Sabbatical. Time to heal.

I've been mostly absent from blogging largely because I've wanted to blog nothing but this post, but have been unable to start on it until now. I feel simultaneously as though I have a space in my life that has been blown wide open, large and empty, and that this space looms with fullness and intensity.

I wrapped up my apprenticeship at the end of last year, and as it came to a close, I was suddenly shaken from my longstanding belief that I would seamlessly move from apprentice to midwife. Shaken from denial, really, of so many things... denial that I was capable of working that hard forever, that I was still being the sort of mother I aimed to be, that my children were weathering my work well, that I wasn't missing out on that much, that I was doing the right thing.

A birth came at rush hour on Friday, just as I was arriving to a community Shabbat dinner with my children: our first attempt at making new friends at our new synagogue. Scott was an hour away via BART. My sitter was an hour away given rush hour traffic and the fact that we were so newly moved that I hadn't found one in our new neighborhood. I was a half hour away from the birth. On my first call regarding the birth, the mama was already pushing. I was not going to make it to assist the midwife. A mom I recognized from the preschool, that I had met once, got out of the car next to me with her kids. I asked her if she had a sitter that lived nearby that I could call. I told her what was happening. She offered to take my kids to the dinner for the hour until Scott could arrive. I accepted. We exchanged names and phone numbers, I introduced my children, and I left. I made it to the birth about 15 minutes before the baby arrived.

The next week, I didn't get called to a birth because upon a first phone contact with the midwife, we had a major breakdown of communication. While I was going through my head ideas of how I could find childcare faster to get to the birth faster to help her out sooner, she thought my hesitation meant I didn't want to go because I was with my kids. I was crushed - not only disappointed to miss the birth, but hurt about the way the miscommunication had gone.

I realized the reason it had hurt so much was that I had always put so much effort into getting to births fast, and that at the moment that the miscommunication occurred, the ideas I was having about expediting childcare were all just as inappropriate as the choice I had made a week prior. In our miscommunication, I saw that she viewed wanting to stay home with my children as a more reasonable reaction for me to have than desperately scrambling to find shoddy childcare situations to shave 45 minutes off an arrival time - despite my reliable track record, despite the fact that I had not once given anyone reason to believe that I would hesitate to attend a birth for any personal reason. Dear God were my priorities askew. What a wake-up call.

And if that was a startling realization, even greater was the realization no matter what I did, there would always be sacrifices to be made one way or another toward midwifery or toward motherhood. Of course I knew that already, I had just never realized how deep, important, and mutually exclusive those sacrifices would have to be. I started to think, perhaps my standards for the kind of midwife I want to be and the kind of mother I want to be are not compatible.

Perhaps they're not. Or perhaps I am too burnt out right now to think otherwise.

2011 chewed me up and spit me out. Largely, I have no one and nothing to blame but myself. I signed up to take on a second apprenticeship despite seeing clearly on the calendar how busy my first was about to get. I signed up to go to a busy birth center. I charged forward even when each midwife who knew me well asked me if I was handling it all okay. I was handling all quite well, actually, but in retrospect, I should have seen it coming, because this is how I always am: calm, clear, and effective during crisis - burnt to a fragile crisp after it's resolved.

Yes, I made the choice to pack my time full with apprenticeship opportunities. Still, I could not have foreseen how 2011 would unfold in terms of births. I attended enough complicated births to last most midwives several years. Of 44 births I personally attended this year, 19 had complications ranging from postpartum hemorrhage to events so strange I have no corroboration for them in literature or anecdote. I also was a part of the prenatal and postpartum care for 16 other clients whose births I did not attend either because I was out of town at the birth center or because they transferred care to the hospital before the start of labor and thus didn't have the usual 3-person birth team. Two of these sixteen clients had normal homebirths; for the other fourteen, I had varying levels of stress regarding their complications as I was updated from the midwife and/or student who did attend to them during their transfer or during the birth. (This is far different than being present during complications, but it is still significant to my stress levels over the year.) This is not normal. Generally, we see minor, easily managed complications in about 25% of births and more stressful ones in perhaps 5% of births. For my 2011, it was 55% overall. About half of those were scary (23% of my 44, 21% of all 60).

As 2011 was coming to a close, it was clear that I needed a break. I talked to Mason and Mollie about the plans to bring me on as a junior midwife, told them I was considering quitting, and we came to the conclusion that a sabbatical was in order. The plan was made that I would take all of 2012 off call. The relief I felt revealed to me just how heavy the weight I had been carrying was.

