I’ve learned the acronym that essentially spells privacy at doctors’ offices is HIPAA. A new ruling extends it to the walls of baby photos on the walls at the OB or midwives’ office (or pediatrician, or orthodontist). We’re gonna miss the babies, aren’t we?
In the local daily paper, I paid tribute to a local midwife, Judie Brock, should you like to read it.
Midwives support families at a tender moment: with the new and unknown. The piece went into the paper just after news of Robin Williams’ death lit up all the news and social media—a gut punch of an ending, a reminder that tender doesn’t only belong to the beginning. All over, people fight to stay alive. It becomes possible to think you can judge someone’s letting go, unless you really embrace the illness part of mental illness, unless you acknowledge that depression can rage beyond a harness, even if you try with all your might.
There are terrible things we could change in the world (I leave it to you to think of some, because that’s a pretty easy task this week). We can put our help-the-world energies upon those, or to support people through storms, internal or external. Sometimes, we can just watch the rain, as many of us did yesterday—and be awed by so much power beyond our fathom. That’s okay, too. You don’t always have to get soaked to feel it.
