It has been so long since I have put anything in this space. So much has happened over the last year for reproductive rights, workers, immigrants, healthcare access, the political mood and movements, and my personal and professional life has not let me keep up with it here. Though I have had my best work-life balance of my professional life so far over this last year, I’ve had a hard time squeezing in time for writing about my experience or my thoughts about what’s happening in the world.

A lot of what is hard is that my dear mother has really been on my case about protecting my professional identity, and about being ever so careful about how I present myself on the Internet, in spite of my attempts to remain as anonymous as possible here. It’s incredibly hard, as someone who has so many damn opinions and for whom my profession is a major passion of my life, to figure out how much I can say about what I think about things, while preserving myself professionally. Are there enough disclaimers in the world to cover me and protect me from losing my job, or offending my clients, or not getting some job in the future? Probably not. So I hold a lot of ideas in my mind and wrestle with what is appropriate enough for me to put into print.

Hopefully this is.

Well, I’m doing it. I’m transitioning. A very welcome, but also a terrifying change, from intrapartum care only in the hospital to not only full scope (GYN and OB) care but to homebirth. I have been working over almost the entire last year mainly in a very large private academic medical center that I previously thought of only as my city’s “baby factory” because so, so many people deliver there. I have also been moonlighting in a similar role in a small Catholic community hospital in my neighborhood that primarily serves Black and Latinx patients. These were both very welcome changes from the major challenges I encountered at my previous position, and my life over the last year has allowed me to settle into a fairly reasonable routine that works well with my family and activist lives.

But now my dream job has started, and my world is being uprooted, but for the better.  in the most delightful ways. 

Why am I making this change? I’m giving up a 36 hour workweek with hardly any stress about my job, for being on call 20 days a month for a position that I care about deeply and find spiritually satisfying. I’m giving up about 100 miles a week in bike commuting (often schlepping my daughter on the bike trailer) for having to always be close to my car and driving all over a large metro area to I can get to labors and births in a timely manner. I’m giving up a position that allowed me to make a midwifery stamp and positively impact my patients during their labor, as I provide physician extender service as part of a resident team, for one in which I will partner with a team of midwives to develop relationships with our clients, who have invited us into our homes for the most intimate moments of childbearing. I’m giving up watching how the medicalization of childbirth, while “evidence-based” and in highly skilled and talented hands, so often leads to much higher rates of complications than one should see in otherwise healthy people, for a birth setting in which emergencies can still happen, and the operating room or assisted delivery or complicated resuscitation is still a 9-1-1 call away.

Sure, I’m giving up some personal comforts (and admittedly, proximity to emergency help), but I am leaping into what I am hoping will be a tremendous adventure that will train me to be so much more skilled in what I care about: normal birth with healthy people. It’s a tremendous honor to be seen for my skills and potential, and to have been chosen for this practice. There’s only one way to know if this is my perfect fit, and it’s to try! So, here’s to doing my best at trying!