Yesterday I had the most wonderful amazing conversation with Birthing From Within workshop participant I met the week previous - a local CNM. She and I connected pretty strongly (I thought, could be wrong, but I loved her warm eyes, clear strength and youthfullness...one of those: "I really want know more about this person" moments) and she taught me a quick lesson at the workshop that I am still thinking about.

Anyway, part of the directions given at the end of the workshop was to connect with someone from the workshop in the following week. So I mustered up the courage (and by golly, I waited until the very last minut oe the week to call her - true to form) and said hello, how are things, here's how things are for me.

The talk led to her struggles with case review and how it is done and my sturggles with peer review and how it feels to me. Pretty in sinc we were.
And I realized, how very, very deeply I want to connect with folks in the trenches of patriarchal/oppressive systems of medicine and birth. This is far, far cry from the Birth Junky 20-yr old of my past wherein I saw the vast majority of those involved in that system as the enemy.

I don't anymore. I see them all as potential allies. I see the positive motivations behind their actions and the muddied-thinking and struggles they undergo.

I still very much see the system as the enemy though.

She relayed to me a case review that was brought up about a birth she had attended at the hospital as the attending midwife where the cord had broken at birth, and how put on the spot, interrogated, hostile it felt. How in case review one cannot ask "Has anyone else had this happen and what did you do, what did you learn?" Instead of it being an open-discussion of why cords break, how to deal with it, the only thing looked at is the clinical picture and how to Make Sure It Never Happens Again.

And little midwife me is thinking I have heard lots of stories of cords breaking at homebirths, how it's such a surprise, and that it will probably happen to me one day - no big deal, just deal with it. How I would bring it up at Peer Review and the discussion would probably centered around when it happend, what was done and what the cord looked like, the placenta looked like, were there any clues there as to why it might be weak. And other midwives would share their experiences and we could learn from eachother, or in the very least, be encouraged that "yeah this happens".

What that must have been like for her...to be called up and have to cover her butt in front of a panel of Experts. Meh, to know that someone at this birth flagged this case for review, much to her surprise and dismay.

And how very, very hard it can be for women to learn to navigate a masculine system, designed not for learning and improving, but for protecting the satus quo (that not quite right, but it's all I can come with atm) - A punitive and oppressive system of judgment.

So this is where I am sitting tonight. Thinking about that. I feel her lonliness.

What did I say to her?
I said it was good disclipline to look at the clinical picture & I wish we had more of that in Peer Review. To look at the chart, to see if everything there was clean. And also that part of Case Review IS discipline: to sharpen skills and make us better at what we do (who we are)- those are not bad things. It takes discipline to practice breath awareness at a birth! It takes discipline to see our thoughts and how they can cause us suffering. Discipline is good. How can she see that aspect of Case Review and work off it might be the fuel she needs to go forward.

Dunno, just some thoughts.

Start where you are, again.

Friday, October 1, 2010 Repost of the Beginning - because I got sidetracked, because I need to hear it all again (and seem to on regular basis) - such resistance!

"I have been wanting to have a blog of my own for years, since my last one was copied and destroyed under duress (long story that I may someday share)...but which left me in fear of writing and producing again the stuff that comes from my heart. Yet today I stumbled across Pam England's new blog and it was the final kick-in-the-ass I needed.

My intentions for this blog is two-fold: to write about birth & politics (as they tend to go hand-in-hand), and to write about my own inner Heroine's Journey. My hope is that my posts will be juicy and chalk full of bare bones Big-ness. I thought long and hard about the title. While, I would love to be full of inspiration all the time, open and free and productive and good, sometimes I am not so. Sometimes I am bare-bones full of hot despair. But I have made a commitment to myself to live in the shaky, tender place of impermanence, to express that however it comes out with a boldness and compassion for it. So, yeah, sometimes my posts will be small. I know this, and have given you fair-warning.

I hope you are encouraged by my blunders as well as my victories"

Start where you are, because all of it is a beginning starting place, over and over. As much as I would like to "further along" - whatever that looks like - I am where I am.

Pretty much an Orphan looking for her tribe. Questioning people, thoughts, situations: does this feel like "home"? or oh my! that's definitely not a safe place, or that feels way too alian to me... Me, thrown out of my sweet place of comfort, hardened a little and determined to be a loner (tribes?! we don't need no stinking tribes!). There is solace in having nothing left to take or to loose. I kinda' like that place: yes my parents are gone now, don't ever have to go thru that experience again. I think I will revel in my orphan for a while (this is not literal, I feel it necessary to say, though it is - I am thinking of many other losses in general and being left out in the cold to fend for myself).