Miscellania

These days I've been feeling a winding up of tension, a sense of anxiety's spiral looming close. Often when the feeling of anxiety approaches like a winding shadow behind me, I turn to lists. This blog is one such source, an archive of text lists. Seeing my thoughts written in this way allows me to compile them and to declutter. I am grateful for experiences of this stress as they often indicate that I'm growing. Though I haven't said it out loud much, I have made a decision. I want to become a midwife. Midwifery was a fixation of mine during my undergraduate career nearly from move-in day, as my roommate and best friend Jazmyn pursues a life in midwifery. That first year I joined Hampshire College's Civil Liberties and Public Policy student group interested in learning more about reproductive justice. Quickly within that first semester I fell in love with feminist reproductive healthcare. One afternoon Jazmyn returned to our room from class to find me...

When people ask me what my job is there are several answers I could give. I am a babysitter, a nanny, a childcare provider, and a caregiver. In recent years I've begun using the last most frequently. I think it most accurately describes the kind  of babysitter, nanny, childcare provider that I am. I seek to provide families with a safe, loving, engaging space for their children and a meaningful and mutual relationship based on learning with me. I am only weeks away from graduating Mount Holyoke and beginning the next leg of my journey onward to become a registered nurse, then a lactation consultant, and a full-spectrum doula somewhere along the way. I was recently thinking about my future in nursing and the way that it appears (on the surface) to be so completely different from my undergrad work at Mount Holyoke studying Liberal Arts. What I mean is that I am moving from a space that emphasizes personal growth, emotional engagement with the material, and models of messy learnin...

Things on my mind: herbalism gardening what does it mean to be a caregiver? Childcare, lactation, nursing, midwifery??

Home is the pasty steam of linguine boiling over the taste of flat pepsi and the symphony of creaks my toes play by heart up the stairs, my legs leaning in an effortless dance like the posture of a trained pianist one who's been playing since pre school. My mom can't use the cook timer on the stove,