God is in the Midst of Her...

It was inexplicable and immediate. For so long, midwifery had been *it*, the thing I cared most about in this world, my love for Jesus incarnated. I tattooed “sage femme” under my breast, for crying out loud! In my soul, I WAS a midwife! And perhaps I still am; I do still and will always claim “wise woman;” I believe that is the Lord’s design. But being a midwife is no longer my greatest earthly identity. For almost 3 years I was first God’s child and Christ’s beloved, and secondly, I was a midwife. But today as I write this, I am first God’s child and Christ’s beloved, and secondly I am the woman who loves Jeremiah McWilliams.

This started playing out in my heart in July (probably about the time I first started writing this “Gestating Halley” series – it’s taken me this long to sort it all out). As of early July I had been dating Jeremiah for less than 3 months. (Heck, I’d KNOWN him for less than 3 months, period). It was quick. We hadn’t told each other yet that we were in love, but it happened soon after. I would sit in my mother’s kitchen in St. Louis and think out loud about my bewilderment. I told her numerous times I just couldn’t understand why working as a midwife’s apprentice wasn’t giving me the ultimate joy and fulfillment I expected. I also told her that for the life of me, I couldn’t “turn down” my desire to be with Jeremiah; I could not lessen it, I could not make it equivalent to my desire to attend births, and I could not mesh it nicely on the side. My desire to be with Jeremiah was greater, and it would not be squelched. My wonderfully intuitive mother listened to my ramblings with patience for several sessions. Then one day at the lunch table, she looked up at me and spoke truth that is still resonating: “You know, Halley, sometimes we have a hole in our hearts that we cannot fill, and until we are able to fill it with what it was meant for, we fill it with something else.” Suddenly, Clarity – that elusive but oh-so-gratifying angel – paid me a visit. “Are you saying that I had a Jeremiah-shaped hole in my heart that I was filling with midwifery?” I replied, flabbergasted. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

And so I told Julia in early August that I had to stop apprenticing with her for the time being, because I couldn't keep up with the crazy lifestyle I had assumed, and because I needed to figure a lot of stuff out. She was incredibly gracious and understanding, for which I am eternally grateful. It’s now mid-October and I’m still mulling that conversation with my mother over in my mind. It was so simple; it was so freeing; it was so true! It made a lot of sense then, and it makes even more sense now. I did not become a horrible, selfish person over the summer (as I wondered when I found myself hoping that no babies would be born on the precious nights I got to be with the man who understands me so easily and loves me so well). I do still have the willingness and the earnest desire to exhaust myself, inconvenience myself, and sacrifice myself for that which is dearest to my heart. But my deep love for birth is now in 3rd place, and at present, it’s a distant 3rd place. If you have been reading this entire story, I do not have to tell you that my passion for birth and mothering runs as deep as the Atlantic. And yet my love for Jeremiah has mightily overpowered it – there is no contest. So then, how deep and high and sure and true is my love for Jeremiah! It’s INCREDIBLE if you stop and think about it! :)

I want to be on-call for Jeremiah. I want to answer his 3am phone calls. I want to spend national holidays with him. I want a life with him! And I am more than willing – I am eager – to amend my dreams in order to blend them with his. He is my greatest dream, after all, and I will exhaust, inconvenience, and sacrifice myself for him. Jeremiah loves my dreams; he wants to see them all come true – it is for this reason I can securely put them in his hands. Jeremiah – the most amazing, selfless, incredible man in the whole world – wants to amend his own dreams in order to blend them with mine. We cherish each other’s hearts. We want to be together, and we are finding our way.

I feel certain in writing this that there will be at least one reader who will disapprove or even condemn me for this, perhaps in person, but more likely outside of my presence. They will say that I cannot let a man “take over” my dream of becoming a midwife, that I cannot change my plans “just because” I now have a man in my life. This perspective makes me sad. It is so misled, so ruthless, and so self-seeking. Recently I heard biblical love defined as “self-forgetfulness.” This term sums up well how I have come to feel about how my individual dreams and ambitions fit into a relationship. I can assuredly set my dreams – and therefore myself – gently to the side, forgetting my heart to an extent, because Jeremiah isn’t going to forget my heart. To the contrary, he loves my heart with great passion and tenderness, just as I love his. I will forget my dreams if I can see his fulfilled. I believe this is love. And as one, we kneel before the Cross with every longing of our hearts, and trust our Savior to knit us closer together and bring our hopes to fruition as He deems fit.

