40 Thank You Messages for a Midwife

The thing she actually did

Birth flattens a lot of hours down to about six things you can still remember, and almost none of them are medical. Ask a woman what her midwife did and you will not get a summary of the labour. You will get a sentence. What she said when the trace went odd, the moment she decided to go and get somebody, the fact that she was still there at nine when her shift had finished at eight. That sentence is the card. Write it down before you write anything else, in whatever words you have, and put the rest of the note around it.

If the only line you have is thank you for delivering our beautiful boy, look at what it says. It thanks her for a piece of work that was mostly yours and partly his. She was there for it. She did not do it. What she did was talk to you, decide things fast, and stay. If you are in the US the person you are writing to may be a CNM, a birth centre midwife, or the labour and delivery nurse who never left the room. Same card, same rule.

If you cannot remember her name

Most people cannot. This is the single most common problem with this card and it upsets women far more than they expect it to, because the blank feels like an accusation: she was the most important person in that room and I cannot produce two syllables. That is not what happened to you. You were in labour, memory does not behave in labour, and the woman you are trying to name introduced herself once, eleven hours before the part you actually remember. There are about four ways to fill the blank in and none of them are difficult.

Start with the paperwork, because the name is almost certainly written down somewhere in your house. In the UK it will be in your handheld notes, on the birth record, and on the discharge summary, usually signed at the bottom of the last page. In the US, look at the discharge packet and the birth certificate worksheet. If a midwife did your postnatal visits, she signed the red book every time she came. People shove all of it in a drawer and forget the drawer is a directory.

If the paperwork will not give it up, ring the ward and ask. Give them the date and roughly the time. Wards keep rotas going back years, and who was on with room four on the night of the third of March is an ordinary question with an ordinary answer. For a community midwife, ring the community team instead, give your address and the dates of the visits, and they will tell you who covered you, because they allocate by area and it is written down.

And if none of that works, send it anyway. A card addressed to the maternity unit that says for the midwife who was with us on the night of 3 March, the one who stayed on after her shift finished, will find her. Wards are small. Somebody reads it out at handover and three people say her name at once. The date, the shift, and one identifying detail is plenty. You do not need a surname and you do not need to apologise in the card for not having one.

I once sat at a friend's kitchen table in Dunstable about eleven weeks after her son was born, with a blank card between us and no name to put on it, and she was in a genuinely bad state about it. Claire had been trying to write the thing since the middle of June. We found it on the discharge summary, in a folder in the boot of the car, second sheet, printed rather than signed: Dawn. Once she had the name the card took four minutes, and the line she wrote was the one Dawn had said to her at about four in the morning, which was stop looking at the machine and look at me. Sam is two now. Claire still quotes it, usually to people who did not ask.

The cards all go to the delivery room

Midwifery is not only the birth, but the thank you almost always is. The antenatal midwife who saw you eleven times across eight months and knew exactly what you were frightened of gets nothing. The community midwife who came to the house on day one and day five gets nothing. The student who was there for the entire labour gets nothing. Meanwhile everyone you know sent you a card about the baby, and there are plenty of new baby congratulations messages in the world to choose from.

Write one card if one card is what you have in you. If you have two, the second one is worth more than the first, because nobody else is sending it.

After a straightforward birth

Nothing went wrong. That is the main reason these cards never get written: there is no dramatic bit to hang one on, so the whole thing feels like it does not warrant a stamp. A birth where the plan held and everybody stayed calm still had somebody in the room making it hold. Name the small things, because the small things are what you actually saw.

• You kept saying I was doing it, not that I could do it. I noticed the difference at the time and I have thought about it since.
• You watched me, not the monitor. Every time you came back in you looked at my face before you looked at anything else.
• Everything went the way it was supposed to, which I now understand was partly because you were quietly making sure it did.
• You put a cup of tea down next to me at some point and I have no idea when. Thank you for the tea and for the eleven other things I did not notice.
• You told me I had about twenty minutes and to drink my tea while I still could. You were right about the twenty minutes.

