An Offering to the Earth Roots the Child

Photo by Graham Ramsay Ellen Rothman

We buried Macy’s umbilical cord stump just before her first birthday. After some deliberation, we chose to bury it along the path of our favorite hike in the red rock hills behind our home. The tawny rock glowed in the sunset as we dug a hole at the base of a lone piñon tree. The spiral grain of the old wood twists skyward, tapering to tortuous branches with scrappy green foliage. Just beyond the tree, the ground drops away, tumbling haphazardly over strewn red rocks to the desiccated creek bed several hundred feet below. The creek has left a sinuous scar in the plain, winding first this way and then doubling back. Three red mesas define the vista, and on a very clear day, the snowy caps of mountains hundreds of miles in the distance are barely visible on the horizon.

In Navajo tradition, the umbilical cord stump that falls off during an infant’s first few weeks of life harks back to the powerful physical connection between mother and child before birth. By burying the dried stump, Navajo families forge a connection between Mother Earth and the new child. The buried stump roots the child to the physical world, and children take on the characteristics of the particular spot that the parents have chosen. If the family needs a weaver, for example, they may bury the stump near the loom.

A Life No Less Real
My husband, Carlos, and I have been living on the Navajo Reservation for the past five years, working as pediatricians in a small rural clinic. We chose the spot for Macy’s cord carefully, and we visit the tree every time we pass.

When we first considered taking a job with the Indian Health Service, we saw the experience as an opportunity for adventure. We wanted to try something new, and we envisioned our stint on the reservation as a brief interlude before returning to more established paths of professional success. We signed on for an initial two years and anticipated staying perhaps a third year at the most. It was with a sense of wild abandon that we packed our red Jeep and headed west down the Mass Pike for the last time.

Our families initially feared that our job choice reflected a casual disdain for our years of training and education. They would have been much more understanding had we enrolled in a prestigious fellowship program. But, gradually, acceptance supplanted disbelief, and our families grew to appreciate the challenges and opportunities afforded by our work setting.

Our stay has long exceeded our initial plans. Now, with Macy nearing school age and a second baby on the way, our families make no secret of their interest in having us move closer to home. “In a way, the last years have been an escape from reality. Now you will have to decide what you really want to do with your lives,” my father-in-law said to me recently.

The comment made me realize how much my perspective has changed in the past years. The allure of the frontier with all its inherent stereotypes—escape, adventure, danger, and even lawlessness—attracted me at first. Working in an underserved Native community would be undeniably admirable and good—tikkun olam, in the Jewish tradition—a work that heals the world. But over time, my adventure gradually became my regular life. And I found that I loved it. Not because it made me feel good about myself or because I felt I had finally escaped the academic grindstone, but because I found the daily experience of being responsible for the health of a community to be awe-inspiring and profound and meaningful.

Daily Richness
Far from the escape I originally imagined, our life on the reservation is both more complex and more rewarding than I anticipated. Working in our small community has afforded the opportunities to create small outreach programs that have a direct and appreciable impact. A few students who participated in my teen mentorship program will graduate from college this spring, and I periodically catch kids wearing helmets I distributed through my all-terrain vehicle safety intervention. Through our work in the clinics and the ER, we have gotten to know families well. At the same time, policies we initiate at the clinic can affect health care community-wide. The quiet lifestyle affords a family focus that I cherish. I work full-time, but feel that I am a full-time mother and partner as well.

As a mother, perhaps even more specifically as the mother of a daughter, I want to build a life that my children can admire. The umbilical cord is as much the connection of the mother to the child as the child to the mother. Every time I pass Macy’s piñon tree, I am reminded of the physical bond that now exists between Mother Earth, Macy, and myself. I hope that we will remain rooted, I through Macy and Macy through me, in this experience as we forge a new and unimagined life.

—Ellen Rothman, HMS ’98, practices in northern Arizona on the Navajo Reservation.

The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Harvard Medical School, its affiliated institutions, or Harvard University.

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