You could tell what Dolly believed by what Dolly did. She moved money. She created access. She gave people books. She invested in education. She supported medical research. She poured resources back into the place she came from. She used her fame, her money, her influence and her enormous platform to materially change people’s lives. Her values had legs.

And I keep thinking about that today because in my current lens/process/environment, I am exhausted by people who have learned the language of justice without accepting any of the inconvenience of practicing it.

People who know what to post.
Who know what infographic to share.
Who know how to say “support marginalized communities” or “help end maternal mortality”, “support Black women” etc. but when supporting an actual person requires something of them (time, resources, advocacy, discomfort, speaking up, risking a relationship, pissing somebody off) suddenly everybody gets very quiet. If speaking up risks their proximity to power (whiteness), it is out of the question.

Dolly wasn’t perfect. Nobody is.

But there is something I deeply admire about a Southern white woman whose compassion was not merely theoretical. You didn’t have to interrogate her politics to figure out whether she believed people deserved dignity. And especially right now, in my own journey through midwifery, I find myself thinking a lot about the difference between proclaiming care and practicing care.

I want more people whose values have legs.

More people willing to move something.

Risk something.

Give something.

Do something.

May we all know the mercy and compassion that Dolly taught us.

And may we have the courage to practice it.

And then, because apparently the universe decided I needed to spend this week contemplating the lives and deaths of people who taught us something about being, I found out that Tim Curry died too. And immediately, a line he is known for came to me: Don’t dream it. Be it.

I’ve been asked some version of “Why do you even want to be a midwife?” more times than I care to count.

Sometimes by people who are genuinely curious. But sometimes by other midwives and students, particularly when I am struggling. When I’m exhausted. When I’m disappointed. When I’m naming the ways this profession has hurt me.

I don’t think they mean it as an insult. I think they see all the other ways I move through the world and genuinely wonder, You have options. You could do so many other things. Why keep choosing something that has been this hard? Why not just quit? Why do you still want this?

But maybe people don’t realize how deeply that question can sting because having other options doesn’t make this calling feel optional. This perspective assumes that my difficulty belonging here must mean that I don’t belong here. It assumes that because the road has been painful, I must have misunderstood the destination. It also implies that as a Black woman, I am not used to being challenged in deeper ways than my non-marginalized counterparts.

I don’t want to become a midwife because midwifery has always been kind to me.

I yearn to become a midwife because something about this work lives so deeply in my bones that I have continued toward it even when the institutions surrounding it have given me every reason to turn around.

There are things we choose. And then there are things we recognize within ourselves. Midwifery has always felt much more like recognition to me. Something ancestral. Something familiar. Something I knew before I had the vocabulary or credentials or paperwork to explain that I knew it. That’s part of what makes navigating this profession and the training to prepare me for it so painful. There is a particular grief in having something that feels ancient and intimate inside of you placed behind gates, guarded by people whose institutions first stole it from people like you, and then being asked why you keep knocking.Because I know what’s on the other side.

I know who I am.

I know the kind of midwife I want to be.

And because somewhere along the way, I stopped dreaming about becoming her and I started becoming her.

So maybe these two strange losses arriving beside my own grief are leaving me with two instructions:

Let your values have legs.

And

Don’t dream it. Be it.

May I have the courage to do both.

Food. Broth. Check-in texts. Offers to run errands. People asking what I need and then asking again the next day. Every time I think I understand the importance of community, life gives me another reason to understand it more deeply. We are simply not meant to do all of this alone.

Especially when your body decides it is DONE negotiating with you.

Lately my body has been telling me to sit TF down. And weirdly? It has felt gentle. Painful as hell, but gentle. A kidney stone + rupturing ovarian cyst + sinus infection certainly isn’t what most people would describe as gentle, but somehow I do. Getting sick often feels like an energetic reset for me, a hard interruption that creates space for something I haven’t been willing or able to make space for myself.

As I finished my NARM (National Associated of Registered Midwives) requirements and began closing out a very long chapter of student midwifery, I found myself wanting quiet and stillness. I thought getting here might make me immediately excited about what comes next, but instead I found myself desiring a full breath. I want to study without performing. I want time between finishing student midwifery and deciding what midwifery looks like for me. I want to remember why I wanted this before wanting it became tangled up with proving I could survive it.

I already know I can endure hard things, and I don’t think endurance is the question anymore. Maybe the question is what I want my work to feel like when survival is no longer the requirement.

Being a student took a lot out of me.

Somewhere in all the proving, performing, adapting and enduring, I lost touch with some of the things I think brought me to this work in the first place. My softness. My curiosity. My intuition. My reverence. The ability to listen deeply and trust what I hear.

I want those things back.

I want enough distance from becoming a midwife to remember what made me fall in love with midwifery in the first place. I want to study differently. To commune with my ancestors. To receive teachings that can’t be measured in numbers or signed off on a form. To make room for the kind of knowing that made this work feel sacred to me before it became something I had to prove I deserved to do.

There is grief in letting go of what I imagined apprenticeship would be, too. Perhaps I should have known better than to expect such a flawed system that we have all been fighting against to make tenderness part of my education. Maybe healing from student midwifery is part of becoming the midwife I am actually supposed to be. And maybe most importantly, I want to resist the impulse to turn every ending immediately into a beginning.

For now, I’m letting myself be held.

By water. By rest. By my people. By my ancestors. By this body that has apparently decided subtlety is no longer an effective means of communication. 😂

Every time I attend a birth, I remember, my body remembers, my soul recognizes: this is holy ground.

It is a ritual that rearranges me, a thread that stitches stability into my life. In the chaos of the world (both my personal world, and the world at large), attending birth returns me to the altar of what truly matters. Humanity rests o…

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