Of course, it wasn't a complete vacation from midwifery - I still had my schoolwork to finish and my licensing exam to sit. I took the exam in February and passed!

Another relief, and another door opened wider for my children. If I were single and had no children I would have needed a break after that crazy year. Being that I am married and have three children, I not only needed a break, I needed a reunion. I've been soaking up my kiddos.

It's already becoming clear to me that I need more than 2012 off. I recently said to a new friend, "Midwives are notoriously unreliable to anyone except their clients." It's true, and I want to be reliable to my children.

My son is still little. I read Frye with newborn D nursing in my arms, I started attending clinic when he was six months old, I started attending births when he was eleven months old, and I have been so busy that I have missed out on more than half of his life. While I completely understand how this works well for some families, it is not working for me. It is not what I had ever intended for myself in motherhood or intended for my children. Time to start being myself again.

That's the crux, isn't it? I am a midwife. I am a mom. Like my love for my children, these identities overlap in my heart and fill me. But unlike love and identities, time can't overlap, and I have to choose what to do with mine. Right now, I am choosing to focus on my family.

A wise friend told me that this year my job is to forgive myself. I appreciated that, and then I edited it. This year, my job is to heal. I can't regret the choices I've made over the past few years. I am not angry at myself. I have learned so much and been a part of so many wonderful experiences I could never regret. Nor could I bring myself to regret the traumatic experiences - in them, I learned, and I mattered. And even though I have questioned it, I do not regret now taking this time for my family. I'm quite certain that I did the right thing with my time over the past few years, and that now the right thing is to shift gears. I don't regret, and yet it hurts. I missed them and I still miss them. I feel sore and raw from some of the choices I have made and some of the experiences I did not choose. Sometimes the right path is the hard path, the painful path. This is the year I heal.

The raw heart of motherhood

I know I'm not alone in seeing the world differently after becoming a parent. Watching the news becomes a heartache in a new way as you know every person suffering is someone's child. Even fiction becomes different. For the longest time, I couldn't watch what were previously my favorite crime shows. Violence in any form was hard to stomach, even pretend violence.

Recently, I read The Hunger Games trilogy and it occurred to me about a third of the way through the first book that I would have already put it down a few years ago. I won't give you any spoilers, but the book is full of unthinkable situations that require great sacrifice and bravery. Mental anguish and grisly violence are to be expected throughout. It's also one of those terrifying dystopian novels that imagines a world much worse than ours yet so like ours that it's impossible to ignore not only the possibility that we could end up there but also the ways in which our world, our government, our culture are already cruelly inhumane and dishearteningly difficult to change. Orwell's Oceania and Huxley's The World State pale in comparison both to the horrors of Panem and, more subtly, to the similarities between Panem and 21st century America. I found the book utterly chilling, compelling, and rushed right from the first to the next to the last, loving the humanity juxtaposed with the inhumanity, the universals present in the differences, and joltingly disturbed by the brutality.

It opened up that raw heart of motherhood. By the time I finished the third, I was mired in thoughts of how I can protect my children from living the horrors present in our own world. Of how I and they can help improve the world so that other people - other people's children - don't have to live these horrors either, and barring that, of how we can stop hatred and violence from escalating. Of how no matter how peaceful we can make this world, there is no protecting them. Death, loss, and successful ordeals are themes threading through even the most charmed life.

Today, I took my kids to a playground with trees and bushes surrounding half the park, making for a nice pretend wood. They played "Woodland Children." I found myself proud of their inventiveness. I was surprised by Eliana's knowledge of what it might take to survive in the forest. And then, their plots and comments were enough to make me place them in Panem, to imagine Eliana in the Hunger Games, to grate at the rawness that the books had opened up inside of me and personalize it. I tried to ignore them for a while and turn away from this discomfort, but as I began to listen again, I was simultaneously relieved and disturbed to discover that Eliana has a ruthless streak that would give her top-tier odds for survival in any circumstance. I'm not surprised by this, but it was a new perspective on it, and a welcome one given the concerns brought to a head by reading these books.

What painful and lovely gifts The Hunger Games has given me, then: to recognize even more greatly the need for Tikkun Olam, repairing our world; to appreciate again how good our life is; to recognize the strengths of my children; to face fully the inability to keep them from harm or pain. I am glad I did not open the first book when it was published but waited until my mama heart had healed enough to be able to be opened again so that I could feel that rawness in new places, and learn.