Now we're talking

It's all good. My offer of admission is still standing. After 12 days of excruciating wait the issue with my application is resolved. Now I’m getting super excited! I can now allow myself to imagine being in school or attending my first birth as a midwifery student. Even just saying the words out loud, I am a midwifery student, feels great. Even though I haven’t started school yet, I just say it to myself; I’M A MIDWIFERY STUDENT. I have dreamed of this day for so long. It's hard to believe it all started 15 years ago.

Here is the story. My first child was born in 1995 in Holland. I am originally form Brazil, a place with a 90% C-section rate in some private hospitals. Come to think of it, everybody I know form Brazil who has given birth there has had a C-section. I grew up with the fear and danger of birth all around me. No wonder when I had my first baby I wanted an obstetrician and a hospital birth. Even though I feared birth, I feared a C-section even more, and for that I was glad I was not in Brazil. At the time I had my first child I was living in Holland, a place that has a 50% home birth rate. Every woman, unless you are high risk, gives birth with a midwife, either at home or in the hospital.

Because of my birth culture I refused to have a midwife and insisted in having an obstetrician. I also had my mind set that I wanted an epidural, enema and shave. I did not want the episiotomy, common in Brazil, as again I have a fear of any surgical procedure. Everything else sounded good to me. This post is not going to be a birth story but I just need to establish where I was coming from because it is so far away from where I am now. It turns out I didn’t get the epidural I wanted for that birth or anything else that was on my list. What I got was a 9-hour straightforward labor, no pain relief, and spontaneous vaginal birth with no tear. In spite of the perfect birth scenario, it was not a good birth experience for me. I had no support and I was not ready for a natural birth. However, the experience stayed with me and I vowed to be more mentally prepared the next time.

When I got pregnant again with my daughter I once more looked for an obstetrician (what else is a pregnant girl to do?) but the birth experience turned out to be completely different this time. This time the obstetrician wasn’t available at the time of the birth and I ended up with the midwife who was on call (I was living in Ireland at this point). The moment she touched me, I knew right away that there was something different about that care. This is when I discovered Midwifery. I loved my birth and fell in love with Midwifery. I was 23 years old. After my daughter was born I embraced Midwifery, breastfeeding and motherhood in a way that I had not experienced before. I became an advocate of midwifery and decided I was going to become a midwife.

However, soon after, I found out I was pregnant again and realized that having 3 children under the age 4 and going to school full-time was more than I could handle. I had big dreams. I wanted a large family and I wanted to be a midwife. At one point I believed I had to make a choice but life thought me that when you have a fire burning inside, a calling, you can’t just brush it away. I had a calling to be a mother and I had a calling to be a midwife. Time showed me that all I had to do was to prioritize my steps. It was hard! I am not a very patient person. I kept my dream of becoming a midwife alive by becoming as involved as I could with pregnant women and babies. I went on to have three more children, became a childbirth educator, doula and opened my small business called Mother Matters.

Three years ago I felt my children were old enough for me to start taking bigger steps toward my dream, and I went back to school to acquire the pre-requisites for the midwifery program. Up to this point I was still homeschooling my children. Last year I was finally ready to apply but didn’t get accepted to the Ryerson Midwifery Program. The reason I applied to the Ryerson Midwifery Program (I live in Burlington, right beside McMaster) is because they offer a part-time option. I was devastated when I didn’t even get an interview (you can read here about this chapter in my life). I knew then I had to make a decision. I had to increase my chances of getting in and that was applying to McMaster, full-time. I believe the general population of candidates from Ryerson is more mature and with more life experience because of the attraction to the part-time program, and thus harder competition. No offence to those who are McMaster student, I’m just under the impression that there are younger people applying to McMaster and that maturity and life experience help you get in. McMaster also didn’t require a letter, which is the part I got bumped out of the application process at Ryerson. Whether my theory was right or not, it worked. I got called for an interview and was offered admission. When I made the decision to apply to McMaster what I was most afraid of was the full-time program. I didn’t think I could do it. Having applied to Nursing and done a semester full-time has helped me take the fear away. It was hard, extremely hard. But I also learned that I had strength where I thought I hadn’t. It also showed me how resilient my family is. It was a very hard decision for me to make. Our lives have changed a lot since I went back to school full-time. Before, I had my own business but I was mostly a stay-at-home mom and the children were homeschooled. Making the decision to put them in school so I could attend to my own education has been a hard one, full of guilt and sometimes regret. It changed our family dynamics in ways that disturbed what I had worked so hard to create. However, it also brought a lot of positive attitude from all of us. My children have grown to appreciate the hard work I had to do to get were I got and it has inspired them to see learning in a different light.  They also have come to respect my dream and cheer the victories with me. I know midwifery, the education and the profession, will bring a lot of challenges and hardships. But I’m not afraid. Not right now, at least. There is a season for everything in life, and even though I get a little longing when I look back and remember the times when the kids were small, I was a stay-at-home mom and they were all homeschool, that chapter in our lives ended. The kids are not so small anymore and whether I like it or not, things change. Everything in life is constantly changing; nothing lasts forever. So with that thought I embrace this new season in my life with loving memories of when midwifery was just a far away dream.