Over the last year, this CNM has found myself in the midst of needing to make, and then executing, some major personal life changes. While I welcomed 2018 with a fire in my belly around gender and sexual liberation from a political angle, and while countless issues impassioned me throughout the dumpster fire of this year in politics (though, most notably, the global and national war on immigrants and refugees), I learned that my ability to focus on, read about, and articulate my response to these was severely diminished by a need to take care of myself and my child above all.

I am making peace with this, and I don’t feel as though I’ve missed out on, say, a major social movement, or that some action I could have personally done would have changed some feature of the year in a fundamental way, outside of myself. But I will say participating in some kind of way in the so-called resistance (proudly proclaimed on car bumper-stickers but otherwise apparently a bit anemic these days) is usually quite therapeutic and makes me feel more connected. I also just want to be that guy that speaks up, that has something to say, a way to make sense of things, a way to connect people to social justice activism, to revolutionary politics, to communities that are organizing. I had hoped that this forum I created, however modest, could serve as a way to work through what it means to be a Marxist midwife throughout my own clinical experiences, and applying that lens to local and world events. (To be fair, I did make a few significant contributions at a national level on some things I quite care about; they just didn’t make it to this space.)

Instead, I’m apparently sometimes just an annual blogger! Living my life and more quietly and modestly thinking through things, reflecting on them to a smaller audience in my real life and adjusting to a new professional identity in the home birth world. It’s been a long year, and certainly not the one I quite anticipated, though it was likely somewhat inevitable that my commitment to and recent deeper explorations of the politics of queer and trans/gender liberation would eventually lead me back to wrestle with my own queer desires and identity. So, while this process started with identifying and attempting to address a series of political questions about the connections between queer and trans liberation and the feminist movement (a la The Women’s March), abortion rights, and birth justice, it seemed to culminate in finding my way back to my own, and yet somewhat newfound, queerness.

And so here I am, over 20 years since coming out as bi, reconciling my truth with the discomforts of coming out *again* to my Evangelical family who has had the ability to ignore my sexuality as long as I was partnered with a straight cis man. While it’s not easy to navigate divorce– let alone parenting throughout it– I feel somehow so much lighter and clearer in my heart and mind than I have for years, soberly deciding to end a relationship that did not work, and navigating a new, queer love in my freedom.

While this midwife closes the year looking forward to lots of loveliness for myself, my kiddo, the families I’m privileged to call my clients, and my gorgeous community in 2019 — I also dream big, for open borders, and queer and trans liberation, and a free Palestine, and an end to militarism and imperialism, and for reproductive justice, and climate justice, and housing justice, and loads of love, grace, and joy.

P.S. These changes could not have gone nearly as well as they have without the love and support and graciousness and political collaboration of a lovely bunch of humans in my life, especially my kiddo, my dearest comrades, my ex, the Blossom group, my forever friends, my Mama, and my sweetheart.