A little piece of calm

Sorry it's been so long since the last post. It's not passed me by that I moaned that no one was reading the blog, dragged a load of people over to take a look and then provided no reward. Sorry.

It's been one of those weeks where it feels like there are a thousand things to do, the house is descending into chaos through lack of attention and I'm becoming progressively more manic. Time to calm down girl.

Part of the mania comes from the knowledge that I'm really coming to the end of my fieldwork and it's time to start the writing. My supervisor has heavily hinted (as in demanded) that I write a significant amount before term starts in October and teaching begins and I get distracted again. The pressure isn't kicking in in quite the right way. Instead I'm playing the trick of doing a million things that 'really need to be done right now', just to avoid doing the thing I don't want to do.

Being conscious of my busyness has also got me thinking about the timescale of a PhD. I'm now realising why these things take so long to do; and I'm saying that in a country where the aim is to get the whole thing done in 3 years rather than the 6+ it takes in most of the rest of the world. It's a process of getting into grooves in thought and action, losing them, reclaiming, getting back on the journey and then getting diverted and stuck in a jam, one after the other after the other, again and again. I suspect if we all filled every moment of our time in a constructive fashion we'd have it done in 18 months but, hey, who does that?

The thing is, when I'm in the maternity units, things are busy, but not for me. I sit still on a chair, drink tea and watch other people rush from one job to the other without a moment to breathe. I feel guilty most of the time for not being able to help. Yes, I answer the door, welcome people, I've started to take phonecalls, but in the end I'm on a different timescale. The 'help' I'm giving, hopefully, will come some years down the line. It's not an immediate thing in the way that birth is (once the interminable meandering start has settled into a regular rhythm).

Fieldwork is this funny mix of mania and calm. Rushing to the hospital, rushing home, rushing to do interviews and so on. But when I'm there the pace, for me, slows down. And now I'm getting to the end that slowness becomes a little boring. I think I might be experiencing what they call in the business 'theoretical saturation': when you're not really seeing anything new and it all becomes a bit same old.

It's time to go now and move to the next stage. I need to take a little of the calm with me and spread it over the rest of my life. Breathe, breathe...pause...write.

Hellooo? (can ya hear the echo?)

Ok, I admit it. I'm a performer. I like an audience. I don't think there's anything much wrong with that.

I thought when I started this blog that it would just be a place to dump things, safe in the knowledge that no one would read it anyway so I could say what I like as badly as I chose. Turns out that's not the case. OK, I was right that no one reads it, but actually, I'd sort of like some company.

Even if you haven't the faintest idea what I'm rambling on about - please drop by and say hello by comment. I'll reciprocate.

Promise.

I don't feel so fluffy now

I've been thinking again this week about the ethics of ethnographic research. Not so much the NHS version of ethics, which usually runs along the lines of: 'if you are planning on injecting your participants with some little-researched substance, make sure you've got their signature first' or 'our 36 page ethics review form which will probably eat away six months of your life is only there to ensure the safety of patients'. (Cynical? Moi?)

No, I'm more concerned about the subtle ways in which the seemingly harmless process of collecting people's stories can become a sensitive, problematic and sometimes frought experience.

I'm not sure I could explain what I'm trying to say any better than Alison Bechdel already has. Alison is the author of 'Fun Home', a graphic-memoir of her childhood growing up in a house full of secrets and denial. It's an astounding book. But aside from the story, what is gripping about this book is that it illustrates how 'truth' is a shaky concept. In the book, Alison writes her version of the truth, a version which is different to that of others in the story. There is no 'real' story about what happened, just interpretation: was her father's death suicide or a tragic accident? Who knows. But it also doesn't really matter. Alison believes it was suicide, and so suicide it becomes.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2006, Alison reflected on what happens when you write your own truth, and when that truth is different from the truth of other characters in your story:

"I've discovered that there's something inherently hostile about having someone else write about your life, no matter how well-intentioned that other person might be," Bechdel says. "It violates their subjectivity. That's the really awful thing about this book: I made my mother and my brothers objects in my version of this story."

That's ethnography. I am making people objects in my story. I can't get round the fact that I am writing about the midwives' lives and whatever I interpret as the 'truth' simply becomes the truth, for the purpose of the thesis at the very least. I listen, I watch, I respect what they have to say about their world but in the end I'm the one who does the writing.

I remember being paralysed by the analysis of my masters interviews. What if I got it wrong? What if I misinterpreted their stories? What if they just didn't like what I said? What if they felt betrayed? It was only when I concluded that there probably wasn't anything I could do about it that I could actually begin to write the story I wanted to write. And so the ethics became even more dodgy. How come I get to decide how the story goes?

