Changing the world

This week I made a difference. A home visit lasted two hours and, by the time I made my way back to my own home and my own children, my knees and hips ached from perching awkwardly on a very low sofa. There were tears, laughter, anxieties, hugs, questions... we hatched plans A, B and C, and then a plan D, just in case. The support network sat around were incredible, but the woman didn't believe she was doing a good job. She needed her hand held and a bucketful of reassurance. She was experiencing 'normal' worries but feared she was losing her mind. This fear was usurped by the notion that “we” would swoop in and take her children from her. She nearly broke my heart, not by being upset initially, but because she was so relieved and grateful that I listened to her and asked her what she wanted to do. As I write this, I am thinking back to what I had written last week: may I be kind, may I be an advocate.

Her fear that her children would be taken away was unfounded, but it was very real. I've lived that fear. I stayed with my husband after we'd already stopped loving each other, after I'd started sleeping on the study floor with a knife and scissors under my pillow because I was scared of him. I stayed because he threatened to tell everyone I was an unfit mother. I stayed because I thought he was going to take my children. I stayed. And I prayed each night on my way home that my children would still be there. He would change plans, not go into work on odd days, and take the kids to his mum's without telling me. I lived in constant fear that my children, my babies, would be snatched away from me by the man who was meant to love me. I left because I realised there was the slimmest chance that I wasn't insane, that maybe he'd played a part in my mind unravelling. I left because someone took the time to ask how my day was and to suggest that maybe my marriage wasn't OK, and maybe I wasn't safe. I left because someone made a difference to me. My husband eventually struck me a deal: if I didn't fight for my share of our house, he wouldn't take my children from me. I was too weak to fight, so he lives in our house and our children live with me during the week. I am financially ruined, but I have my girls.

I will never complain too vociferously when life gets hard or seek half of his money or our house, because the fear that he will take them away still lingers and threatens to consume me, and because I am grateful that I got to keep my children close to me. I managed to keep them close and finish my training because I made innumerable sacrifices and because I worked hard and fought harder. This week, someone told me how hard they fought for me during my time as a student midwife. She told me that even at my lowest point, she fought for me because she could see the person I was and the midwife I would become. She reiterated that that was the point: individualised care and advocacy. So many people have fought for me, and I have very limited means of expressing my gratitude, but an appropriate one seems to be passing this forward. I have done that this week on several occasions, fighting for women who had momentarily lost their own fight.

Another of those women constantly fighting for me wasn't around when I finally walked away from my marriage, and I have always been grateful for that fact. She is one of the many who have seen me at my most vulnerable for various reasons over the years. I tried to explain this week why I was grateful that she wasn't there, but it came out wrong and it sounded as though it was because she was in no position to support me. That wasn't the reason, and I'm still struggling to pinpoint it. I had absolutely no fight in me and I would have hated her to see me then. She would have looked into my soul and known I was lying when I parroted out “I'm fine” to anyone willing to listen to me. She would've torn me apart and laid me bare, she would've asked questions that I wouldn't have wanted to answer, and I would've felt ashamed at failing at marriage, and at the decisions I made. I depended on everyone and no one at that time, and if she'd been anywhere nearby I think I might have crumbled. Moving, ripping my kids away from their home and school, walking out of my life, may have been unbearable if I'd seen it reflected through her eyes. It might just have been too sad.

I'm not sure what my point is any more, although I think that I want to say that I made a difference to one woman, just as other women have made a difference to me. Being a student and being a newly qualified midwife sometimes feels futile, I've spent entire shifts feeling invisible, and whole placements wondering when it's going to click. I've wondered what on earth I'm doing and whether I'll ever be enough. As a student, I heard Elaine Hanzak speak. She admonished us for ever thinking or uttering the statement “I'm just a student” or “I'm just a midwife”, because you might just be that person who changes someone's day. I may not have set the world on fire this week, but I may have contributed to changing the horizon for one or two women. Week six has been a good one: I've made a difference and other women have made a difference to me. The midwife who messaged me after a night shift to tell me I was brave, the one who took the time to help me, the other one who shared tears of laughter with me at 3 in the morning while babbling about nipple shields. The midwife who literally untangled myself, a student, a woman and a baby during a pool birth, the friend who shared views from the top of a big hill, the woman who listened to my crazy ramblings and told me to go for it, and those who babysat my children so I can be a midwife. The person who told me they fought for me, the midwife who hugged me at the end of a very long shift when I cried because that person had told me they'd fought for me. They may not have realised it, but they all made a difference to my week.