I also feel certain in writing this that most of you are my dear, dear friends, and want me to be happy and free and alive and well. (And I am! More than ever before in my life, I am!) I know you are the ones who, even if you hadn’t read this explanation of my heart’s overhauling, would still stand by me whether I was a midwife or not. Thank you for your kindness and unconditional friendship…makes me tear up to think of it! It is because I have come to believe that you love me for who I AM, and not for what I DO, that I can say that I am no longer going to be the least bit sheepish or apologetic about loving Jeremiah more than I love midwifery! I am going to REJOICE! REJOICE in the Lord always, I will say it again, REJOICE! (Philippians 4:4). Friends, I have found him whom my soul loves! (Song of Songs 3:4).

If I was going to rewrite Eric Church’s song “Love Your Love the Most” to reflect how I feel about Jeremiah in relation to how I feel about midwifery, it would go something like this:

“Yes I love tiny babies
And pregnant bellies too
I love a good sweet birth story, it rocks on Friday nights.
Hell yes I love my dreams, but I want you to know
Honey I love your love the most.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlCGnGLlu64

And, so we are at the end of my gestation. I have been born as Jeremiah's love, and it feels amazing to breathe outside the womb. I might tell you I was post-dates, but God would tell you this birth happened exactly when He ordained, just as my birth as a Christian happened, and just as my births as a midwife, a mother, a grandmother, etc will happen, if and when God wills. But for now, I am quite content and ridiculously happy being madly in love with Jeremiah McWilliams. I don't have to have all the rest worked out -- after all, I'm just a newborn ;)

Looking back on the first half of this calendar year, I can say that both nursing and lobbying were better and worse than I thought they would be. I suppose they both surprised me. Let’s start with lobbying. My desire to take over for Mary & Debbie at the Capital had everything to do with my sense of duty to my midwifery sisters and the women of Missouri, and nothing to do with caring what Tony Messenger tweeted about, or why Senator Crowell insisted on reading “The Shack” when he was filibustering. It’s not that those things don’t matter; it’s just that they weren’t interesting to me. I cared about the ins and outs of daily life at the Capital in a narrow, peripheral way – if the gossip it had anything to do with midwifery, I forced myself to care about it, and if not, I would just think about how many more hours I had to stay there and be fake before I got to go home.

I thank God for Sarah – the brains of our operation, and the majority of the manpower. She very generously offered to help me at the Capital, and yet it ended up being me helping her. While I found most of Missouri politics annoying, she found it invigorating. She was and is, always, amazing. I found that going back to that place day after day, week after week to be draining, intimidating, and often extremely boring. However, being at the Capital was better than I expected in some ways too: I was hardly ever alone (which makes SUCH a difference at that place!), when I was alone I found that I generally knew what to do (or could text someone who would tell me what to do) and towards the end I actually got interested in some of the bills unrelated to midwifery. The best part was that in the end I felt a great sense of pride for the part I played to ensure that midwifery remained legal…and, of course, being at the Capital meant I wasn’t at the hospital! :)

Now for the surprise of being an RN, being a staff nurse. I suppose I thought it would be easy – boy, was I wrong. It’s so physically exhausting, and frequently mentally unsettling. It definitely demands more of me than I expected. I pray every morning as I go into the hospital that God would let me (and my patients) survive from 7A to 7P. I learn something new every day, and I’m thankful for that. Granted, it’s things like “You don’t need an order to draw from a central line, only a PICC line,” or the difference between expressive, receptive, and global aphasia. Good things to know, and interesting things too, but nothing that makes me say “WOW!!! I can’t wait to go to work tomorrow!” It seems like a rip-off that my work as a staff nurse would be SO draining, but not SO rewarding. If it’s going to deplete me, I sure wish I felt like it was all worth it…you know? I do love being able to sign my name “Halley Watson, RN.” I take a lot of pride in having those letters behind my name, and I know that my work is valuable. Nursing can never be completely swallowed by technology….a machine cannot convey empathy, a machine cannot listen to someone’s story, a machine cannot keep someone’s soul alive. So, I do feel important as an RN. But I also feel quite underappreciated. I’m constantly overloaded to the point that I cannot convey empathy, I cannot listen to stories, and I can’t keep souls alive, just bodies – all I have time for passing meds and doing brief assessments. It’s good time management, sure, taking care of five patients at once, but it’s not healing. I didn’t sign on for this.

This past March I heard back from Newlife, about six weeks after submitting my application. I took a deep breath before I opened the email attachment, sure that my life was about to change forever when I’d read the words, “Congratulations! You’ve been selected to the 2011 class of Newlife International Midwifery School!” But that’s not what happened. Instead of a congratulatory letter, it was a shocking but very sweet rejection letter. It was probably the kindest rejection I’ll ever receive in my lifetime. I didn’t believe it. I was frozen; time was frozen. It could not be.

