Few places are as filled with the collapsing of fantasies as the hospital delivery room. I knew that becoming a midwife would mean watching such moments again and again and again. I hadn't suspected that many of those collapses would be my own. But it turns out that the reality of bringing a child into this world, though harder, is so much better than my imagination could ever conjure. When I began my training, I embraced all that modern medicine had to offer. The hype surrounding natural birth seemed disproportionate to the task at hand: ensuring the safe delivery of a newborn. Especially in...