Looking for Holidays

[drafted on the 24th of January, kept back for rudimentary revision]

This week is passing in a blur of confusion; hours of abandoned sleep are latching around my conscious thought and strangling it strand by strand. I have returned to the clinic for the first time since the week before Christmas. When I unlocked the door early this morning and stepped into the cold waiting room, a familiar sense of imprisonment slid into place around me and blocked me from the easy morning outside; the silence indoors clanged with apprehension.

Clients arrived, fellow employees greeted each other cheerily, appointment after appointment drifted by, bubble-like, and vanished into fragments. I moved half-asleep through routine tasks. Works lifted from my lips of their own accord, and questions asked themselves. My disembodied auditory receptors obtained answers, and my fingers staggered across pages of client files to record them. I wondered vaguely if this constituted malpractice -- providing health services while functioning as though I were an automaton, deduction disabled and actions dictated only by programming of habit. As I scheduled appointments my brain, pretending to be dyslexic, turned my nines into fours and my threes into 'S's.

Every muscle in my body strung tight against fatigue and frustration, I gritted my teeth against the day; my shoulders began to burn and my back ache with the effort to keep awake and stay calm. Nausea roiled in my gut, and I cursed myself over and over again for coming back. Just as my uncle said, I'd dropped what I knew to be necessary in order to stay in the safe zone -- the place where I could play hero. There's nothing worse than a God complex. You just had to protect them from the consequences of their choices, didn't you? I went to the water closet and stared at my reflection in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes, ringed by black shadows, stared back at me over a taut jaw. "Bloody fool."

Gradually, between a meat-laden lunch and twenty-four ounces of Wawa mocha (a combination of ultra-caffeinated original, French vanilla, and English toffee, with a splash of hot water), memory took hold of my murmurings. Yes, I hated coming back. But my word was given, the promise made; what could I change except through breaking yet another commitment? I stood in the empty basement, laundry in hand, and aimed a thought in a new direction. "Lord, is there hope in this? Is there good? Give me the strength to find it." The strenth begged joined hands with the memories creeping through the chinks in my mental fog. And the memories had faces.

Later in the evening Ema shared a bit of Bacon, a letter from Jane to Derek. So deal with what you can, let go of what you can't, and know that God chose you for this specific day and hour—or maybe, more aptly, gave the day and hour to you, as a gift. While it's troublesome now, you have the opportunity to grow from it and even if you can't see any purpose in it, you can always anoint it with the purpose of letting God work His glory through you. If that doesn't make for an exciting trip, I've never learned anything.

The words felt like a swat on the bottom, albeit a gentle one. I had to stop drenching myself in the junk of being here and realize that, mistake or no, it had been made. These days -- every one of these tortured, beautiful hours -- they are my gift. For each waking nightmare there was a dream that made the night worth enduring; for every loss, however bitter, there was a gain. (Matter is never destroyed, only transformed, and the transformation does not always obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics.) The good that has come to me through midwifery will overwhelm and outlast the discomfort of sticking with crashed relationships for a few months more.

The people were worth it all.

I've forgotten too many of them, but a few stand out in vivid colour.

Katie, you showed me how to be a student. Your quiet diligence and continuous service, even when the entire staff had gathered in the kitchen for a coffee break and you were the only one working, taught me just what it meant to serve behind your master's back, without immediate appreciation or reward,  'as unto the Lord.' And you didn't even know Him.

Rhonda, your love for your clients burned in every word you spoke, every smile you gave. When you came into Mary's bedroom after the stillbirth of their twenty-week baby, you didn't fumble foolishly for words or hang back in the awkwardness of the situation; instead, you touched her heart with your gentle, unobtrusive kindness. Watching you love those you encountered made me want to learn to love them that way too. You always smiled the world at people you didn't even know.

Laura, you gave me the opportunity to empathize through listening. The hours we spent in that back exam room, prenatal after prenatal, chatting about your stresses at work, your relationship with your well-meaning but smothering mother, the romance deepening between you and your taciturn husband... You shared your fears of inadequacy as a mother and your desire to give back some of what you had been given in life. You cried so many tears between your first pregnancy and the second, but in those tears you grew up. And you let a girl over a decade younger than yourself share that journey with you. It was my honour.

Jan, you made a child your colleague and took her comments as though she were a fellow professional. I still remember the day we left the clinic and went out together to interrogate the interrogators, scribbling interview notes and license plate numbers in crazy shorthand on our yellow legal pads. Since then, you went out of your way to draw me into your social circles and treat me as if I were both fellow midwife and friend, without qualification. The ideas that I sheepishly shared, that you insisted could be -- must be -- reality? They are happening now.

Sarah, you were ugly and unlovable, along with your queer little half-witted (or so they said) husband. My perceptions and prejudices were shattered as I worked with you in your home, in your own domain and on your own terms, and then afterwards, during your daughter's illness, at the Children's Hospital (oh, that place was so fearsome and unfamiliar to you, and not once did you let show that you were so, so scared). I will never forget the look on your face as you pulled the little napkin over your baby girl's face, or the way your hands hovered there, arranging this tuck, this fold, as if you couldn't bear to let them close the lid and take her away from you forever. Behind the stumbling speech and vague looks of incomprehension, behind the obstinancy and lack of education, you were a strong, beautiful woman.

Sadie, you were too little to say much, but it was over your survival that I had to come to terms with who controlled life. In the aftermath of your birth, with the questions flung from every direction, and even now the questioning looks and the unspoken disapproval (that child never should have lived, and you saved her life), I found a solid answer. We did what was right. No amount of medical bills outweigh the value of a living soul, and no matter how many times I make the choice, no matter what the situation, it will always be the same.

Lara, when I met you last spring... They told me about you, told me you spun fire and had a sense of style all your own, and I knew I just had to meet you. But when we sat down across from each other in that meeting fascination gave way to quiet observation. When you spoke, it wasn't your beautiful English accent that intrigued me, it was the person behind that voice. We stood hand in hand in a prayer circle before we were even introduced, and the words you spoke shook me to the core of my soul; the words themselves evaporated as soon as I opened my eyes, but the substance remained -- the promise of something pure and true -- and it felt as if you were not present and it was instead God who had reached into my heart and shown me that love did indeed exist. You gave a stranger so much during the course of that weekend, as casually as if you had been expecting her to be there and had prepared for her exactly what you knew she would need.

So many people, so many good things. So many reasons to hope. Jane, in her letter to Derek, continued, Of course, it's also just nice not having to mull over junk. We get free holidays from that all the time, just as long as we accept. That little detail isn't my strong suit, but it's nice to know the offer is always there, and that we are encouraged to work toward our own benefit. It's not my strong suit either, but the junk isn't all there is to see, and I need to remember that. The pain is worth the price of receiving the gift, and who's to say that half the junk isn't exacerbated by my own dwelling upon it?


In the end I went home and collapsed on the couch, fighting to stave off the exhausted desperation that waged war with logic in an attempt to slip in an invasion force of guilt and despair. The Doctor's words rang in my mind -- "Everyone's life is sort of like a pile of good things and bad things." A small comfort when the bad things seem to have the larger pile, but I needed to sleep and wasn't about to give in to that idea. I may be no Pollyanna, but do I really need to hang onto the junk like that when I have so much to appreciate? Closing my eyes, I let the darkness tear away all lingering thought.