Looking back, looking forward...

Happy New Year!

It's been a huge year for me.

It's a year that found my motherhood in a new set of struggles I've never had before - trying to balance work and parenting, recognizing some of the specific challenges that my children face, finding new ways to meet them where they are and accept them for who they are while trying to give them tools to enrich their lives.

It's been a year that saw my marriage stretched thin and bounce back, in which I found myself a place of independence within the context of this family of five, while forging new connections with each of its members.

It took me from beginning midwifery student to primary under supervision. It took me from knowing I had the inner strength to proceed through urgent situations to witnessing myself being strong in them. It changed me deeply and irreversibly.

Each opportunity to be with a woman finding new places of strength inside herself made me more honored to be a woman.

Each moment of wonder at a baby's emergence made me more reverent of this process through which we begin our lives.

Each birth which required intervention that the hands of an ancient midwife would not have been able to access made me more thankful to live in a time and place where we can access life-saving technology both at home and in hospital.

It's all managed to increase my ability to live in the grey area, to let integrity, tenacity, and vulnerability lay side by side inside of me, to honor the uncertainties of life and birth alongside the expected and the joy.

What an expansive year, and yet, it all felt normal. It all just happened. It was simply the life I was living. Other people would remark on it, and I'd be speechless, feeling an internal shrug. It was what it was.

Looking into 2011 I see a busy year ahead of me, a time to finish checking off all the boxes toward becoming a licensed midwife, not only in paperwork, but more importantly in skills and capabilities. I have a deadline of finishing all my required experiences by December 1 if I am to sit my exams in February 2012 as I aim to do. (Don't tell my kids, but I hope to celebrate the completion of my requirements with a family trip to Disneyland.) I have another Utah internship scheduled, which I am 90% sure I will proceed with. I have homeschooling children. I have preceptors I remain dedicated to helping as much as I can, which will never equal the amount that they have helped me. I have my 10th wedding anniversary, the 4th anniversary of the first birth I attended, and a few milestone birthdays in the family. And I have a feeling it's going to be even bigger than the past year, and that the year will go by just like this one - charging through it til the end, until I look back on it in amazement of how full and life-changing it was.