Half way through

Wednesday July 22, 2009 11:39am

I haven’t been to a birth in a week. This is mostly okay with me, but I’m starting to stress about it a little bit. It is not about the “numbers” (the number of births I need to attend as a primary midwife before I qualify to sit for licensure) because, technically, I have all my numbers. But I don’t feel “good” about all those numbers, so I’ve been sort of replacing some births that I counted as primary at home in the States with births I’m doing as primary here because I feel like I was more autonomous at the birth and would prefer to count it toward my license instead. This probably makes very little sense, and is probably very unnecessary, but I’m noticing that it has felt important to me to do. So, if there are only 3 births from home that I feel good about counting, added to the births from Senegal that I want to count, added to the births that I’ve done here so far, I’d like to do 4 more births here before I go. Which is totally doable. Before coming to Bali, I expected to attend on the order of 20 to 30 births as primary while I was here. So far, in three weeks, I’ve attended 8. That doesn’t mean that I won’t get to 20 or 30 births, but it doesn’t look great. This is at least partly, if not entirely, my own doing. If I wanted to spend every night at the clinic, I’d have done a lot more. I don’t live next to the clinic so its not easy for me to get to a birth if its happening quickly, and I’m not as “in” with the Indonesian midwives as other volunteers so I don’t always get called. And Bali is distracting. In Senegal, we were in such a remote place, that there was actually NOTHING to do but lurk at a clinic, read, or sleep, and the midwives called us on one of our two phones and we all collectively decided who would go. Things work differently here. And there’s so much more to do. Cafes, bookstores, monkey forests, boyfriends all luring me away from my intended purpose here. So, starting tomorrow, I’m back to hanging around the clinic like a bad smell.

I’m trying to decipher what it is that I want to come away from this trip with. What is my educational goal? The numbers are not the motivating factor. If anything, it’s the remaining sense of greenness I am seeking to scrub away, the wondering when and how I’m going to feel Ready if being nearly qualified to sit for my license hasn’t produced that sense of confidence. I feel more like a midwife now than I did when I left for Senegal, more like one even since I returned only 7 months ago, but I still don’t feel qualified to be solely responsible as a primary caregiver. I’ve mostly made my peace with the fact that, once licensed, I probably *still* won’t feel fully qualified and have resolved to spend my first few years working only in team with other midwives whose experience and qualification I trust, because two heads are better than one and because I am not going to be the foolhardy youngster charging full speed ahead straight out of the gate. That’s not my style.

The importance that I gain that confidence feels so urgent because it’s not just me I’m concerned about. Of course, my ego worries that I could be shamed publicly, could lose the respect of the midwifery community (if I can gain it in the first place), or lose the respect of my friends and family if I ended up in a situation that I couldn’t handle and had bad outcomes. But what about those outcomes? They translate to people. And the ego pales in comparison to the weight of my conscience if I had something tragic happen on my watch that could have been prevented if only I had been better prepared. The entire time I’ve been working toward this license I’ve been wondering how I can know what I don’t know, if I don’t know I don’t know it. I cannot afford, spiritually or emotionally, to be caught with my pants down. Further, midwives are a hunted species. If something happens due to ignorance or irresponsibility that reflects on ALL midwives EVERYWHERE. That’s not true for doctors, for firefighters and paramedics, or even police officers. Sure, sometimes individuals are singled out, questioned for negligence or poor training or abuse, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. They have communities who protect them, who advocate for them, who support them. That is not as true for midwives. We stand, for now anyway, more or less alone.

Anyway, I have practical skills I need practice with, like suturing. And they use a lot of herbs here, which is something I have next to no knowledge of. So I stand to gain some skill in those departments over the next few weeks, if I can make nuisance enough of myself to be included. I am, however, still chewing on the question of what I’m really doing here. Honestly, if it weren’t for those last 4 catches, and Kira coming next week, I’d probably just head home. This is not what I was hoping for, and of course it so rarely is. But its so far from what I felt like I was needing. Even writing that, I’m aware of the naivete of the statement. There is what I feel like I need, and then there is what I actually need. And while there are a lot of moments in my life I can point to and say I didn’t get what I WANTED, I don’t know that there is any time I can point to and say I didn’t get what I ultimately needed. So I guess my counsel to myself is that I need to have faith. I need to believe that, while this trip so far has been disappointing on many levels, it has been surprising and wonderful in many other unexpected ways. And even though I may come away with some lingering sense of disappointment overall, as long as I make myself available to it, I’ll get what I need. Even if it’s just 4 more catches.