When I began my life as a midwife, I started in the traditional model of apprenticeship. An older, very experienced midwife whom I revered took me under her wing. I would do anything to help at a birth and was often given the task of cleaning up. I was young. I wasn’t tainted by financial gain. I spent a lot of money in gas, driving the midwife to births (this was in Israel where gas is $4.00 a gallon), and it wouldn’t have occurred to me in a thousand years to ask for compensation. When I heard, years later, the midwife had gotten divorced, I mourned the loss of my innocence. I had thought she was perfect.