When graduation turns sour
In 2006 I graduated with my friends, Bath Abbey providing shelter from the driving July rain that didn't relent for the entire day. My friends and I got our gowns together, threw soggy mortar boards in the air together, went out together afterwards, slipped and slid through puddles on our way home together. Over the years, we had studied together, cooked together, dressed in togas together, lived away from home for the first time together, run out of money together. Granted, we only graduated with our course mates and not with our house mates who had been taking different subjects, but that was a given. We had anticipated this, we had known it from day one.
Fast forward to now. Fast forward to a cohort of nearly twenty student midwives. Twenty women ranging in age from early twenties to forty-something, women who come from various walks of life and who have lived this midwifery degree together. I'm not sure whether you can ever understand the intensity of the bonds that develop between such a group of women unless you have walked in their shoes.
These women have become a tribe over our three years together and never more so than when our lives have skidded out of control through no fault of our own. When my own life veered in an unanticipated direction, these women wrapped me in love and laughter, and they took the edge off the abject loneliness that envelops you when life is brutal. These women have been part of the network who have kept me going, wiped my tears away, welcomed my kids with open arms, and given me strength and courage. We've shared triumph and failure in equal measure, and we've quite literally laughed until we've cried, and cried until we've laughed.
Only people who have trained as midwives together can understand the bond that develops when you have seen sights that most people couldn't begin to imagine. The bond when you've cried hysterically in a cupboard on labour ward together, laughed and snorted your way through a night shift together, wiped blood and amniotic fluid off your shoes together, welcomed new life into the world together. There's a unique bond that forms when you see a friend sob by the lockers after a particularly tough shift, when a failed essay has to be rewritten, when life's curve balls just keep smacking you in the face.
The bond and love and pride are special. I am proud of these women, of all they have overcome, of the fact that they have got up every single morning, got dressed and faced the world. Our families don't understand the privilege we have, the fear, hurt, tears, pain, joy we witness, and they don't know the weight our shoulders bear. Our families can only imagine what our eyes have seen, what our ears have heard, and the moments of magic our hands have experienced. Nobody else understands just how hard we have worked, how much we have sacrificed, and how far we know we still have to go. Our families don't know how much we have learnt, how much is riding on our ability to practise safely, how much we have poured into tens of thousands of words of essays. I don't have to describe a bad day to my cohort, they just get it. They know how I feel. They understand that the fortieth birth I facilitated was tinged with sadness, rather than being flooded with joy because it was a particularly sad day on the ward, and because the parents of number forty would be going home without their baby.
Over the course of three years, we have never been told that the six MSc students would graduate separately to the rest of the small cohort. I naively assumed that because we'd largely been taught together, we'd be standing up and graduating together. Apparently not. Regardless of the academic qualification handed to us, we are all midwives, the expectations on us are the same, our badges the same, our pay grade the same. As it should be. I feel cheated by this twist in our story because we hadn't been told this until a generic invite pinged into our inbox a week or so ago. This email announced two separate graduation ceremonies at two different times in two different locations. I am livid, angrier than I have been in a very long time. The majority of my support network will be ripped away from me for that day and, although I wanted to become a midwife for me, I have managed to do so thanks to the band of women who stand shoulder to shoulder with me.
As much as relationships and friendships within our cohort ebb and flow, the group itself is a constant. It is a safe space, it provides solace and shelter. I am angry and sad because it didn't need to be this way. We should have been told from the outset that this would be happening: 'Heads up, you'll spend three years training together and will all become midwives together, but graduation day won't be spent together. Bad luck'. Better still, we should be graduating together. If it was necessary to distinguish a BSc from an MSc, we could be made to sit separately, like chatty teenagers in secondary school. We should be allowed to watch our friends, our midwifery family, graduating. We'll have been qualified and practising as midwives for five months by the time graduation rolls around, and this makes the separation seems all the more marked and futile. To say that graduation has turned sour would be an understatement.
The invite to graduation is still waiting in my inbox. It's been opened, but it is sitting there waiting for me to accept this decision, to accept that six extra people and their twelve significant others couldn't be squeezed into the first ceremony with nearly five months' notice, to back down and swallow my pride, to woman up and apply for tickets, even though it will be a much lonelier event than it should have been.
They say every cloud has a silver lining. Here we go: here's to giving the current third year students the opportunity to mobilise and state their case, to appeal to the powers that be and make sure that they all graduate together as one cohort, which is exactly how they have trained and bonded.
