Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Today I tasted things for money

So since I barely blogged from Japan.Sorry it got to be much more interesting living life than writing about it I have decided to switch gears.I like blogging and from now I am going to be blogging about being a midwife or at least my general thoughts about it. There seems to be some confusing about why I want to be a midwife,when I decided, and what was the catalysts. All of you seem to have different thoughts because in keeping with my fragmented self I told almost everybody different things.None of it untrue just not the whole truth.There is also only one Woman of Color who is a practicing midwife in Philadelphia.I am not including CNMs. This is a problem!This is not what initially decide to become a midwife.But it is what made me begin to research the history of black midwives in the US and look for black midwives in the US.There is a conference in Harlem that I am going to in October for Black Midwives and healers which I am hoping will be inspiring.I don't need to agree with all these people politically I just need to know that they are out there.
I can tell that midwives can be pretty conservative folks outside of the realm of the politics of maternity and families.I am also concerned about the politics of families particularly the racism and classism. I think that people are doing a lot of good work around providing women with information about options but what women what options and how accessible are they. It's pretty fucked up that I don't how to fashion my own baby sling but I can buy one crafted buy someone who saw it while in the Peace Corps in East Africa. That is cultural genocide.Not in its entirety but it still counts.Especially when the profit to be made is factored in. D talked about it at dinner, taking ideas from folks making slight modifications and then reselling it back to them.
I wanna be a midwife to women who don't trust doctors, who doctors see and immediately presumed that they are stupid.That because they speak another language,have more melanin, not enough money that somehow they are less fit parents. I want to be the caregiver that my mother should have had when she had to c-sections, or my grandmother on the unwed mothers ward ripping up the mattress, or my girl who hid her pregnancy until she was going into labor.But that is not why i decided to be a midwife either. That is a much longer post about gender,race,class and nationalism. As I thought about different family and women I knew then these things started to get folded into my ideas and thoughts.Like the fact that the midwife that I would want to have maybe doesn't exist in Philly.
All right well these should be far less humdrum than my Japan posts which were heavily censored.