SCHOOL!

I'm feeling excited, confused, anxious, conflicted, impatient....

So I decided where I want to go to school. I have so much fire about this that I can barely contain myself. My goal is to get my BSM which will prepare me for the CPM certification. We won't have to relocate and I can work with local preceptors (I hope.)

I just feel so undecided about when to start, and so lost about how to pay for it all. Should I enroll this winter so I can get started right away? Should I wait until after I have babies? Should I wait until John has a higher-paying job that can support us while I do full-time study and labs? Am I stuck in a self-created gender-role issue, where I'm too passive to allow this to happen? How are we going to pay for this? Will this put a strain on my marriage? (Again with the gender-role issues....) Now that I truly know what I want to do with my life, is it unreasonable to want to embrace it all and devour it up NOW? I just WISH I could quit my day job and start living the rest of my life! But that can't happen yet.

The other day I met a wonderful midwife who will be attending the birth I'll observe soon as a doula. She is MY AGE. And she's been practicing since she was 19! She's on the faculty at MCU and she really knows her stuff. She's become a little burned out by midwifery lately and is going back to school to become a nurse practitioner. (Bridging the gap and hopefully educating some docs along the way.) She mentioned some things that really got me thinking about how difficult and how serious it is to follow your calling to midwifery. Families and marriages suffer. We are maligned by the medical community. We are demonized by the government. We are misunderstood by society at large.
But I'm not doing this for fame and fortune, guts or glory. I'm doing this because I believe in women and I believe in God and I believe in nature. Peace, life, gentleness, compassion, information, enlightenment, sisterhood, freedom and power. I believe in myself. I believe in LOVE. I have an amazingly wonderful and supportive husband. I live in a community in desperate need of quality mommy-care. I want to be someone to come to. Even though I am only one person, hopefully I will not be the last. I want women to know there are options, and I want to be one of those options. I don't want to feel selfish about wishing the best for all of my earth sisters out there. I want to help and hold and heal and share my heart with these women in a way that only a "with-woman" can.

And I want it all NOW.

*le sigh*