I mean, my mother could have actually used the word "traitor" instead of implying it in every other sentence, and my dad could have harped on not being able to see his great-grandchildren even more than he did (what is with him and that idea of great-grandkids? It doesn't matter how often I say "They'll have them when they can afford them"; he'll just come back with "All you need is love" and I will have to bite through my tongue to keep Cynical Lucy from letting loose)  -- Grandma Jessie was drunk off her butt, no big surprises there. Ann was nasty; the tumor's started growing again, so interactions with her involve spinning the Wheel of Moods. Mom said "If you were here, you could be a positive influence on her." I very carefully did not say "The 'influence' she needs to be under is that of anesthetic, while that thing is being cut out of her head": they should have done it when she was driving distance from a hospital with a good oncology department and the odds were fair that it wouldn't leave her blind; now . . . oh, we've been over this. You're thousands of miles away, what do you know? How often have I heard that, in all the years we've known each other?

I miss Grammie and Pap-Pap. I have their wedding picture on the bookcase, next to Scott's dad's shadow box; they were younger than David and Emily, and Pap-pap shipped out the next day and Grammie went to work at her new job and I wish they were here so that I could ask "How did you get through it?" I hope someone's making time to go out to the cemetery. I wish David could have known them; I'm glad Ellie is getting to know her grandparents. She's so much bigger, even since I saw her last!

The word "bookcase" in there is not insignificant: yes, I have my own house and my own furniture again! Not a lot of it -- still no container; we're sleeping on air mattresses with bedding I found at a charity shop -- but we bought some things from an American family who'd had enough and was heading back to Tennessee. She argued over the price until I turned around and headed back to the truck, argued over the baskets for the lower shelves until I started taking stuff back off the truck, and responded, when I told her where I was from, with "You'll go running back, too. They don't have rationing there. People are free!"

Yeah, I thought, driving away, free to starve, free to get shot, free to run out of their medication and not be able to get more, free to lose everything and spend your days working the farms from the FEMA camps . . . .

(Don't get me wrong; many things here are bad: the transit systems outside of major cities is a joke, trains stop running because of leaves on the line (no, not a joke), the culture that shrugged at spending the weekend out of one's head on alcohol has in some areas mutated into supplementing one's entertainment money with homegrown meth labs. I could write paragraphs on what's wrong with the NHS -- and I work for them!

(But you get the sense that most people are trying to do what they can -- hastened along, no doubt, by the public lynching of two MPs by furious constituents after their petrol usage was leaked to The Times: suffice it to say that it was well above the allowance given to the man in the street, and much had been made of "all pulling together" and "no special privileges" when petrol rationing was imposed; they'd traded political access for a clandestine transfer of rations from some fairly wealthy business owners. The Queen was furious, and called the PM on the carpet. Yes, it's a constitutional monarchy, but it helps to have a head of state who knows what's it like to live under austerity measures, something President Pelosi could learn from -- and from what I read, she might get the chance; how many of her family's investments tanked?)

Anyway. You will have noticed the use of the word "truck" in an earlier paragraph: it was, indeed, a truck, borrowed from the neighborhood car club. If you need to use a vehicle, you check on-line to see what's available, then reserve it; on the day you use a SmartCard to check it out of the lot, do your driving, and bring it back. Your petrol ration is automatically debited; if you don't have enough to check a vehicle out, you can buy ration points from someone else -- if they're willing to sell, and people charge all the market will bear.

(This does indeed mean that I am driving. Be afraid. Be very afraid.)

Now I have a table and chairs and a sideboard (and four dishes), a bookcase/room divider (and two books), two air mattresses, two canvas wardrobes, two wind-up alarm clocks . . . and that's pretty much it, at the moment. Scott bought a small radio for the sitting room; it has a slot for iPods of varying sizes, and most evenings will find us all downstairs together listening to music or reading (the public library here was expanded just before the shock; I missed books!).

Work: most of my new clients are polite enough, but nervous and upset at the changes in the maternity model of care; everyone has heard horror stories. Older women have been gleefully imparting anecdotes about a "friend of a friend" who died before she reached the hospital, or her baby died, or she couldn't have children again, or . . . I'm going to spend most of the next few months doing heavy-duty education and reassurance (I was firmly told that finding the worst offenders, stringing them up by their toes and flaying them in the market square was not an option, but there was a note of regret rather of outrage in the lead consultant's voice; thus far we're getting along very well).

"Birth is as safe as life gets" -- you can tell the ones who've attended births, or given birth, from the ones who haven't by the way they react to that statement: the latter group sigh and their eyes mist over; the former trade glances that are full of gallows humor, or haunted. We've learned a lot about improving maternal and neonatal odds, but risk can't be eliminated. The resources for a blanket guarantee of pain relief, a bed on a hospital ward, technological interventions to increase fertility or preserve the premature . . . they're already strained. I don't know how much longer they can be kept going.

To give our mothers a decent shot at not needing those interventions, all of us are doing a lot more nutritional counseling (I've got a CE class on it next week) with an increased emphasis on vegetarian options, even though pregnant and nursing women get a larger meat ration. We don't have to encourage most of them to get more exercise -- I wore a pedometer last week and I'm walking about 5 miles a day! The biggest gap is in stress management; we've put feelers out for meetings with counselors, religious leaders, anyone with the skills to listen and offer comfort and strength.

One woman came in to the clinic for her consultation; halfway through the interview she blurted out that she wanted an abortion. In the course of the conversation -- I called in one of the other midwives who had more experience with the UK way of counseling on this -- she said that it was a horrible time to have a child, and she didn't see any way that her baby could have a decent life.

I told her that she knew her situation best, and that ultimately it was her decision, and we talked about her options. I told her I understood her fear, and I do.

Still, the ravening hordes have always been coming over the hill. I wanted to tell her about my friend Dana, who's spent most of her life working in India and Nepal teaching people how to harvest rainwater, how to build ram pumps and purify their water. She's worked with the profoundly destitute for her entire adult life; she told me once that she knew many people who hated the conditions in which they found themselves, but very few who regretted being alive at all. I did stress that even now, there were far more couples on adoption waiting lists than there were infants available.

I don't know what she'll decide. I'm not sure I know what the wisest decision would be.

That's hard for a midwife to type, you know.

Wow, that got serious quick.