Tonight Josh took me to dinner at Fig and Olive for my birthday. Oh. My. Goodness. I think we made one of those memories that we will look back on someday when we are older and fatter and spend lots of time changing diapers. I had chicken tagine with figs and olives and apricots. Josh had the melt-in-your-mouth filet mignon. And we talked about life in the City and what we love and hate about being here and how delicious our food and drinks were and how we often feel so out of place in fancy restaurants but that's part of what makes it so fun.

Every time it is someone's birthday, I always like to ask three questions:

1. First, I ask the people around the birthday person to list three things they appreciate about the birthday person.

Then I ask the birthday person:

2. What are three beautiful or meaningful things you remember from this past year?
and
3. What are three hopes for the next year?

I indoctrinated Josh and he kindly honored my cheesy tradition. Here are our answers from tonight:

1. Josh said, after a listing a few inappropriate "favorites": I like how well our friends speak about you. I like that you tell good stories. I like that no matter what you are doing, you give your best work, you don't do anything halfway.

2. I said, three beautiful things from my past year were: becoming a doula, sitting on the beach with Josh and my family in Cape Charles, VA, and eating Ramen at Ippudo with some of my best girls.

3. My three hopes for this next year are: to receive God's mercy better, to forgive better, and to grow our family ;-). Yeah, I know, easy goals, right?

I recently began the process of becoming a Certified Birth Doula. The word "doula" is Greek for "a woman who serves." A birth doula is essentially a birth assistant, someone who supports a mother and her partner as they prepare for, experience, and remember the birth of their child.

I owe this latest career path change to one of my best friends, Blair Hicks, who recently completed her training as a Certified Nurse Midwife and Family Nurse Practitioner at Vanderbilt. Blair's midwifery training included a year of shadowing other midwives all over the country. She spent some time in the backwoods of northern Georgia and a few more months just outside of Houston, Texas. Every few weeks during her training, Blair would send out an email to all of her friends letting us know how she was doing and what she was learning. She would always include a birth story or two. Every time I read one of Blair's stories about her role in bringing a new little person into the world, I would tear up and complain to my husband about how meaningless my life felt. Blair has known since she was a little girl that she wanted to be a nurse. I've always known I wanted to do something in the theatre. But at this point in my career, it seems like almost all of my energy is spent trying to survive Manhattan and eeking out just enough time to create a piece of theatre here and there. The idea of having a tangible physical and emotional impact on the birth of a person and a mother's experience of bringing new life into the world sounded like a hellova career path and calling. In the middle of my "grass is greener" pity party, I felt God nudging me and saying "Hey, maybe this is me calling you into something new. Listen to that hunger." And so I began...life as a doula. I won't leave theatre entirely. It will always be a part of my life. I am just ready to hold it a little more loosely and begin a new chapter. A birthing chapter.

This is Blair in the midst of her midwifery training. How can you not be inspired by such a glowing, lovely woman!

This is me at my first birth this June. 

The thing about a goose is that there is no such thing as a "tame" one. A goose is always wild, and stubborn, and independent. He will not listen to your threats and he is not afraid of your big stick.

When I was seven, my parents, my two sisters, and I lived on a "farm" in Tennessee. We always joked about it actually being a "farm" because while we had a fairly large garden and 5 acres of land and a pond, we didn't have any animals. My parents had always dreamed of living on a Tennessee farm with crops, and cows, and chickens, and children, and while we saved up money to build a big farm house and buy animals, we were making do with our vegetable garden and our tin roof should-have-been-condemned two-bedroom house. Then one summer my parents announced that we were going in with the neighbors to buy some geese. Geese! How exciting! I'd never owned a goose before. I think I had seen a few at the pond in Lubbock, Texas where my grandfather used to take us with some breadcrumbs. Or were those ducks? Maybe both? Geese would be fun. I couldn't wait to share my breadcrumbs with them.

I think we had the geese for about a month? All I can remember is that we spent a lot of time chasing them with sticks. They quickly grew in notoriety in our "neighborhood." The phone would ring, and my mom would yell out the screen door that Old Miss "Whatwashername" was calling again about the geese being in her garden and eating her lettuce. I didn't know geese liked lettuce. That was our signal to pick up a couple of sticks and go chase the geese off of Old Miss "Whatwashername's" property on to our own. Between the five or six of us kids (me and my two sisters plus the kids of the neighbors who were sharing the geese with us), it would take what seemed like hours to get the two geese back on the right side of the fence. We would herd one through and while we were working on the second one the first would skirt around us. We'd wave our sticks and they'd just sneer and hiss at us. None of us would actually hit them, except maybe Greg, who was the only boy among us. But even when he did, they didn't seem to fear him. Eventually, we'd herd the geese back onto our side of the land only to repeat the same silly dance several more times that day. This went on for a few weeks before our parents finally gave up and decided that geese were not the best kind of farm animal and we should probably keep saving up for a good chicken or cow.  Geese were simply untamable.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Wild Geese by Mary Oliver