One of the most memorable speeches I've ever heard was given at my beloved's graduation. They attended a pretty crunchy school natural medicine. They went for acupuncture but they also had many degrees including nutrition, naturopathic medicine, and most importantly to this story: midwifery.
The common consensus across campus was that the midwives operated on their own frequency which is a nice way to say they were usually really weird, even by the standards of a pretty alternative crowd of people. Not weird in a bad way. But weird nonetheless. They straddled the boundary between life and death and it changed them.
I had never experienced a midwife before the ceremony which is why I didn't think anything of the fact that a midwife stepped up to give the graduation speech. My friends nearby had a stir of repressed amusement and elbowing each other which did puzzle me slightly.
The speech began as a story, which I heartily approved of. The midwife related an experience in which a woman told her that during her first birth she had screamed too much and used up her energy in that instead of pushing and the midwife, to the collective masses assembled to watch a solemn ceremony, said, "I told her this time she would need to scream with her vagina."
The audience was slightly stunned by this, myself included. I scanned the crowd to see dropped jaws and wide eyes. It was such a bold statement to make in an academic setting and no one quite knew what to make of it.
The midwife continued unperturbed.
She related that many dads didn't know what to do during the birthing process and that this particular dad chose to chant over and over, "You're gonna be huge, you're gonna be huge," as his wife screamed with her vagina to birth their child. The midwife mused that she didn't know if he was talking to their child or his wife or if he even registered what he was saying in that moment.
Then the subject strayed toward how the student body had strained and striven toward this goal, this endgame that was the result of sleepless nights, hard work, and camaraderie. The speech seemed to have moved onto more solid ground and traditional graduation reminiscences. The crowd settled, thinking the worst had passed.
But as the midwife wrapped up she said, "As you go forth into the world, pushed out by this noble institution to help the masses, just remember one thing," she paused and the audience held their breath while the beat drew out before she finally whispered:
There was a roar of astonished laughter as her speech neatly tied their graduation into a metaphor for being birthed unto the world and we finally understood the point of her anecdote.
The speech lives in infamy in all our collective memories. Years later my beloved's dad will still be like, "Remember that bizarre graduation speech?"
And it was. It was bizarre. But I'll say this. I've attended a lot of graduations, and I don't remember any of the speeches half so well as I do that one.
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