So I'm back in that place and having to come to the same conclusion as last time. The only problem that this time I've got to know these people so well. They've pretty much become my friends; now I'm worried I'm about to slowly violate their subjectivity and there wasn't anything about that on the NHS Ethics Committee form...

thought for the day

A couple of years ago I went on a writing retreat with a group of feminists from the university. We hung out in a Welsh manor house and did some writing workshops. Some people brought their teaching prep, some didn't. We got pissed, talked politics, went for walks, had fun.

I had the uncommon luxury of not having anything to do except write whatever I wanted to write. I got out the transcripts of my interviews with midwives I made for my masters dissertation and I reworked their stories. Little nuggets of story-truth trimmed and tightened until there was practically nothing left. Never quite finished, but presentable:

Ella’s Story

I was cycling past that day when her husband called me in
to promise to be their midwife.
- Just like before, Ella, when Ashra was born

So I pulled a few strings, as you do.
We were six women in a small, hot room.

Out in the street the ice-cream van and its off-key Greensleeves passed
Leaving me, one hand on a perineum
the other clutching a 99

oh yes, flake please
no sauce

Quickasaflash silver-fish baby slid into my hands.

The ice-cream fell, and as it melted into the carpet they gawped.
Stopped short mid-lick.
Ice-cream running down between their fingers as the blood ran down between mine.

Alison’s Story

He hit her about.

I’d asked her, like we ask them all and this time particularly because of her broken jaw. But it’s difficult when there’s a check-box to fill; and she’d stayed shtum with him sat right there.

She did tell me, at 2 am; when he’d kicked off and, right then and there, she walked.
Out the door, down the road, ignoring the shouts, she was purposeful and unusually proud.

She’d drop in to see me, I’d arrange visits on her own, helped her set herself up in her new home. I like to think I played a part in her decision to leave; just quietly raised her confidence. Made her feel special for the very first time.

I see lots of women like her, but she’s the one I remember. When people ask.

making the tea and keeping people happy

In the course of my PhD I have made many cups of tea. Tea, in fact, has been the key to the success of my fieldwork. On my very first day at Millside Hospital I wrote in my fieldnotes, with impressive foresight I think: 'That kettle and I are going to be good friends'; and so I was right, we would be.

What my making endless cups of tea symbolised was someone taking care of the midwives I was working with. Taking care of someone is emotionally and physically tiring; it is something that midwives do all shift, every shift and yet caring needs to be passed from one person to another like an endless circle of karma. You cannot care for someone unless you are cared for yourself. The surprise and delight of the midwives at my offers of 'tea, anyone?' was both sweet and sad; they didn't appear to be cared for in a way that enabled them to have the resources to care for others.

I don't think that the structure of supervision, unique and central to the midwifery profession, is enough. Yes statutory supervision was an astounding achievement for the fledgling profession in 1902; it has helped ensure the safety of women and babies; it has provided some kind of emotional support for midwives, but there is too much complacency. There is an assumption that midwives can cope with a job in which they are supporting vulnerable women in pain and often dealing with grief as well as happiness, without regular counselling or emotional support. Simply having a statutory annual supervision leaves them open to exhaustion and burn out. I'm not the first person to notice that.

Care of midwives is crucial to the future of the profession. Empowering midwives in order that they may empower women is crucial. Giving midwives the space to articulate their own concerns so that they can advocate for women is crucial. Tea is also nice. I didn't mean to be doing these things during my fieldwork, it was just that I had the time where no one else did. I sat and listened to their stories, I became a sounding board and counsellor, I made tea.

The difficulty now is managing the expectation that change might come from what I have done. That the 'evidence' that I write in a thesis can actually act as political leverage within the Trusts where I have spent time, in order that midwives might be better cared for. I hope so; but I don't feel I can promise. Perhaps the way will come afterwards. Perhaps I need to stick around: make a fuss, listen, speak, write and fight after this thesis is done. And perhaps I will.

Here at last

I've come late to blogging. The party started years ago and I've been the shy girl in the corner, watching, reading, following, but never quite daring to say anything.

So, I have decided that things have got to change.

My plan is that this blog is a place to deposit ideas, musings, theories, rants and other detritus from the process of writing my PhD over the coming year and will hopefully continue beyond. One of it's primary roles is a strategy for breaking through writer's block; the idea being that when I'm writing on a website that practically no-one reads, with no restrictions of academic convention or rigourous use of evidence that somehow I'll be able to actually write.

This seems to be going well so far. I have written this post in about 1 minutes 30 seconds. Believe me, if this was an academic article I would have been sweating for about 3 hours by now. Perhaps I could just keep a blog for a year, print it out and submit that, instead of the enormous soup of complexity I am about to start cooking.