Monthly Coffee Date

From my breezy balcony on this warm Chicago morning, I am so glad to sit down and share with you. I will be drinking tea, as a sudden and horrendous bout of heartburn hit me last month. Stress? Highly likely. Overconsumption of coffee and wine? Beyond probable. Something that had been brewing for longer than I’d like to admit? Definitely. I’m on one week into a two week regimen of no coffee/alcohol/chocolate/acidic foods. I’m super duper craving iced coffee as sipping it is one of my all-time favorite signs of warmer weather, but tea will do for now.

This month I’ve been crunched over a computer more than I’d like to admit, and yesterday I spent all day on foot at the Chicago protests, and my 35-year old body will need all day to recover. So let’s start by taking three deep breaths, slowly in and slowly out. Bring your shoulders up to your ears, and then wind them back and down. Bring your palms together in front of you, interlace your fingers, and stretch your arms forward, then up overhead, then back if that is comfortable. Make space in your hips as you sit, taking up all the space on the sides that you want and need. Take up the space around you. Make it your own.

Let’s begin. What was most present for you this month? What themes dominated your early morning and late evening thoughts? What successes are you celebrating? What challenges have you struggled with or are you compartmentalizing until you have the capacity to return to them?

This month I spent a lot of time thinking about, working with, listening to, and supporting students. Myself and my clinical instructor colleagues celebrated the midwife and nurse practitioner students in the graduating cohort. We held a celebratory Zoom call, and I read two of my favorite poems, Ada Limon’s “What I Didn’t Know Before” and Mary Oliver’s “GoldenRod.” The tradition of sharing poems and stories and music and mantras with midwifery students came from my time at Yale, where the incoming class received a binder full of these messages from all the students previous to us. I hope in an upcoming move (news coming next month!) I uncover that binder, as right now it’s in a tub at the bottom of our storage unit. Through the Feminist Midwife platform I hosted two Zoom sessions for students to openly share (without faculty or preceptors or mentors present) how things in their programs are really going. There is a long list of concerns, and a motivated quorum moving forward with next steps. Likely more calls will be held coming soon. And this month I was able to connect with the mentees from my alma mater to talk through their next steps as they graduate: the workforce about to enter our midst is talented, experienced, thoughtful, and they will need a lot of support that is different than any previously graduating class before them. We need to keep our hearts and minds open to on-boarding new graduates at this time.

Taking a big sip, as I am still waking up, I am thinking about the protests since George Floyd’s murder. And the calmer discussion about Breonna Taylor’s murder. And the months-long outrage that finally led to the arrest of Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers. Really I am thinking about all the protests since Ferguson, and how little has actually changed about the messages of these protests. I can only count on one hand how many protests I have been to in my lifetime, as I came to activism late in my adulthood, with the most recent being the hardest. Yesterday my wife and I attended the Chicago protests, and were moved by the community grief and passion as well as the unfiltered white anarchism that has infiltrated the movement. I will write more about my protest experience in my newsletter, but when I was asked to share my midwife “story” for yesterday’s #ACNM2020 Heart of Midwifery, here is the text I sent to be read on my behalf:

I cannot be at ACNM or HOM today because my midwifery is story to tell is one of feminism and reproductive justice. I am in Chicago protesting institutionalized police racism and national white supremacy and the murder of George Floyd. I am protesting the murder of Breonna Taylor. I am protesting the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. I am a white midwife who actively works toward being an accomplice to Black people and the Black Lives Matter rebellion and the reproductive justice movement. What being an accomplice means to me is to move beyond reposting and giving money and actively move into intentional participation. Especially with nurse and midwifery training I am present at protests with supplies ready to care for others if tear gassed or injured. What being a white midwife accomplice is to be anti-racist: not *just* work *in* communities of color and communities of high need, but work *for* them and *beside* them. Reproductive justice means the ability to have children, not have children, and raise the children we have safely. When Black people are lynched at the hands of social systems tasked with caring for them, or killed by terrorists and their survivors never get justice because of those same systems, no one can feel safe to raise their children or live freely. My midwifery stands for reproductive justice and humanity, and for those reasons I protest. I welcome you to consider your own midwifery story and what it will mean to you to midwife in the world. And I am here to push you, White midwives, and I am here to listen and learn and fight alongside you, Black midwives and midwives of color. In solidarity: Stephanie

