say hello to the elephant

This blog is written as a Diary entry for myself. I wrote it so, that I can look back on it and remember how ‘heavy’ my elephants got for me, and hopefully appreciate how far I have come. xxx

Dear Elephant

“I feel you sitting on me right now. I feel all of your weight… and your size seems to be blocking a lot of the light coming in from the window. I keep trying to heave you off, and creak my neck around to see the sky outside, but, you are just one big heavy persistent fucking blob, and to be honest, I’m actually a little bit over it. Get the fuck off me.”

This is how I have been feeling for about the last 6 weeks. Studying this degree is challenging so much of my life and my ‘self’. I knew it was going to be hard, I knew I was going to be pushed to my limits, but I had no idea that I would lose sight of myself and the passion that I used to feel inside me every day.

There have been days when I have left the hospital and cried. I cried because I had not been inspired by any of my colleagues, or I had not seen one midwife that I aspired to be like. I cried because midwives I had worked with were not doing the things I thought midwives would do. I felt out of place and awkward and sad for some of the women we had cared for.  I have left lectures and cried. Cried because the lecturers hadn’t even shown up, or wrong slides given out, or irrelevant information given, and my valuable hours had been wasted. I cried because I started to doubt what I was doing. Working 2 part time jobs, juggling 3 kids and a husband, does not allow me much free time to waste… and I really do rely on being inspired and motivated at my hospital shifts pracs….. so when this doesn’t happen….. I struggle.

This degree is harder than I could have ever imagined. Not hard ‘academically’ but ‘physically and emotionally’.  There is NO ‘time off’. There is NO mid-semester break. When the pracs and lectures are over, we still have our “follow-through-women”. We still have to attend clinic appoints and be present for the births. We are still on call, and unable to go away anywhere, or make plans with friends and family, for fear of missing a birth, and all the accompanying clinic appointment hours. If we miss a birth we have to start again with another “follow-through-mum” that we also have to find ourselves. There is literally NO ‘time off’.

I hardly see the kids. I never see my friends. The house is a mess. The family diet is shocking. I don’t eat well. I hardly exercise. I rarely sleep. The dogs don’t get walked. I dont even remember what sunshine looks like…..And my poor husband only gets to see fleeting moments of me, and when he does I am a stressed, tired, frazzled shell of a wife.

I am only half way. I keep thinking it’s going to get better…. Actually I keep HOPING it’s going to get better, because I’m not sure how much more I can take.  I also keep hoping that I am not changing as a person, because I don’t like this Cherlisa with this big fat elephant sitting on top of her.

I want to smile again. I want to see ‘the good’ in people again. I even want to just “see” people again.

Elephant, please, get the fuck off me and just go and stand in the corner for awhile. I am so over you right now.

Cherlisa