The final countdown

It’s international day of the midwife today, so I couldn’t not acknowledge that. Today is our day to celebrate the work we do and the impact we can have on the whanau we work with. I don’t think that there is another job that compares.

I am so proud to be a midwife.

It’s also the day I tell you that I am no longer going to be one.

It’s not a decision that has come lightly and one I’ve been keeping close to my chest for a while now. When I lost my midwifery partner to the mandate it became pretty clear that I couldn’t sustain being on call without a break forever. You’ve all heard me talk about our pay inequity and the years of fighting for fairness there. You’ve heard me say that I just want to be paid enough to be able to afford to have someone cover my clinic when I’ve already worked all night. You all know that I could rant and rave about the fear of losing NZ’s wonderful continuity of care midwifery model for hours. But I won’t put you through that again 😉.

Just know it’s under threat, the insulting pay causes more and more of us to leave as it’s not sustainable to stay, the ones left behind find it harder to cope and one by one we are disappearing…

So shortly after the mandate I made the decision to stop being a community midwife. But it’s not as easy as that. I had clients booked for the next nine months, mostly repeats that I wasn’t willing to leave without care, I knew they couldn’t get another midwife after losing so many in our area. So I started working out my nine month notice period. That’s a long time once you’ve made the decision to change.

It’s been bittersweet. Initially there was a huge feeling of guilt and grief, there were lots of tears and a bit of an identity crisis. Then gradually I reconciled to the idea and starting looking forward to going to bed every night knowing I could actually stay there. To not taking my phone to the loo, to not making contingency plans for every event. To just taking one car when we go out. To having more than one gin!!! To answering “Yes I’ll come” not “I’ll try to make it”. To actually committing.

It’s going to be weird. I’m excited. I’m frigging sad. I’m angry. I’m frustrated.

Originally I planned to stop community midwifery and become a midwifery angel/locum and help my colleagues when they were tired and needed support. To attend homebirths as the second midwife so I could keep my finger on the pulse and soak up that birth high.

But then they mandated the booster for health workers. I was bedridden for two weeks immediately after my second vaccination and honestly I can’t feel that bad again. If it was a side effect of the vaccine I’m not willing to go through that.

The government no longer considers me safe to work with my clients, even though I’ve had covid. The nonsensicalness of it all is mind blowing.

So that’s me. I’ve lived and breathed midwifery for ten years. I hope that I’ve helped, that I’ve made a difference. I’ve loved it and I’ve dreaded some of it. But there is nothing like it.

So I will take the enforced exile and keep hoping common sense will prevail. Hoping I can come back. Until it does I’ll keep making my pots. I won’t join my colleagues being recruited by the NHS in the UK (who also have a midwifery shortage but have no mandates). I’m happy that they can now do what they love again, but really - what a stupid waste of those highly skilled women. Unvaccinated or unboosted midwives are not even allowed to work as doulas or run antenatal classes. The government has decreed they have to stay away from birthing women completely.

I promise to keep writing you stories until my time is up, there are a few lovely births on the horizon and I’ve got many a birth story rattling around in my head to share yet.

Im sure I’ll still keep bumbling along and making an idiot of myself too. The pic for todays blog is of my own feet. I raced out the door to help a friend with a birth at the hospital. When I got home I noticed I had two different coloured shoes on. No one said a word. I must have talked with about 15 people.

I can’t decide if not commenting was nice or evil of my mate 🤣

So happy international day of the midwife to what wikipedia defines as “a health professional who cares for mothers and newborns around childbirth”.

11 words that define all that we do apparently.

I only need two. You are all “fucking legends”. Thank you for what you do.

💕 Kimba