Tag: nursology

I am the daughter of a nurse.

My father, a veteran of World War II, suffered a head injury that left him unable to work. My mother, an immigrant nurse from Germany, became our family’s provider, returning to work when I was just three years old. She took a job in Labor and Delivery at one of the Catholic hospitals in our town. It was 1954. Women were having many babies, and the hospital was short-staffed. She worked the night shift.

After two weeks, exhausted and overwhelmed, she went to the Director of Nursing, Sister Grace Marie—a Sister of Charity of Cincinnati—and told her she needed to quit. She had no one to care for me at night. But Sister Grace Marie simply looked at my mother and said, “Bring her with you.” This was in the days before the Joint Commission.

And so, I grew up sleeping on the green leather couch in the nurse’s lounge on Labor and Delivery at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.

The young nursing sisters—nuns in formation—were sent from their Motherhouse and college in Cincinnati to do their clinical rotations at “Good Sam.” At night, when my mother was busy tending to patients, the nursing sisters would pick me up, careful not to wake me, and carry me into the delivery room. If I stirred, I would hear their gentle whispers:

“Here comes the baby.”

And then I would watch, eyes wide with wonder, as a powerful woman pushed life into the world. The baby, slick with vernix, would arrive with a cry, greeted by the steady voice of the nurse coaching the mother, guiding her through the final effort. The mother, the nurse, and even the baby seemed to respond to one another’s voices—bursts of relief, joy, exhaustion, laughter.

The scent of amniotic fluid, the rhythm of contractions, the grunts of effort, the shouts of triumph—these sounds and sensations settled deep inside me, as if they had always belonged there. The women surrounding me—laboring mothers, my own mother, the nursing sisters, the lay nurses—were powerful. They held life in their hands. They spoke with authority, moved with purpose, and yet, they were tender, reassuring, steadfast.

I wanted to be with them. I wanted to be like them.

Nursing was not just my mother’s work; it was the very air I breathed. It was a way of being, a way of knowing, a way of witnessing the world. I was nurse-identified before I even had the words to explain what that meant.

To be nurse-identified is to recognize nursing not just as a profession, but as an epistemology—a way of knowing through presence, through care, through the radical act of being with another in their most vulnerable moments. It is to understand that knowledge is co-created in the intimate spaces between bodies, between breaths, between hands that soothe and hands that catch new life. It is to live in relationship with others, knowing that healing is as much about human connection as it is about science.

Long before I was a nurse, I belonged to nursing.

And I still do.