30 Days NaNoWriMo Meme – Day 3 – Pick one of your female characters. Introduce your readers to her, from her point of view and her words only.
I’m Sinéad O’Flanagan. Twenty-four years old and a midwife. I came here to Chicago last year. It was Wednesday, 15th July 1925. I will never forget that day because when I entered the States, it was like been slapped onto the moon. Nothing here looks, smells or feels as it did in the village where I was born in the Shannon Valley. That was even fine with me, at the beginning.
When I left Ireland, I left nothing behind. I’m the last of my family, a family of midwives and healers. Granny rased me to be a midwife, knowing herbs and their powers. Knowing the bodies and minds of people, especially mothers. She taught me how to look beyond the flimsy veil of this world. When Granny died, the world toppled upside down. I was still very young, and people didn’t trust me. Granny had been respected and sought after for her wisdom. She was an elder, she had been a mother herself. I was young and unripe, what did I have to offer to anyone?
As time passed, I came to believe the same, that I had nothing to offer. Maybe that place, which had been Granny’s and my family’s place for centuries, wasn’t supposed to be mine. So when I had the opportunity to leave, I did.
In Chicago, everything was new and different, but I thought maybe it was supposed to be this way. Maybe my path was to build a new life in a New World.
Life is so strange, you know? It has the weirdest way to guide you.
When I started working here, helping people in my own Irish community, I met a woman, an old woman. A midwife herself. An Irish woman, she said she was, though she was born right here in Chicago. But she was so much like Granny and like her, she could look through me. She saw right away I wasn’t walking the path meant for me, a path she knew so well.
She gave me this coin. She asked a promise of me, and she perfectly knew what she was doing. She was a healer, after all.
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Character photo by myakmysia
