I told a friend and midwife mentor that I was going to use this time over the summer to pray, and focus, and decide where it is my future is taking me. I have been doing a lot of praying, and a lot of contemplating, and still have yet to come up with an answer to my questions. A once good friend told me that when making difficult decisions sometimes it is best to just throw all logic out the window and have faith in God's bigger plan for us. I used to have no problems following this advice - when it was just me. Now my decisions, however, are bigger than just me. The happiness and futures of three other amazing people have been trusted to me to help grow, and develop, and turn into amazing adults from the amazing children that they already are. When other people's fates are also in your hands, especially people whom you love with a primal, unexplainable completeness, decisions become harder to make. And, it seems, I find it harder to only trust in Faith alone.
The single hardest thing I have ever had to do since entering into this amazing role of "mother" is to make dcisions for my children. Even the most mundane seeming decision can turn into a stressful situation. I toil over what pediatrician/dentist/etc to use. I toil over how to raise them religiously. I toil over what school to put them in. I toil over whether to homeschool or not. I toil over how staying with their father would affect them. I toiled over how leaving their father would affect them. Vaccinations. Circumcision (or the lack of). Parenting styles. Cribs or no cribs. Disposable diapers or cloth? Wool or PUL? Work or Stay home? Finish a college degree or wait until they are grown? Follow my dreams? This becomes ever more trying as a single mother because now there is no more joint decision making. Now I am solely responsible. I am solely accountable for the raising of these little beings I call my children.
I realized while doing all of this praying and meditating this summer, that it is all like one sweet summer song. The life that I draw, that I create, that I write about. The life that I choose to make for my children. This is not the ideal life that I pictured myself and my children in 9 years ago when first starting my family. I believe that children need *two* parents. God chose to make it so that we cannot procreate without both sexes and both people are valuable in the upbringing. However, not everyone takes their commitment seriously, and I could no longer keep my marriage than a womb can keep a child past its time. After my marriage was over I was hurt and depressed and longing for something that once was. I denied to everyone, even to my self, that I ever loved my ex husband. I was so full of disgust for him at that point. But it isn't true. I did love him, very much. And he took advantage of me. And he lied to me. And now I am dealing with the consequences of his actions and inactions by raising three amazing children without him.
But I will not let it discourage me. And I will not get stuck in old patterns once again. I am a strong woman, with a strong desire to do what is right by my children, and so I believe that I will be given enough wisdom to know what is right and what is wrong for them. After all, they are my children, who were knit together in my womb. Whom I loved before they were even there. Whom I loved since my very beginnings. I no longer remember a time when I did not have love for them, when they were not a part of my life.
The wind whispered to me one day, and showed me a glimpse of my daughter years from now. Having married a man just like her father, and sitting alone one night, her own children in bed, crying silently by a fire. The vision weighed on my heart so heavily that I knew at that very moment I had to change things. For her. And for my boys, so they would not grow up to be men just like their father. And so we left.
Now I am left with another major decision. I have to decide how much I am willing to take away from my children, in order to give them a better life in the future. Am I willing to take away the beautiful house, the 1 acre of land, the horses next door, the peace of mind that allows me to have the children play in the neighborhood until the street light (there is only one!) comes on without worrying about strangers lifting them and taking them away? Am I willing to take away the small town, the life I've been working on building for them the last year, the friends they've made, the moderate climate, the occasional snow? Am I willing to move away from the one place I've longed to live for so long (a selfish question, I know)? Am I willing to bring them closer to their father, closer to the very influence I wanted to get them away from?
What are the good things we get in exchange you might ask? Three years from now (about) I would earn a license to practice midwifery in Florida. A climate for midwifery that will hopefully still be more positive than it is in Alabama. I would be able to earn more of a living in Florida than I ever could operating in Tennessee or Alabama (where it is still a class 3 misdemeanor). I could, perhaps, get the children and I out on our own. No longer have to rely on family for a roof over our head or water for our baths. That, ultimately, is my goal. Can I reach that goal successfully in Tennessee? Probably. If I gave up midwifery. Can I give up midwifery? No.
So, this is the decision that I must toil over this summer. And really, a decision can't be made at all until I hear back from FSTM one way or the other, which I have not yet. In the mean time, I will continue to listen to the whispers in the wind.
