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.
