead.
I look at Rebecca’s mother. She is standing at the window. Her back is to me. She is watching for headlights.
She does not know what I know. She cannot see what I see.
I say, “We need to go to the hospital.”
She does not turn around. She does not say, “We don’t do that here.” She says nothing.
Her silence is permission. Permission she cannot give out loud.
I look at Aaron, Rebecca’s husband. He is holding a lantern. He is twenty years old. His face is soft and has not yet grown into its beard.
I say, “Aaron. I need you to run to the Esch farm. There is a telephone in the barn. Call 911. Tell them Rebecca needs an ambulance.”
He looks at me for one second. One second.
And then he sets down the lantern—gently, carefully, the way you set down something you are afraid of dropping—and he runs.
I sit with Rebecca. I hold her hand. I do not tell her what I am thinking. I do not tell her that her baby is dying. I do not tell her that I am counting the minutes in my head.
I keep the fetoscope pressed to her belly. I count. I recalculate. I count again.
The eighteen minutes I wait with Rebecca are the longest eighteen minutes of my working life.
Her mother stands at the window. Her back is still to me. She is watching for headlights. She does not turn around.
Rebecca is quiet. Not asleep. Not resting. Conserving.
I hold her hand. I do not speak. There is nothing to say.
And then—headlights. They swing up the lane. They come through the window. They fall on Rebecca’s mother’s face.
She turns around. For the first time since I arrived, she speaks.
She says, “Good.”
One word. Nothing more.
The paramedics come in. They do what paramedics do. They put Rebecca on a stretcher. They put an oxygen mask over her face. They ask her questions she cannot answer.
I ride with her to the hospital. I am not supposed to. I am not family. I am not medical. But I get in the ambulance anyway, and nobody stops me.
At the hospital, they take her into surgery. A cesarean section. The doctor comes out afterward and tells me that another hour would have meant a very different outcome.
I do not tell him that I know. I do not tell him that I was counting the minutes. I do not tell him that I have counted minutes like that before.
I just say, “Thank you.”
And then I go home.
—
That is the story. That is the whole story. That is everything I have to tell you.
But it is not the whole story. Because there is something I have not told you.
I have not told you about the moment after.
The moment when I sat in my kitchen and did not light a lamp. The moment when I sat in the dark and thought: I have broken the rule twice. Twice in one winter.
And I am still here.
I am still alive. The sun still rises. The world still turns. The bishop has not come to my door. The Lord has not struck me down.
I have broken the rule, and nothing has happened.
And I do not know what to do with that.
Because I have spent eighteen years believing that the rule was the rule. That it was the way things were. That to break it was to invite disaster.
And I have broken it, and there has been no disaster.
There has been Sarah Esch, alive. There has been Rebecca Stoltzfus, alive. There have been two babies, born healthy, born whole, because I broke the rule.
And I do not know what to do with that.
I do not know how to hold the fact that I broke the rule and it was good.
I do not know how to hold the fact that I broke the rule and it cost me everything.
I do not know how to hold both of those things at once.
—
I sat in the counselor’s office eight years after I left the settlement. I told her this. I told her that I did not know how to hold it.
She said, “You do not have to hold it.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
She said, “You do not have to hold it all at once. You do not have to resolve it. You do not have to make it make sense. You just have to live.”
I said, “How?”
She said, “One day at a time. Like everyone else.”
And I have been living one day at a time for eight years now. And I still do not know how to hold it. And I have stopped trying.
Because some things are not meant to be held. Some things are meant to be carried. And there is a difference.
Holding is when you wrap your arms around something and keep it close. Carrying is when you put something on your back and keep walking.
I have been carrying this for eight years. And I will carry it for the rest of my life.
And that is okay. That is what it means to be human. To carry things you cannot resolve. To carry things you cannot make sense of. To carry things you would not change even if you could.
I would not change it. That is the thing. I would not change any of it.
Not the quarter mile of dark. Not the eighteen minutes with Rebecca. Not the years of loneliness. Not the four months of my mother’s silence.
I would not change it.
Because it made me who I am. And who I am is a woman who was present. Who chose. Who broke the rule.
And that is enough. That is all any of us can hope for.
—
The lamp is still on my shelf.
The photograph of my mother is still next to it.
The stone from the Esch lane is still next to that.
And every night, before I go to work, I look at them.
I look at the lamp and I think: I was there in the dark.
I look at the photograph and I think: I loved you.
I look at the stone and I think: I walked that lane.
And then I go to work. And I hold hands. And I change sheets. And I sit with people who are dying.
And I am present.
That is the whole story. That is all of it. That is everything I have to tell you.
The rule was the rule. And I broke it. Twice. In one winter.
And I would do it again. I would do it again right now.
—
There is one last thing I want to say.
If you are watching this, and you are standing in a doorway of your own—a doorway where you have to choose between the people who raised you and the thing your own two hands are telling you is true—I want you to know something.
You are not alone.
There are others like you. Women who have walked out of bedrooms and out of houses and out of lives. Women who have broken rules and paid for it and kept walking. Women who have carried things they could not resolve and kept going.
You are not alone.
And if you break the rule—whatever your rule is—you will pay for it. You will lose things. You will lose people. You will lose the love of a community that has known you your whole life.
But you will be present. And presence is not nothing.
Presence is everything.
—
I still have the lamp.
It does not light anymore. But I keep it where I can see it.
And when I look at it, I do not think about the births that went right. I do not think about the thirty-one hours with Katie Beiler. I do not think about the sound of knitting needles.
I think about the two nights that broke me open.
I think about the quarter mile of dark. I think about the dispatcher’s voice. I think about Aaron setting down the lantern and running.
I think about Sarah Esch’s pulse under my fingers. I think about the number I could not make right. I think about the moment I walked past her husband and out into the cold.
I think about Rebecca’s mother at the window. Her back to both of us. Watching for headlights she could not yet let herself hope for.
I think about the doctor’s words in the hallway.
I think about all of it. And I think: this is what it means to be a midwife. Not to follow the rule. To know when to break it. Not to be good enough. To be present. Not to trust the light. To be the light.
And I was. Both times, I was.
And that is why I am telling you this story. Not because I am brave. Not because I am good. Not because I did something remarkable.
Because I was there. In the dark. With my hands. And I chose.
And so can you. Whatever your doorway is. Whatever your rule is. Whatever the thing is that you have been told to trust more than your own two hands.
You can choose.
You can walk out the door. You can run through the dark. You can hang up on the dispatcher. You can set down the lantern and go.
You can be present.
And it will cost you something. It will cost you everything, maybe. The invitations will stop. The letters will come back unopened. The people you love will go silent.
But you will have been present. And presence is not nothing.
Presence is everything.
—
The wind had taken down two fence lines on the Yoder property that January. The temperature was fourteen degrees.
And I walked out of a bedroom, out of a house, out of a life, and I ran a quarter mile in the dark to a phone shanty at the end of a lane.
I picked up a receiver I had never touched. I said, “We need help.”
And help came.
That is the whole story. That is all of it. That is everything I have to tell you.
The rule was the rule. And I broke it. Twice. In one winter.
And I would do it again.
I would do it again right now.
—
*[End of story]*
