My Coming Year: Front Page News

I stopped in a local coffee shop this morning on my way to school (a rarity for me... especially before an 8:30 class) and the Metro newspaper on the table caught my eye: "Mothers rally for midwifery" read the headline.

In Canada, midwives are covered in the government funded healthcare, which is sort of bittersweet in my opinion. Midwives=good. Government healthcare=bad. I digress... in Halifax, they seem to be lacking. Currently, the IWK [local hospital] has suspended all the midwives because of a labor shortage.

At this point you are probably wondering why on earth I am writing about midwives.

A year and a half ago, when I graduated high school I was utterly lost. Since I had grown up in the suburbs of west Houston I was supposed to go to university, but had no idea what I wanted to study or do afterwards. I like science, I like heath, I like babies, but I really did not want to be a nurse. I wrestled with such a range of jobs: linguist, statistician, and yes, even owner of a bed and breakfast. Then, through some late nights scouring the internet for ideas, it struck me: pregnancy massage therapy. Ever since then, everything has come together beautifully. I really can't explain it. Since I can remember, I have had a great sense of awe for pregnant women, and something that cannot be described in any other way but a passion to serve them. I'd just not known what to do with it until then.

Yes, I am at university studying mathematics. I do like math after all, and a degree is handy, but I have had a very interesting experience here, because unlike my fellow math students, I have no intention of having a job in this field afterwards. There are some math subjects, like analysis, that you would use constantly in employment. Others, like cryptography, you would use if you somehow got a job with the CIA. So while my fellow students are filling up their schedules with analysis, I fill up with game theory and cryptography (also useful topics, but not the kind that get you employed). I have also taken Biblical Hebrew, Nutrition, Anatomy, and History of Scotland, and I have loved it.

However, through all of this, I have been itching to start with the massage therapy. When the opportunity came up in November (three days before the class started...) to get my postpartum doula training, I jumped at it.

To be continued...