Fifteen Blackbirds on a Tuesday Afternoon

1. When it comes to working in a clinical setting, there is a pecking order. There is always a pecking order. 

2. Acknowledging the pecking order will result in the near-immediate acceptance of you and what you have to offer on both a personal and professional level.

3. If you circumvent the pecking order by becoming the pet of the top dog, it is unlikely that you will appreciate any acceptance whatsoever, except that which we can find the grace to extend you despite your inappropriate assumption of privilege.

4. Acting as if people stepping aside to make a place for you is you doing them a favour is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.

5. Nonchalantly assuming personal responsibility for jobs that are part of another person's routine workday, without being asked, is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.

6. So is acting as if the connection formed through an introduction and then one half hour prenatal happens to be more important than a connection formed over two pregnancies and a birth and a miscarriage in between.

7. It's not.

8. The thing is, while I try to be reasonable I find that I'm also decidedly territorial, and what all this is showing me is not that you're a bad person, or that this conflict is beyond resolution, but that there's a wolf inside of me that sets boundaries defining what I call my own, and that wolf would rather tear you apart for one mis-step than it would allow you the understanding owed from one human to another.

9. The thing is, I keep discovering that I'm a nastier sort of woman than I think that I am.

10. I have teeth. Sharp teeth. And it's frightening to be so ready to maul you because you inched your foot over a piece of ground to which I had laid tacit claim. Because honestly, what's more important here? You getting the chance to meet a goal for which you've been working your heart out for years, or me having a month of comfortably roaming my own domain? You achieving something that will set you up for the rest of your career as a midwife, or me getting the gratification of being the one on the floor for yet another routine month at clinic? 

11. Does it matter if I miss a couple of births that I had been hoping to attend? 

12. Does it really?

13. So here's what I have to say, over halfway through this month, with all of the subtle distaste and distance there between us: Yes, there is a pecking order. And yes, you disregarded it. And yes, that stings. There were places I wanted to be and people that meant a lot to me, and you slipped between us, and I wish you hadn't. You were just a tiny bit rude. But the thing is, that's not going to matter in a year, or six months, or even one, and I'm glad, honestly glad, that you get the chance to accomplish something that means so much to you, that you're giving up so much to achieve. 

14. The thing is, there is a pecking order. There has been and there always will be, and it serves as a sort of social structure within a clinical context. But empathy supersedes that structure. That animalistic pecking order.

15. The thing is, I need to learn to let it go.