Three: Disconnection

On the wall of the hospital I spent most of the waking hours of a decade of my life in, used to be an enormous poster of me taking a woman's blood pressure. I walked past it recently, still there several years after I stepped back from my NHS midwifery role.

In the image, I'm grinning at the woman and she's smiling back at me. The photo is posed, but the warmth in those smiles is real. I was a student midwife, on my first placement on the postnatal ward. I was exhausted, terrified, perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time and couldn't remember the last time I'd been for a wee. But huddled at her bedside, swathed in jaundice-yellow light and surrounded by a sea of disposable blue curtain, we grinned at each other. Neither of us had a clue what we were doing and we both knew it. We were in it together, she and I. I was with her as she surveyed the enormity of new motherhood, and she was me as I wondered whether the resulting image would immortalise the fact I still wasn't actually sure how to take a blood pressure.

Despite the very real and pervasive feeling of fear and anxiety I felt as a student midwife, I already knew that I loved those moments of true connection with women: the grinning, the knowing, the holding, the hugging. The moment, in a cramped hospital bathroom, I helped a brand new mum shower and get dressed after a caesarean birth. She reached into her bag and pulled out a lacy red thong she had thought, just a few days earlier, would be appropriate post-baby attire. We both stared at it in horror and dissolved into laughter. 'No-one tells you, do they' she eventually gasped between snorts, as I went off to find some more appropriate giant disposable pants. No-one had really ever told me, either.

Over the course of a decade, the blood pressures got easier to take, yet the pressures of NHS midwifery got less and
less so. Over time I walked back and forward past that giant smiling photo on the wall. Walking in, full of energy and hope and out exhausted and anxious. Walking in to 18 hours of non stop labour care, and out with head pounding and feet burning. In, exhausted on a fourth back to back 12 hour shift with no breaks. Out, elated at the birth I'd just witnessed. In, a student, out, a midwife. In, a midwife, out, a mother.

And when I left the NHS, a decade on, with two young sleepless toddlers and no idea how to make the juggle work for a moment longer, I walked past that poster on my way out once more. I stopped and looked at my giant smiling face. I felt exhausted, conflicted, deflated. I felt relieved, terrified and somehow that I was disconnecting from my whole identity. If I wasn't working as a midwife any more, then who was I anyway?

I had come to midwifery to be with women, but before I could gather up the emotions, stories and experiences of all the other mothers, I had to gather up my own. Because in becoming a mother, I'd realised that the woman I had to truly figure out how to be with, before any other, was myself.