Anniversary

Last Tuesday marked my one year anniversary at my current midwifery practice. One year later I certainly feel more competent on many days. I don’t cry as much. I get slightly less panicked the day before a call shift. I know which nurses I have to sweet talk and which ones I don’t in order to feel respected. I speak up more at meetings. I started a newsletter and have precepted medical and nursing students. My leadership skills have definitely been recognized by others in my group and I am almost always nominated to head up creative endeavors and any community organizing that needs to be done. The director of a local advanced nursing program has invited me to teach an elective class to her students on literature and medicine. I guess when you write it all down like that, there’s lots to be proud of.
But to be honest, there is still something missing. And I can’t quite put my finger on it. As always, I’m not sure how to tease out the dissatisfied feelings that are coming from my life in general and which are coming directly from my job. I do think, on many days, that I would be happier if only my practice started less inductions, if less women demanded (sobbing and decompensating and pounding their fists into the mattress) epidurals in early labor, and if I was not as responsible for what feels like medical issues that are often outside of my scope of practice. On other days, I am certain I could live with a little more philosophical compromising if I felt the group of midwives I worked with was more cohesive or if my boss was more supportive. And some days I feel like none of this would make any difference at all. That I was not meant to have a full time back breaking job that demanded all of my emotional attention and where sometimes my intuition is rewarded and sometimes it is resented. I think, on those days, maybe I’m supposed to find a way to be a full time artist or videographer or dinner party holder. But then, I know myself better. And I know I am very very willing to give a lot of time and energy and emotion to work that feels right and satisfying. Plus, you’d have to do so much clean up if you were a full time dinner party holder, right? And I hate washing dishes…

I haven’t written for a while and I’ve been thinking a lot about why that might be. I certainly don’t feel nearly as compelled to come home from a call shift or a day at the office and “get it all down” as quickly as possible. Maybe it’s because, as I move further and further into the day to day experience of being a midwife the ability to break up each day into these little vignettes or anecdotes is more challenging. I mean, I still think the stories are unbelievable-I’ve had 3, yes 3, IUFDs, an inverted uterus that came all the way out of the vagina and into my hands and I was lucky enough to catch the baby of one of my best friends and watch her labor and push and make the sounds a woman is supposed to make when she is having a baby-but as time goes on, as I see more patients and deliver more babies, the stories do run together as a whole lived experience; As, my life, really. And writing it all down in a few paragraphs feels like I am compartmentalizing or trivializing it. At the start of my career (and believe me, I still think I am at the start) writing down everything that happened, telling stories, holding someone’s attention and making them laugh…It worked as such a great coping mechanism for all the emotions and hardships one has to deal with in this field. And now, I don’t know. Sometimes, writing about my day feels more like I am giving it away than doing a cathartic sharing.

It reminds me of one of the last monologues in the John Guare play Six Degrees of Separation that Stockard Channing delivers so well as she is sitting at a lunch party with her husband recounting to the other diners the last segment of the story of a homeless man who both lies to and befriends her. It dawns on her that this story she was telling was more than that, more than an anecdote. It’s her life. And as I sit down to write about pregnant teens or self-righteous nurses or unhelpful doctors I can’t help but relate.

Her character says, “…And we turn him into an anecdote, to dine out on, like we're doing right now. But it was an experience. I will not turn him into an anecdote. How do we keep what happens to us? How do we fit it into life without turning it into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punch line you'll mouth over and over, years to come: "Oh, that reminds me of the time that impostor came into our lives. Oh, tell the one about that boy." And we become these human jukeboxes, spilling out these anecdotes. But it was an experience. How do we keep the experience?”

I’m trying to figure that out.