After a long or difficult labour

The longer it went on, the more likely it is that you had three midwives and can only picture one. Say which part she was there for. If you genuinely cannot separate them in your head, write to the ward and describe all three; they will sort out between themselves who was who.

• Thirty-one hours, and you had the middle of it. When I said I could not do it any more you said I was already doing it. I have repeated that sentence to two friends since.
• You never once looked at your watch where I could see you. I do not know whether that was deliberate. It helped.
• When I lost track of what was happening you gave me the plan in three sentences, and then you gave it to me again an hour later without me having to ask.
• Thank you for the low lights, the closed door, and for telling whoever came in at four in the morning to come back later.
• I stopped being frightened when you sat down. Nothing had changed except that you sat down.

After an emergency or a caesarean

We are going to theatre now. Whatever she said in the minute after that is the bit you kept, because what people take from these births is almost never the surgery. It is who was talking. If she made a call early, write that down plainly: acting before anyone else in the room was worried is the part of her job she is measured on and the part nobody ever mentions back to her.

• You went and got the consultant before anyone else in the room was worried. My son is fine, and I know what order things happened in.
• Thank you for talking to me the entire way down that corridor. I could not see anything but I could hear you.
• In theatre you stood by my head and described what was happening as it happened. Nobody had warned me that anyone would do that, and it is the reason I was not terrified.
• You came back the next day when you were not on shift to go through it with me. I had questions I did not know how to ask yet and you waited for them.

For the community midwife who came to the house

She saw you in your own front room with the curtains half shut, on day one and day five, in the state you were actually in. She weighed the baby, looked at your stitches, asked how you were sleeping and waited for the real answer. These visits get almost no cards and they are the ones women describe in detail years afterwards.

• You came to the house five times and every single time you asked how I was before you asked about the baby. You were the only person who did that.
• Day five, the half past nine feed, you sat down on our front room floor and did not rush. That is the visit I still think about.
• Thank you for weighing him on the kitchen table and saying out loud that the number was fine, because I would not have believed it otherwise.
• You noticed I had not eaten. You said so kindly and then you did not leave until I had.

For the antenatal midwife you saw for months

I said at the top to name the moment. There is no moment here. Eleven appointments across eight months, a folder of blood pressure readings, and the only true sentence you can write is the vague one: thank you for looking after us. I still think naming the moment is the rule, and I would give the same advice tomorrow. I also think the vague sentence is the right card to send this particular woman, and I have never found a version of the rule that covers both.

• Eleven appointments over eight months and you remembered every time what we had talked about last. Thank you for looking after us.
• You wrote down what I said in my own words instead of the shortened version. I read it back months later and it was still mine.
• At the twenty week check you asked a second question you did not have to ask. It changed what happened afterwards.
• Thank you for the appointment where nothing happened and I cried anyway, and for letting it take as long as it took.

After a home birth

Two midwives, usually, arriving at some unreasonable hour into your kitchen and your kettle and your smell of house. Write to both if you can name both. The thing worth thanking her for here is often a judgement rather than a sentence, and she will know which judgement you mean.

• You arrived at ten past two, took your coat off, and the temperature of the whole house changed. Thank you for the way you came in.
• Thank you for trusting the plan for longer than I did, and for being straight with me about the point where you would have stopped trusting it.
• You cleaned our bathroom before you left. We were not going to notice for hours and you did it anyway.

For the student midwife

She was there for eleven hours and her name is on none of the paperwork. Students get left off this card almost every time, and they are very often the one who never left the room, because the qualified midwife had two other women down the corridor and the student had you. If you know her first name, that is enough to get a card to her through the university or the ward.

• You were there for the whole of it and your name is not on any of the paperwork. It should be. Thank you for staying.
• You held my leg for two hours and told me what your favourite part of the course was. I have no idea whether that was training or kindness and it does not matter.
• Thank you for coming to find us on the ward the next morning. You did not have to and you were the only one who did.

