Feb 3, 2013

Fingerprints All Over My Heart
Day 32
To my Friends, Family and the Sisters of My Heart,
In an effort to keep things real, to keep things balanced I am going to share some of my frustrations, my exhaustions, my downright bitchiness that has come to the surface after days of very little sleep. I do so enjoy writing about the really lovely part of midwifery but I want everyone to know (especially aspiring midwives and doulas) that it is not all "goodness and light". The profession inherently produces a lot of deep frustrations and trials and being a student is loaded with hours of logging, paperwork and study. As I write this I want to say that I slept for many hours yesterday and then went to bed at midnight and slept soundly until around 9:45 am. I shed a lot of tension relieving tears as well. It was needed.
We have three interns here and have so many wants and needs between us. In many respects we are still strangers, but they are my sisters and I already love them, and I am sure I will forever. In my heart of hearts, what I envision when women come together is to step away from the Patriarchal model of competition, and embrace a model based on feminine collaboration instead. I find that the old medical model/patriarchal model ideas will creep back in despite my best efforts to change my mindset but at this point aren’t we all a product of that old system? America had made women very competitive and I hate it! I find myself comparing silly little things like “I got less sleep than you” or “You didn’t chart that exactly right” (of course according to my own understanding or opinion of how it should have been charted). Or seeing someone do anything a little different than I and feel a tightening inside my gut of frustration and have to bite my tongue not to add my two cents worth. I do not like this. One of my deepest convictions is that every man and woman deserves autonomy. Being disrespectful of this is not the person I want to be. This is not the midwife I am aiming to become. I am not responsible for anyone’s understanding of a subject and how they choose to manifest that understanding. In fact I am not responsible for anyone’s actions or reactions in any setting or context. I am only responsible for my own actions and reactions and to fulfill my given responsibilities in each particular setting. My entire life I have carried so much guilt for others actions, feelings, reactions, pain, poor decisions, and even the downright evil they perpetrate on others. That all goes back to the fact that I do feel responsible for others…. and I realize that when I say that it comes down to the word FEEL. I am so empathetic… too empathetic. I feel what others are feeling way too clearly for comfort. And so I superimpose myself into a context that is not my responsibility to carry. I am learning that this is not sustainable. That is part of the reason for so many of the really crazy choices and mistakes I have made over the last two years. I wonder if I somehow got "stuck" emotionally because of my abuse beginning in early childhood and then my pregnancy at 14. I used to think it forced me to mature faster than most girls my age, and throughout my life I have felt out of step with many of my peers no matter the setting or age group. I have felt an ancient weariness in my spirit at times, but lately I have felt a deep need to go out and express the teenage girl that is still walking around inside me. Here at Shiphrah I have been charmed by the sweet purity of the midwives spirits, and their lovely calm attitudes inside the birth rooms. It is also my own simplistic way, but I got caught up in a kind of militant “professionalism” in the states and so felt I needed to suppress those kinds of actions when dealing with mamas and babies. Now I find I can simply be me… I can hum and sing to the babies, or the mamas for that matter. I can relax and let the mamas do the work that no one can do for them. I do know it hurts (believe me I KNOW), but I also know that this is their exclusive right to pass through this journey and I am only there as a kind of helper or guide. It is not for me to take this away, it is their rite of passage.
Over the last few days of everyone being so tired because of so many births I have felt cut off in a few conversations when I was trying to say my part. I believe I can be very oversensitive to that kind of thing because of my years of abuse and the silence that I lived in out of guilt and a need to protect my mother and others from the ugliness of it all. I need to learn to take responsibility for my part only, and part of that responsibility is to use my voice to say my part. Indeed in each collaboration of effort we all need to have a voice or it is not a “collaboration” at all. Instead my reaction was to withdraw into sullen bitchiness. That is also not the person I want to be. I need friendship, laughter and fun. I need brightness and cheerfulness. I need soul stirring beauty, words, music and art. Most of all I need to look into the faces of laboring women and help them as they do the work of a lifetime…. I need to reach out and receive life into my hands. I need to catch the joy that issues forth out of their bodies! That is the person I aspire to be. I am Joycatcher. Such an unbelievable honor!