Follow your bliss

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."

--Joseph Campbell

My bliss is not really allowing me to follow it at the moment. Sigh ok sure that's the point. That if I follow the tiny smidge of bliss in my life I will live the life I should be living.

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. 

--Joseph Campbell

So I decided after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing that I would apply for a graduate position as a midwife. At best, it would mean I have another option for 2012, as our house purchase fell through due to a technicality in our financing (damn you GFC!)

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

--Joseph Campbell

I'm trying to embrace all of these things.

I am waiting until 15 September to find out what is happening with my court case. Chances are that there will be another delay, to go with the other 4 that I've had. Colour me VERY surprised if that doesn't happen.
We will decide what we're doing with housing then. Until then, just staying in the moment. Surrounded by boxes.
We will get a rental for 6 months (Sept-March) in an area we like - on the tram line perhaps? Near the beach? Near a cafe strip?
Or if we do settle, we'll look into buying a house.
Then early November I'll find out if anyone wants to take me on as a graduate (bwahahahahaha I'm not betting that they will - I am brilliant on paper until you get to the "Do you have a disability" part and then I'm sure I'll go to the bottom of the list). But I think I can set a start date for March 2012.
The adventure is that I've applied for country placements. Which makes life more complicated but more of an adventure!
Which leaves me with finishing up at Bunnings in December, after 5 years there. I'll have to work out what to do with the shares I hold in the Bunnings parent company when I leave there.

But for now, I'm just waiting for TheBabe to drive around on her car.

Back to midwifery

There is a lot of swirling in midwifery recently - the past 2 weeks have been rather tumultuous.

Which made me realise that I've not posted about midwifery in a long time. Lots of reasons - I am only 15 weeks away from finishing my degree, I have applied for a graduate position after a LOT of heartache and back and forthing with TheHusband, and it's just been a damn hard slog. I'm a little over it but I also need to dive back in.

But recently there's been a lot in the media - one midwife dragged into court to face a very one-sided roasting, midwives running around like chickens sans head about nothing, and lots of mentions about the rate of homebirths going up. All things to tempt me out of the hermitage!

And getting my brain working again. What I think this adds up to is that there is a push to define what a midwife is. Not just in the ways it's been done (to death) already but in a specific, task-oriented, check this list kind of way. So that if you palpate a belly, check any physiological measure, or whatever I've spent the past 5 years learning how to do - not the important stuff of working with women but the practical skills - then I need to be registered. And just as practicing medicine without a license is a crime, so practicing midwifery without registration will be.

And what that means is that only registered midwives will be allowed to practice midwifery. So midwives who are off the register won't be allowed to practice. Not just "are not allowed to call themselves midwives" but won't be allowed to support women in pregnancy or birth. Which I think is what some midwives in private practice have been working towards all along. And it will be the undoing of midwifery and be more limiting that freeing.

Midwifery will get more few layers. Doulas who do the old-fashioned and SO VALUABLE stuff of midwifery of supporting women in their travail with no medical advice involved; lay midwives who combine herbology, aromatherapy, body work, psychology and so much else to caring for women in their community; registered midwives in private practice hog-tied by insurance and regulation to not attend anyone who is not perfectly "no risk"; eligible for Medicare registered midwives doing even less midwifery and more paperwork; and the rest of the midwives who are able to go to work in the system.

And thus there will be another change in how women are served. We started off attending the births of our friends and neighbours, then worked on our own, trained apprentices doing the attending and so on. We tended our gardens and the ill, laid out the dead and welcomed the new, and our reputations were the most important.

Then changes came with the invention of anaesthetic and forceps and thus obstetricians were separated from midwives and the skills were separated. And so much was lost for the women.

Then into the hospitals.
Then into the universities.
And now this.

Call me paranoid but I think the persecution of Lisa for her role in a tragedy that had little to do with her and instead is part of the push to define midwives and limit practice of my craft to only those that hold registration.