When it went wrong

Some of you came home without a baby, or spent weeks going up and down to a neonatal unit with a photograph on your phone instead of a child in the house. Midwives carry those births and they hear back about almost none of them. The worry that a card would reopen something for her is understandable and it is usually wrong, and a card from you is not a burden to receive. Use your daughter's name if she had one. Say what the midwife did, not what happened.

• You said her name. You were the first person who did and you kept doing it. Thank you.
• Thank you for not filling the silence. You stayed in the room and you let it be quiet.
• You took the photographs and the handprints without asking me to decide anything that day. I have them now. I could not have chosen then.
• Six weeks on the neonatal unit and you were the one who told me I was allowed to touch him. I would have waited to be given permission and you knew that.

If you are also writing to people around you rather than to the unit, sympathy messages for the loss of a baby covers the harder side of that.

From the partner

Hardly anyone writes this card and it is a different card. You were in the room with no role and nobody looking at you, and somebody either gave you a job or left you standing there. The register is flatter, more factual, and it can be short. It also lands, because she has almost certainly never had one.

• I was the one standing there with nothing to do and you gave me something to do. You told me to hold the back of her hand and exactly where to stand. I did that for six hours. I still do not know whether it helped her, but it stopped me being useless, which I think was the point.
• You explained it to me twice, once fast and once properly, and you did not talk over my head to the room while I stood in it.
• Nobody was looking at me and there was no reason anyone should have been. You looked at me once and asked whether I had eaten. I have not forgotten it.
• Thank you for telling me what was about to happen a few seconds before it happened, every time. It is the only reason I stayed useful.

Short lines for a card the whole ward will see

A card that goes up on a staff room wall gets read by forty people, most of whom were not there. Keep it to two or three lines and put in enough detail that the right person recognises herself in it.

• Night shift, 3 March, room four. You know what you did. Thank you.
• Thank you from the couple in the corner room who could not stop crying. You were very kind to us.
• We were the twenty past six section on the 14th. Thank you to everyone who was in that theatre.
• You are clearly short staffed and you were good to us anyway. We could see both of those from the bed.

Where to send it, and what else is worth doing

Address it to the ward or the team rather than the hospital in general, and put the date and the shift somewhere on the envelope or the first line. Post arriving at a maternity unit with no date on it goes in a pile. Post with a date on it gets matched to a person.

A card pinned up in a staff room does more than you think. It is read by everyone who walks past the kettle for about a month, including people having a bad week who were nowhere near your birth. Units are short of good news about themselves.

If you want it to count professionally as well as personally, write separately to the head of midwifery or the matron, or use the trust's formal feedback route. In the US that is the nurse manager, the unit director, or patient experience. Name her, name the date, and say specifically what she did. A written compliment goes on a record and gets quoted in appraisals and revalidation. A card on a wall does not. Do both if you can be bothered; they are not doing the same job.

Food for the ward is traditional and it disappears. Biscuits, a box of chocolates, anything that survives being opened at three in the morning by whoever is on nights. Expensive personal gifts are a different matter: most trusts and hospitals cap what an individual member of staff can accept and require anything over a small amount to be declared, so a generous present tends to land her in an administrative problem. That is the only reason to keep it small.

Turn it into a group card

There is usually more than one person who wants to sign this one. You, your partner, whoever was sitting in the corridor, and often your mother, who has her own strong view of the midwife and has been waiting for somewhere to put it. Four hands on one card also survives a staff room wall better than one.

A free thank you ecard works because everyone writes their own line into the same card and you send one link. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, add a photo of the baby if you want to, and print it if the ward would rather have paper. Units almost never find out how it turned out, so the photo is not a vanity thing. If you are stuck on your own line, what to write in a thank you card has the general version of the problem.

If an obstetrician or an anaesthetist was involved they get a separate card, and thank you messages for a doctor is the right register for that one. In a US hospital where the labour and delivery nurses did most of what this article describes, thank you messages for a nurse is closer. Post it so it lands on a weekday. Nights get the post at handover.