Away I go

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, —
No higher than the soul is high.

       -from Renasence by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cub has interlinked his arm with mine, his eyes glued to Toy Story and his other hand picking individual pieces of popcorn out of the bowl, popping them in his mouth. It's movie night and we've been having a somewhat serious discussion about whether or not Buzz Lightyear can really fly. I slowly begin to ease my arm out of his, intending to run upstairs to pour a glass of wine, and he clinches his arm tighter around mine.

"I'll be right back, bud. I just want to go get a drink."
"But you can't go because I love you.
"I love you too and I'll be right back."
"You'll be right back?"
"I'll be right back."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"Ok. Hurry."

I slip out of the room and start up the stairs, making it only a few steps before my whole body is racked by sobs.

Edmonton isn't far and it's just too far. He's slept in my bed almost every single night since the day he was born and starting in January I'll be blowing him good night kisses over Facetime.

My heart is broken.

I'm going to Edmonton. I had an opportunity to stay, with the risk that I'd have to go to later, and after weighing out all the options I've decided to go. It was my choice. And I'm so fucking sad about it. My friend told me once that when we make a choice, no matter how right it is, we might also need to mourn the nonchoice, the thing that we didn't choose. So, this is mourning. I'm trying to enjoy him so much, noting all the little things that he does, the things I take for granted when I see him every day, but if I look too closely at him I burst into tears.

I know I can do it. That we can do it. If I doubted us, or this, I wouldn't go. Pursuing this dream is expensive, in so many ways, and I am operating on blind faith. Faith in myself, in my son, in his dad, in midwifery, and in good highway driving conditions.

The end of April cannot come soon enough.

Placement (with a capital p)

I came home early today to drink coffee and read poetry under the warm covers of my bed. I read Starlings in Winter by Mary Oliver at least ten times until the loveliness could sink in. Once it did, I shared it with my friends and then I turned on The Walking Dead, which felt somewhat blasphemous but totally worth it.

Lately, there is much anxiety in the air over placement. It's a strange feeling, to have your fate rest so solidly in someone else's hands. Okay, so fate is a rather large word for a four-month, second-year midwifery placement. It's just toes in the water, getting our feet wet, watching and learning and hopefully inserting a speculum or two. If we're really lucky, a four-handed catch. I really have no idea, to be honest, so I'm just throwing a few things out there. There is a lot of talk about Placement and little hard data to go from. I guess that's the thing about being only the second year of a brand new midwifery program. We'll figure it out.

As for me, I've offered to go to Edmonton for this placement in a sort of "only if I have to" kind of spirit. As soon as I hit send on the email I was filled with this feeling.. regret, guilt, sadness. I'm not sure what it was, really. It would mean four months away from Cub. PB has, somewhat begrudgingly, said that he would keep him here for the duration of my placement, and we'd choreograph an elaborate dance to ensure that I could see him once in a while (or a little more often than that) and PB could hopefully get a few much needed, and much deserved, breaks. There is this sort of loose guideline that says if you go away for a placement then you can stay here for the rest of them, which is nice but not written in stone. Maybe you can stay for all three, maybe you'll have to go away twice. No one really knows. And so I told them that if I have to go, send me now, let me get it done for the shortest placement when it would cause the least disruption to all of our lives (in theory).

The guilt, though? Oh, it's heavy. Guilt because four months away from the little love of my life? I can't stand it. And here I am, offering this up to my program adviser instead of forcing her to pry it from my cold dead hands.

Either way, it will be hard. I know that. The thing I am focusing on is that no matter where I am, Cub will be well cared for by someone who loves him thiiiiiis much. And in case you didn't know this already, that's a heckuva lot of love.

World's Cutest "Firefighter Guy"

attitude of gratitude

Midwifery school is this fabulous thing. It is always interesting. Yet, when I sit down here with the white screen searing my retinas, I often find it hard to think of one interesting thing to say. So, today, a short list of things I am grateful for. I used to have a really good gratitude practice, saving little notes every day to an app in my phone. However, a year ago my phone died and took all my little notes with it. I've had a hard time renewing the practice since then, but I've got a new app now and I'm being grateful when I remember to be.

Today I am grateful for:

1. Cub's whisper, every morning when he's just waking, to cover him up because his toes are "freeeezing!"
2. Calgary in the fall. I couldn't plan more perfect weather if I tried.
3. Reminders that my parents were here and that they still take care of me: a fridge full of leftovers, a bookshelf that needs to be assembled, a kitchen light that works.
4. A clean car that PB carefully detailed on the weekend, just because.
5. Midwifery. Duh.

 I could go on forever but five feels like a good number for today.

a little wobbly

I am not a natural athlete and yet here I sit, proud owner of a Bachelor of Education with a specialty in Physical Education. My goal was never to be a P.E. teacher, all I ever wanted to teach was English, to spend my days talking Shakespeare and poetry and all the nuance of language, and yet I found myself taking the P.E. path to get there.

I learned, somewhat begrudgingly, how to do a lay-up during a basketball skills class that involved timed drills, which correlated directly to a letter grade. I bought myself a basketball, a sort of flat one from a bin at Canadian Tire, and walked every evening down to the school near my house to practice my rubber band technique. This was back in the olden days and so sometimes PB would come with me, providing a a carefully calculated combination of encouragement and ridicule. I think I got a B in that course. B for Basketball, which was a fairly big accomplishment that still stung when lined up against my other, more typical grades.