God had been telling me, “Apply for Newlife, apply for Newlife” for over two years! Since when does God tell people to be missionaries and turn their entire lives upside down, and then prevent them from going where He calls them to go?!? What in the world was I supposed to do now?!? I was angry with God; furious, even. I felt that He had deceived me. Perhaps that sounds blasphemous, but it’s true. Thankfully, my anger didn’t last too long, at least not the acute anger I couldn’t ignore. An unexplainable peace came to me within a few days, especially after sharing my sad news with some sisters in Christ. “It must be a God thing…that’s the only way to explain it,” my aunt said to me. “And He has a reason.”

My aunt was right. My reason came along just a couple weeks after our conversation. Jeremiah came along (via my aunt, funnily enough) – and he is the reason I was not supposed to go to the Philippines. I knew within our first few meetings that he was a gift from God…an incredible gift that God had been preparing for me for a long time…and a gift I wanted to hold onto. As you read a few entries ago, my romance with Jeremiah ignited immediately and still continues to get sweeter by the day. He is the love of my life, my other half, and I am so, so thankful that I am living in Missouri and not in Asia. God’s plan, as always, was far better than my own.

April was a big month for me. I met JMac and started falling head over heels, and I also started exploring other paths toward midwifery, now that Newlife was a no-go. I sent out an email to my midwifery friends about possibilities in St. Louis, and it was suggested to me that I contact Julia (name changed) to inquire about an apprenticeship. I emailed Julia, she got back to me, we chatted on the phone, and she invited me to meet with her about the terms. That meeting was a weekday evening at the end of May. I was very, very, very nervous about it. I felt like my whole future was hanging on that meeting. I invested everything in it.

The meeting was so characteristically Julia – laidback and comfortable. I was dressed up; she was in sweatpants. I expected her to sort of interview me for such an honorable and highly-sought position as a midwifery apprenticeship, but she really didn’t. She told me she knew I had “put in my time” at the Capital and done my homework, and she said she thought I deserved a chance at the real thing. I was ecstatic!!! I left her house on Cloud 9 that night. We decided that we would start on a trial period before hammering down any terms, partly because I lived in Columbia and would only be able to work with her 3 days a week until I could move to St. Louis.

Immediately I started looking for part-time work in St. Louis. Julia understood that I would need to work on the side; as a beginner-level apprentice, she would be compensating me with an education and not an income. And so I spent most of June looking for nursing work in St. Louis, and coming up empty-handed. Everyone wanted me to have a full year of experience to be considered for part-time work. It was reasonable, but frustrating. Despite not being able to move to St. Louis, at the end of June I started working with Julia 3 days a week as we had discussed, Wednesdays through Fridays. Just a couple days into our time together, I got to attend a birth with her. It was awesome (albeit more exciting than we planned on!) and I felt like I was back in the saddle again.

Within a few weeks, the wear and tear of commuting between two cities every three days started to get to me. This was my life: work 12hr shifts on Saturday and Sunday, breathe (and pack) on Monday, work a 12hr shift on Tuesday, drive to St. Louis Tuesday night, work with Julia (and be on-call) Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and then drive back to Columbia on Friday night to repeat the cycle. Sounds insane, right? It was. It may not have been so draining if my time in St. Louis wasn’t also my time to be with Jeremiah. But that’s how it was – we live in different cities, so when we could be together, we stretched our dates until 2am, sometimes even 3am. It was and is a complete joy to spend my STL nights with the man I love – I wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, I started hoping on a daily basis that no one would go into labor because I wanted to spend the little time I had in STL with JMac, not at a birth. And I started feeling very guilty about that.

What’s wrong with me? I’d wonder. Being a midwife’s apprentice is what I’ve been dreaming about for the past three years! This is my purpose and the deepest desire of my heart! I felt terrible about my inner turmoil. I felt like I was betraying Julia and her clients by not being excited about midwifery and birth 24/7. What *was* going on inside me? Had my passion for woman-empowering, baby-honoring birth faded? Not in the least. Was I drained, emotionally and physically, and therefore just didn’t have the energy to be “on” all the time? Certainly, that was definitely a part of it, a big part of it actually. Did I hate being on-call? Yes, I did, I’ll say it. Is that selfish? Maybe…but it’s honest. (You never realize how much you value being able to turn off your cell phone or go on a weekend road trip until you can’t do it).

But it was more than exhaustion and annoyance with the on-call life. Because for almost 3 years prior, I would have gladly sold my spleen for the chance to miss sleep, answer 3am phone calls, and do postpartum visits on national holidays. And for nearly 3 years I HAD exhausted myself running back and forth between nursing school and the Capital…I HAD paid a lot of money to attend a Midwifery Today conference in Philadelphia over my last-ever Spring Break…I HAD stayed up until 3am reading about births I wished I was attending…I HAD taken abuse from countless family members and friends for my unorthodox passions. It was definitely more than the exhaustion and the inconvenience – it was that quite suddenly and without my permission, midwifery ceased to be the deepest desire of my heart. Love took over.

Birth. But not the birth I expected.