Let’s think through how to begin good activism this month by taking some small steps. A first suggestion? Post about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery on your social media platforms, talk about why their murders must matter to all of us and for reproductive justice, and then anonymously donate to your local Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter. Another? Donate to local restaurants giving food to frontline workers, and by that I mean healthcare centers and hospitals and EMTs and fire fighters (not police). A third? Stop purchasing things from Amazon. Just stop. B*zos has made more money off of this pandemic than is even fathomable. Let’s start with books: if you aren’t ordering through your local bookstores (starting first with your local feminist or BIPOC-led bookstores) then order through Bookshop, where 75% of proceeds support local book sellers. Amazon is a capitalist enemy in this fight for safety and wellbeing and the ability for local communities to thrive and economic freedom: do not support them.

My successes this month? On May 27th, I finally (finally!) registeredFeminist Midwife as an LLC. A small step in a long journey of blogging and speaking and writing for almost 8 years, but a big next step in the journey of what is next for me in this work. I’m thrilled about it. I also turned in a revise-and-resubmit draft for potentially the biggest publication of my career, and I am beyond proud to have taken the next step in that process. (I have draft outlines of some other bold topics that I’ll be pitching to journals and publishers, and those are my June goals I think back on next month.) And, last but certainly not least, I will be joining the 2020 cohort of Fellows at the MacClean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago as its first midwife. My study and research while there will focus on consent in gynecologic care. I am over the moon to be in an academic program again.

My challenges? How, in any other time or space, I would be outrageously celebrating certain things, and instead, in this time and space, they are passing along quietly in the Groundhog Day that seems to be our lives right now. Specifically I am reflecting on how this month we (collectively, “we” the global community of midwives and nurses) seemed to mostly quietly celebrate the International Day of the Midwife and Nurses Week, in this WHO-declared “Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.” The most I could put together this year was to host a silly (read for me: vulnerable) dance party + Q&A session in my living room (thanks to those who tuned in and asked questions!). How did you celebrate? Did you connect with people in your lives who identify as nurses and midwives? How did you thank them? In what ways did you think past thanking them for their “heroic” work and move into asking what the life in healthcare environments is like right now, what they need in terms of support going forward as states reopen, and offer what resources you may have? This piece written by the nurse interning at Nurses for Sexual and Reproductive Health (NSRH) right now really sticks with me: it features a sign held by Jillian, a nurse in Brooklyn, which reads “Please don’t call me a hero. I am being martyred against my will.”

Another challenge for me this month was making it through Chanel Miller’s memoir “Know My Name.” I will be writing a public FM blog post about what her memoir meant to me as a provider of gynecologic healthcare, and as a sexual assault survivor who now provides this care for others, but for now, I will just say it was a daily effort to pick up the book, and then an effort to put it down and move through my life with any focus or energy. Sending love to all my fellow survivors who’ve done the same, with the news coverage of the #metoo movement these past months and years.

Finishing up my tea, here is some levity of late. I finally watched the movie Parasite, which won Best Movie last year (and is honestly one of the best movies I’ve seen). I’ve been obsessively watching each and every season of Married at First Sight, and justifying this pleasure by thinking through how much Roxane Gay writes in Bad Feminism about how part of the work is consuming popular media. We also recently watched the movies The Lovebirds and The Invisible Man, both of which were fantastic. (Though how in the world does Elizabeth Moss not consider her Scientology-representation in movies like that or role in The Handmaids Tale as feminism is BEYOND ME).

Lastly, I highly recommend you join the National Coalition of Sexual Health (it’s free!). They’re a rad crew and I highly recommend their resources for inclusive history-taking, sex positive messaging, and provider education.

As May wraps up today, I am looking toward next month. June is Pride, which will be celebrated in such different ways this year. I am so looking forward to seeing what the queer community generates in terms of commemorating the riot that started it all to begin with, reflects on continued work toward inclusivity of all queer gender and sexuality identities, and considers a holistic future for the movement.

Hope you and your loved ones are doing as well as you can be in these surreal, trying, devastating, rebuilding, protest-focused, unprecedented, dystopian-turned-reality times. I am here with you.

In solidarity,

Stephanie (Feminist Midwife)