Chapter 2 — The long way home…

       It took seventeen years to find my way back. After graduation I thought for sure I would head straight to the Frontier School of Midwifery to ride horses into the backwaters of Kentucky and deliver babies. Instead I became a hippie in San Francisco, and worked in the operating room of a major hospital, becoming intimate with the heart-breaking traumas of the city.     

     Then…marriage…rural living off the grid…crewing on sail boats through the South Pacific…jungle nursing on the island of Bougainville in the territory of Papua New Guinea—doing things I was not qualified to do, but did them anyway because there was no doctor there.

      Our daughter was conceived on that island, and we returned to the mountains of Northern California to be parents. Chickens, gardens, pigs, and a toddler on a small plot of land in the woods…

     When she was three years old we moved to Fresno for two years so my husband could go back to college. Yet, again, I found myself working in another operating room in a big hospital. Now, you can’t get any further away from midwifery than working in an operating room. Brains, and bones, and guts, stainless steel, green scrubs and zero humanity. It was stressful and I hated it. What the hell am I doing here, I would ask myself. This is not who I am.

     I stayed with it because it paid the bills, and I was sure we would move back to the mountains when he graduated, and all would make sense again, or so I thought.

     However, he accepted a job with the Forest Service at a station that was located in a rice growing community in a valley in California, and the ”forest”? Well… it was a days drive away. My husband was gone from Monday through Friday, and my daughter and I were left alone in this God forsaken place, where the mosquitoes were as big as sparrows, and crop dusters flew continually overhead, dropping poison on the rice paddies and the town.

     I entered a period of great loneliness. Sometimes I would hide in the laundry room so I wouldn’t infect my family with my sadness. I felt so terrible in my head, that one day, I actually went to a doctor and asked him to x-ray my brain, or do an EEG, because I knew that to feel like this, there had to be something seriously wrong with me. They didn’t know much about depression in those days, so he did an EEG and said my brain was fine, and recommended vitamins. Well, I can tell you that this was a defining moment…

     I struggled. I knew I had to get a grip on my life. I found a part time job working in labor and delivery in the little local hospital, and learned how to teach childbirth classes in the community. Slowly, I realized that I could breathe once more.

     Sitting at the bedsides of women again, and teaching the mysteries and wonder of birth to pregnant couples, I started to come back into alignment with myself. The depression began to lift, and I felt whole again. I was finally living my truth. 

     At that time I heard that a pilot program in midwifery had opened up at the University of California in San Francisco, and they were going to take three students. Someone suggested I apply. I was incredulous. “You can’t be serious. I’m nobody, living no where, doing not much.” What would I tell them? “I don’t have much experience, but I’m sure I was a midwife in a past life, so you should just choose me right now so I can get on with it!”

     But figuring, what did I have to lose, I applied along with two hundred other women. At the interview I don’t remember much of what I said, but I do know I spoke about my yearning to serve women and their families. I confessed that I didn’t know too much, but what I did know was that I had a “”knowing” that I trusted, and that I knew I could do this.

     When I got home, I had a feeling…This woman and I had profoundly connected. The interview was deeply personal, and we spoke from our hearts, each of us feeling seen and heard.

     Weeks later, when I was accepted, the news felt gentle and soft… like, of course…it is my time. Sometimes a seed will tremble in us, wanting to germinate. It takes patience, waiting for the right amount of water and warmth, but eventually it will happen. It took seventeen years, but I was finally coming home.