Working Toward Career Choices

Right now my job is staying home and grooming dogs.  I love them both.  While grooming dogs for the last 9 nine years has most certainly had major rewards, advanced my knowledge and taught me patience beyond what any normal human being has on any given day, I have been questioning whether or not it is the path I want to stay on.  Being home with children will take up a TON of my time, I realize I would still like to have my own business and contribute to my house and personal interests at the same time.  Skip will be retiring in the next five years and we are going to have a lot more freedom and flexibility than we have now.  So I have been thinking hard and searching myself for what truly feels right.

I have considered nursing many many times.  Skip and I have talked about it, but in all honesty I do not want to go back to school.  I do not want to work in an environment of artificial drugs, no faith in the human body or an industry based on money not people.  I really love the human body and it's ability to heal.  I love to learn about different diseases and what they do, the workings of our insides etc, but I just cannot bring myself to go into the field. Not to mention I have ZERO desire to work for anybody but myself.  I want my career on my terms that works best for my family, not someone else's.

Last year's miscarriage taught me the medical field doesn't actually care about what human life is to an individual person.  So I decided at that point I would seek a midwife for care when I got pregnant again.  This year's miscarriage taught me the things we put in our bodies can and do cause long term side effects.  It also started me on a path learning about herbs and natural ways of healing.  We started to lose that baby just 2 days after meeting our midwife. She treated me like a person, kept in touch with me and directed me towards natural ways to help my fertility.  I was an actual person, not just a broken uterus.  She didn't down play the situation as "something that just happens."  She instead understood it as a loss and something that doesn't have to be "normal" until I lost so many it needed to be looked into.  I am convinced that because of her advice and guide into some serious research I would have lost this pregnancy without it.

I have been so engrossed with pregnancy research and education with this one that it has almost become a full time job.  I send my midwife links and questions and we have discussions about all kinds of things.  I signed Skip and I up for a natural child birth class called The Bradly Method and every week for the past 6 weeks I have loved seeing all those women and their husbands coming to class more and more educated because something has sparked them to research and get educated.  Needless to say I am almost OCD about women, pregnancy and birth.

Skip said to me after our 3rd class, "You know I think you can teach this."   So I went home and looked it up.  The laundry list to teach this 12 long class is HUGE!! The commitment is extraordinary.  But I am going to do it.  There will be a teaching conference in Denver next year.  We found that out just as we were getting our orders to Colorado.  Talk about timing!

So it comes down to these decisions.  I am most certainly without doubt going to become a natural childbirth educator. It allows me to have my own business and work for no one, but the women and husbands that come to me.  It allows me to have my hands in something I have become VERY passionate about and I get to help change lives.   But that is only part one of the plan.  Come mid 2013 when we have hopefully settled into a routine with classes and we know where the growth of our family is going, I am going to work on becoming a direct entry midwife.  I can do this 2 ways.  1) Relocate after retirement to attend a school or 2) become an apprentice midwife and test for my certification when I feel ready.

Not only does this satisfy my interest in the medical field, but I also feel like it allows me to be a part of something that I don't have to have compromised integrity as part of a system I don't think works.  I want to help women take back what is the most important part of their lives.  Motherhood, and it has to start before a baby is even born.  She cannot fear bringing life into the world or she will fear her abilities to do what is natural to her, mothering her children.  Only one percent of our nations babies are born at home and only 3-5 percent are delivered in the care of midwives.  The rest are subject to hospital protocols, interventions and doctors who are trained to believe women are broken.  We are not broken, I want to spread that message.