I had a ton of similar experiences during the six years I spent working towards that degree. I had to learn how to do a jump serve in volleyball, how to maneuvre a lacrosse stick so the ball wouldn't fall out, and which side of the field hockey stick to use. Not to say I learned of those skills particularly well, but I knew what I was meant to be doing and I generally enjoyed myself, which was all I really cared about anyway. More importantly than that, I learned how to deliver a lesson, to speak in public, to feign enough confidence that it stopped being feigned. Despite the fact that I don't intend to ever go back to teaching, or at least not in the capacity I was trained in, getting that degree was completely worthwhile.

And so, here I am a few years later and I'm back in the position of feigning confidence, of practicing skills in my spare time to prepare for an evaluation of them. These skills feel so much weightier. Certainly, no one's health depended on how many lay-ups I could do in a minute, but taking vitals has a little more oomph to it. And that's really only the very tip of the midwifery skills iceberg. The thing is, I've learned to trust myself to learn skills with practice. If I take enough blood pressures, eventually I'll know how to take a blood pressure. Eventually I won't need to spend so much time fiddling with the nob, or adjusting things just so. That part of my motor memory will kick in and away we'll go. 120/80, please. I can trust that. Eventually I will learn the curves of a belly and my hands will go, finding the poles, the spine, the ballotable head and the firm round bum. I can trust that too.

And yet, these skills, especially in the context of a lab, make me feel insecure in a way that I haven't done in a long time. I don't know if it's the skills that scare me, if it's the immediacy of placement or the still slight doubts I have about my place in all of this, but skills labs make me feel all vulnerable and exposed.

This week was a doozy. The best I could articulate it, after my skills lab left me in tears on Monday, is that I felt wobbly with my myself. I could have wobbled the other way, back to terra firma and the general confidence I feel in all skills being master-able. Yet, a push to practice an amniotomy at the end of a long lab plus a few kind words from my professor and there I was with warm, salty liquid leaking from my eyes before I had a chance to stop it.

It's amazing though, the ways this program takes care of you. A few texts and later that evening I had a small group of women in my living room drinking tea (ok, so it was wine for me), bitching, and practicing leopold's on a doll tucked under a blanket.

The rest of the week dragged. Oh, did it ever. There was a midterm somewhere in there, and an assignment I finished in the class before it was due. Plus a practice OSCE that had me all worked up for (surprise!) no reason at all. But the night before the midterm was spent in a cozy study session, eating pizza and discovering that our stethoscopes can be adjusted (turns out my bell side wasn't actually broken, who knew!). And after the midterm my professor checked on me, in a way that was equal parts embarrassing and reassuring to a stoic soul like myself. And, last night, at the end of the long week, almost all of us sitting in a big circle eating my favourite vegan meal, The Glory Bowl, and feeling grateful. Or I was, anyway, for the community this program has given me.

So, I will learn it all. If I was ever able to drag myself to the school on dreary island evenings to practice lay-ups, a skill I never had and never will have any interest in mastering, I can practice taking blood pressure until my (poor "client"s) fingers fall off. Because there is someone, in fact I can think of many someones, who would roll up their sleeve and stick their arm out to let me practice as many times as I needed until I got the hang of it. And boy, am I grateful for that.

the intricate exacting particulars

In midwifery school we talk a lot about self care. We talk about the things we do to take care of ourselves, when our selves are always so busy caring for others. We talk about the importance of good nutrition, regular exercise, a good night's sleep. There's more to it than that though, there are things we do for our souls. Some people take long hot baths or dance in their kitchen to Abba. Some people make things, in kitchens and workshops. Some people sit down to play piano or climb to the tops of mountains, eyes and soul open in wonder.

I read poetry. I read it aloud to myself, or to Cub if he stops to listen. I sit in the bath with A Book of Luminous Things and turn over the words of "Wild Geese" for the thousandth time. That Mary Oliver knows how to write a poem. Reading poetry is the singular thing I do that brings me back to myself. Before you ask, no, I don't write poems. I don't write much. And novels are too daunting for the few precious spare minutes I find myself with. Short stories I can get behind, have you read Olive Kitteridge lately?

But poems have my heart. Lately I've been stuck on this one. I came across it by chance a couple of years ago, while I was pregnant with Cub, and it visits me all the time. It casually opens the door in that small part of my brain (or is it my heart?) where it lives to say hello, and stops me in my tracks every time.

In the spirit of self care, here it is.

The Spirit is Too Blunt an Instrument

The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body's ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.

Anne Stevenson, from Poems 1955-2005

This is it.

My alarm goes off in the morning at a godawful hour but I've been laying awake for what seems like forever. Cub is awake early too. He rolls on to his stomach and brings his face up close to mine, nose to nose, and asks, in a voice that is far too enthusiastic for the still dark morning, "are the green bells gonna turn on, Mama?" The green bells is how he refers to the alarm on my phone, a description that is perfectly endearing.

We get up slowly, he clambers over me, the softness of his baby body giving way to the bony knees and elbows of a little boy. Almost two and a half, this boy of mine, and I wince as his elbow digs firmly into my ribs. He turns the light on, enthusiastically, the way he does every morning, and announces "it's the weekend!" It's Thursday, actually, and my class starts at eight.

Year two. Year two! The first morning at school is lacking all of those signature first day of class vibes. Maybe I got them out of my system last year, or during the 6 years of my first degree. I walk to class. The room is dark, no one there. A few more people show up. We linger in the hallway, chatting, familiar already with each other as though we were just there yesterday and not separated by a summer. My phone lights up with a text and we head to the right class, which is the wrong class too, but that's not the point.

It's familiar, so familiar, and in that, there is comfort. I was dreading coming back. Anxious for everything, until yesterday my heart was not in it. And then, in the first minutes of class, sitting in a semi-circle with the wonderful women who have become some of my best friends, I remembered.

This is it.

This is it.