It's Happening So Fast, Part 3

Our wonderful friends/neighbors came over on Thursday late afternoon and dropped off dinner they cooked for us. I had spent another few hours at the health center getting two of the million things checked off my list that now reaches the entire length of the Brooklyn bridge. It had also snowed like a million inches and I had to walk home... uphill... because the buses had stopped running to my house because I live on top of the hill. Luckily, I ran into a classmate while leaving the health plan who was also about to tackle said hill, so we did it together. I won't say which of us fell, lol. It was cold, and snowy, and my face burned from the little ice pellets flying by. By the time I got home the man had caught a fire under his azz and had actually gotten a lot done in our basement, which of course put me in a better mood. So, right after my last post things turned around a little. And then, yesterday, a friend came and helped the man move the couches down to the dumpster. Those couches (together forming a sectional) were very heavy because they were also a sleeper sofa. They did this while me and my friends (one of whom is the wife of the man who was helping move the sofa) went to eat sushi for in celebration of the end of the semester. And, yes this couple is also the couple who brought us the dinner on Thursday! (all of that to say, they're wonderful and we're going to miss them)

So me and the girls had sushi last night at a beautiful place with bad service but cheap and good sushi. I'm going to miss them and our pow wows. I just kept thinking "this is happening so fast." Not school... that was really, painfully, slow. But now that the semester is over, and my to do list is getting longer and longer and the countdown to when we leave is getting shorter and shorter, it all feels like it's happening very, very fast. I've been getting messages about integration- what to bring, who to meet with when, and tasks that should be completed before I start. This of course adds to the mega to do list (I feel like I should name my to do list something jazzy at this point, lol) but is also exciting because I remember being stressed about whether or not this was even going to happen. My friends talk about how they didn't want the stress of setting up their own site and moving over break and meeting new people in a new setting as their integration experience. I can understand that because this was definitely more stressful than just letting the school stick me in boston or south dakota or something. But the reality is that we all couldn't stay in the area, there were only a few spots here and some of those were taken by people who had been at the same place the whole time they've been here. So I wasn't going to take any chances getting sent off to some unknown place where I still would have had to meet new people in a new office and sub lease my apartment and be away from the man at one of the most stressful (I'm assuming) times of my midwifery education. Um, no thank you. I'll take responsibility for my experiences, even with the added stress that it has definitely caused. This is certainly not the ideal, doing all of this in a short period of time. But being home with family and not having to pay my own way for a while, that's fabulous. The chance of learning my clinical skills alongside a midwife of color- which both of my friends have had the opportunity to do, but I don't know if they really understand how much of a blessing that is, and how much different it is when you never have that as minority student- is going to be fabulous. Not yelling at an interpreter phone all day, fabulous. Being in the city and building connections where I actually want to work, fabulous. I think I need this in order to see myself as a midwife, and when I'm finally there, and can finally breathe and not worry about all that has to be done before I can get there, the stress will no longer matter. Oh and the bonus: not having to move over graduation or while studying for the certification exam. So, yeah I'm stressed, and I've cried about this whole integration madness, and I'm having to pack up fast so that I'm not stuck here for Christmas, but still... I'm leaving and you know? I'm happy. I mean really happy. Happy that I finished this looong leg of midwifery school. Happy that my friends made it through, too. Happy that the man is still here by my side. Happy that I have so many people rooting for me. Happy that my family is coming up for graduation, but really we could all just as easily go on a cruise with all the money it will take :o)

We also talked about graduation plans, but that's like a whole 'nother post.