Reassessing.
I just finished my second term at Frontier Nursing University, enrolled in a Master of Science in Nursing program with the intention of becoming a certified nurse-midwife and women's health nurse practitioner. I did well both terms. I met great people at the orientation session back in late February, and took a brief trip to Philly in June to attend a conference about how to start a free-standing birth center (as required by the program, not because I have any entrepreneurial spirit), where I got to reconnect with some of the people I met at orientation. Everyone I talk to about school is supportive, encouraging, and not shy about telling me that I'll make a great midwife.
So what's the problem, then, you ask?
Well, I'm just not feeling it, and I'm not sure I want to continue with the program.
There's a lot of really complicated stuff going on in my head about all this, and what follows is in no particular order of importance or even logic:
I'm a nurse. So much of who I am is tied up in that label, in the way that nurses think and assess and do, and more than one of my professors at school has said that part of the transition from nurse to midwife is needing to "stop thinking like a nurse." Well, I don't want to stop thinking that way! I love being a nurse. I love the things I do every day in my job. My job makes me happy. Which brings me to...
My job makes me really happy. Like, stupendously, amazingly happy. I work with fantastic people, and I'm good at what I do. I'm comfortable here and in my role here. I like the hours I work--I never have to get up at the crack of dawn, and I go to sleep in my own bed every night. I only work 32 hours/week and get full benefits and make enough money to live very comfortably in one of the country's most expensive cities. If there aren't enough patients to warrant the nurses who are scheduled for the day, I get paid half my normal salary to stay home.
I started thinking about midwifery school when I was working at a teaching hospital, surrounded by residents who did a lot of the hands-on skills that I get to do now because I don't work at a teaching hospital--up to and including catching babies when there's no midwife on call and the covering doc looks at me and says, "You know, you do this one." (That happened twice last week, including one birth where mama was standing up and baby decided to come out with his hand along the side of his face. Potentially complicated, but I handled it well.) Since starting at my current job, formally becoming a midwife feels somehow less urgent because I'm already able to do many of the things I associate with being a midwife.
When I'm not in school, I have a lot of free time for pleasure reading, day trips, socializing, hiking, hanging out with my newly-Californian parents[1], etc.
Instead, when I'm in school, I feel constant (self-imposed) pressure to be studying. Any time I take a day off from schoolwork, I feel guilty. unsound and I don't go hiking, because my days off are engulfed by schoolwork. I don't read books for pleasure while classes are in session. I haven't written a poem in longer than I can remember. There are friends I want to see and I can't figure out how to make the time for them. I signed up for a three-classes-in-two-weeks introductory offer at a yoga studio near me, because I feel my hamstrings ossifying as I type this, and the guilt I felt about carving out time for it out of the time I "ought" to have been studying was insane. Is the end result really going to be worth this?
I'm paying $3,000 out of pocket every twelve weeks for school. That adds up pretty quickly, and that money could be socked away for retirement or a down payment on a condo/house or something of that nature. Furthermore, in California I'll take a significant pay cut going from an RN to a midwife, so I can't even say I'm making a wise investment in my future or anything like that. From a money perspective, it's pure loss.
And of course, thanks to MS, I can't even really guarantee how long I'll be able to work as a midwife--24-hour call is tough on a human body, even one that isn't chugging away with chronic illness. Nurses have, generally speaking, more options away from the bedside than midwives do.
So I took a leave of absence for the next term, to spend more time helping my parents get settled, reclaim some of my free time, and to think about this more. Thoughts and advice are more than welcome!
[1] Holy crap, my parents sold their house and packed up all their stuff and moved to California!
So what's the problem, then, you ask?
Well, I'm just not feeling it, and I'm not sure I want to continue with the program.
There's a lot of really complicated stuff going on in my head about all this, and what follows is in no particular order of importance or even logic:
I'm a nurse. So much of who I am is tied up in that label, in the way that nurses think and assess and do, and more than one of my professors at school has said that part of the transition from nurse to midwife is needing to "stop thinking like a nurse." Well, I don't want to stop thinking that way! I love being a nurse. I love the things I do every day in my job. My job makes me happy. Which brings me to...
My job makes me really happy. Like, stupendously, amazingly happy. I work with fantastic people, and I'm good at what I do. I'm comfortable here and in my role here. I like the hours I work--I never have to get up at the crack of dawn, and I go to sleep in my own bed every night. I only work 32 hours/week and get full benefits and make enough money to live very comfortably in one of the country's most expensive cities. If there aren't enough patients to warrant the nurses who are scheduled for the day, I get paid half my normal salary to stay home.
I started thinking about midwifery school when I was working at a teaching hospital, surrounded by residents who did a lot of the hands-on skills that I get to do now because I don't work at a teaching hospital--up to and including catching babies when there's no midwife on call and the covering doc looks at me and says, "You know, you do this one." (That happened twice last week, including one birth where mama was standing up and baby decided to come out with his hand along the side of his face. Potentially complicated, but I handled it well.) Since starting at my current job, formally becoming a midwife feels somehow less urgent because I'm already able to do many of the things I associate with being a midwife.
When I'm not in school, I have a lot of free time for pleasure reading, day trips, socializing, hiking, hanging out with my newly-Californian parents[1], etc.
Instead, when I'm in school, I feel constant (self-imposed) pressure to be studying. Any time I take a day off from schoolwork, I feel guilty. unsound and I don't go hiking, because my days off are engulfed by schoolwork. I don't read books for pleasure while classes are in session. I haven't written a poem in longer than I can remember. There are friends I want to see and I can't figure out how to make the time for them. I signed up for a three-classes-in-two-weeks introductory offer at a yoga studio near me, because I feel my hamstrings ossifying as I type this, and the guilt I felt about carving out time for it out of the time I "ought" to have been studying was insane. Is the end result really going to be worth this?
I'm paying $3,000 out of pocket every twelve weeks for school. That adds up pretty quickly, and that money could be socked away for retirement or a down payment on a condo/house or something of that nature. Furthermore, in California I'll take a significant pay cut going from an RN to a midwife, so I can't even say I'm making a wise investment in my future or anything like that. From a money perspective, it's pure loss.
And of course, thanks to MS, I can't even really guarantee how long I'll be able to work as a midwife--24-hour call is tough on a human body, even one that isn't chugging away with chronic illness. Nurses have, generally speaking, more options away from the bedside than midwives do.
So I took a leave of absence for the next term, to spend more time helping my parents get settled, reclaim some of my free time, and to think about this more. Thoughts and advice are more than welcome!
[1] Holy crap, my parents sold their house and packed up all their stuff and moved to California!