Who doesn’t love when a midwife helps deliver a baby in a Superwoman costume? That’s right, no one. This is precisely what happened when Jill McFarland-Reddick, who works at the Mid-Michigan Midwifery practice in Flint, MI, showed up to work on January 21.
Reddick, 40, has worked as a certified nurse-midwife for the past eight years. On that particular day, however, she dressed up in costume to attend a Superhero Mother-Son program at the local YMCA where everyone dressed up as superheroes for the day. Her sister and nephew attended just in case she got called in to work, as she was on call–which she did 15 minutes after showing up to the event. Being the superhero she is, Reddick spoke to the laboring mom on the phone and coaxed her through her contractions.
Because the YMCA was about 45 minutes away, she didn’t have time to change out of her Superwoman costume and went straight to the woman’s home. This is when Reddick also called another CNM, Nicole Shaheen, who lives closer to the hospital, just in case she couldn’t make it there in time.
Sadly, Reddick missed the birth by five minutes, but she did glide into the room with her cape on. She explained in Babble: “They thought it was hilarious and joked that it should become the new uniform for our practice.”
After that, Reddick took over the mother’s postpartum care, although she went on to say the real superhero is the mom she helped:
“Moms really are superheroes. They are responsible for teaching, caring for, and instilling values in the generation to come. I feel truly honored to be part of women’s lives in this way. Things we learn from our mothers are carried on for literally hundreds of years as traditions and values are passed down. A mother’s work is often tedious, repetitive, and much of the time thankless. In addition, it’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years on end! If that doesn’t say superhero, I don’t know what does.”
She’s totally right–we’re all capable of being superheroes in our own way.
