Old Post April 2008

It’s been seven weeks since I have updated this. Typically this might be chalked  up to beginner blogger’s block or amateur anecdotal anxiety. I however can attest my neglect of my baby blog is indicative of my neglect for myself as a person over the last seven weeks.

Recently my job has changed, it has gone from a job to a career. Which on paper sounds like a fantastic opportunity but for me has been slow suicide to my proverbial heart and stomach lining. I am 23 and have an ulcer, nightmares that my husband is my boss and continual tears shed over the possibility of getting a B.

While I have never been one for grades finding that they tend to be poor measures of someone’s love of a subject or ability to apply it, not to mention their failure to ascertain how cool you are. The board of shadowy figures who chooses who shall and shall not have their dreams come true seem to have this obsession with the number 4 and the letter A.

The above has turned me into a half of a person and it is here that I end my digression. For the first time in my life I am going to quit something. I am going to drop out of my class this quarter and we are going to save so that me and school can have an exclusive relationship. This is really difficult for me and for Dev. He is so great and has been patient as I have become a stressed out tyrant and an unforgivably absent wife.  I can’t live with one foot in and one foot out, I am just not cut out for that.  Needless to say school isn’t going anywhere and neither are those shadowy figures so until I can dance for them and them alone I will be a PCC drop out.

E-mail to a potential Reference

This is an e-mail I wrote about a month ago to a person who will be writing references for me for future applications. It was the beginning of my application process. I wanted to post it because it is my romance with my current step of faith/adventure.

I have wondered for a long time what I would be when I grew up. For years I thought I would be shooting three’s in the WNBA. But when I stopped growing in sixth grade and summers were spent at Summer Camp instead of training I began to leave that dream behind.

Next I believed I would be a missionary, a single woman missionary to be specific. That I would spend my life living alone and caring for women in other cultures, helping them to advocate for themselves and to discover freedom in Christ. From my experiences on short term mission trips and even my experiences at camp I learned that I loved reaching out to people the world often ignores. Finding value in and humbling myself to advocate for those who are so often not given a voice.

I pursued this dream by attending Bible College, there I met and fell in love with missionary culture. I longed to leave America and entered into an almost unhealthy passion thinking that becoming an overseas missionary would change my relationship with God. That I would become a super Christian. I spent a summer abroad and discovered God was the same here and on the other side of the Atlantic ocean.

I went back to school confused and ashamed thinking missions wasn’t for me and not knowing or understanding where my future and my relationship with Christ had little to nothing to do what I did as a vocation or where I lived. And in fact being challenged that if I wasn’t sharing the Gospel with my co-worker then how in the world did  I think I would magically do it in another language in another culture.  I realized I had shaped my dreams on other’s lives, other’s goals and sometimes other’s expectations and I was lost somewhere in between.

For a long period of time my dreaming almost halted. I was confused and somehow was seeing and thinking more clearly than I had before.  I had my first love and first heart break. I ran a marathon, graduated college and stayed in Portland.  I got to know ME not as a missionary, or as a youth group all-star or even as a girl who worked at Camp Barnabas. Just me a waitress in a city with a Bible degree.

After some searching I came back to an idea that had lived in the back of my brain for a long time: be a nurse. So many things had kept this out of sight and out of mind.  Committing to finish at Multnomah and never really being good at or liking science or math to name a few.  As well as a belief that I wasn’t smart enough to do or be anything like that.  Love returned to my life and Devin showed me that anything is possible. If I believe I am made to be a nurse that my gifts and interests surround nursing I began to agree that  I should AT LEAST pursue the possibility and open myself up to failure or success.  This concept bled all over me. This risk is the risk I constantly have to take with the Gospel. Believing in something I cannot see, trusting someone I cannot touch and receiving love that has no logical motivation.  But moving forward by what I know to be true inside of myself.

So I enrolled in some pre-requisites courses at community college. I began meeting and talking with nurses in my I saw the opportunity to be a nurse in the context of relationships and families in my community. Which is when I began to explore the field of Nurse Midwifery.

As I spoke with CNMs I realized my passions for advocacy, caregiving and for empowerment had a home. My desire is to study to become a Nurse Midwife so that I can help women learn and take ownership of their own health and the health of their family.  I desire to provide an alternative to corporate health care that creates self-empowering knowledge and brings affordability to families who would be financially devastated  by simply having a child.  To celebrate one of God’s most beautiful miracles and to share this hope and joy with others.

This road is still quite new on the national scale but I happen to live in a city with the top rated program.  All this to  say I will be pursuing this no matter which road I take. An associates in Nursing, an accelerated BSN or an Accelerated Bachelors to a Masters in Nursing.  There will be many more applications this winter and would love your help on any or all of them. If you have any questions please let me know.

Love the ex WNBA player, the ex Elizabeth Elliot, the ex Corporate Accountant and the future Laura Rice Chapman

3 Weeks to go and I'm spending time on this?

I knew when I started taking prerequisites for a Nursing program my time would become lean. I work and I wife and I try to friend, so this means that I have become a busy person, something I swore off my Senior year of my undergraduate program (I think Missy was there and could testify).

Busy or not here I come I have 9 credits under my belt, that have not come without sacrifice. Psy215 Human Development & BI122 Cellular Biology.

My psychology class has served as reminder that some students truly feel they are smarter than professors and I am quite confident they enroll in classes just to prove that point. Which is a shame as it becomes impossible for the person I actually pay to hear speak finish an entire lecture without being reminded that though he or she has spent the majority of their life studying a 17 year old who has watched a lot of Dr. Phil must know more.

My Cellular Biology class has made me realize that I actually like Science! Who knew?  I would however like to thank Mr. Lemon and Mr. Chitwood for all of their valiant efforts to make a 14 year old give a crap about Science it only took me ten years, but here I am. Geeking out and watching PBS videos googling cell cycle songs and oozing this information onto innocent bystanders (i.e. husband).

All this to say 3 weeks left in my first quarter and I am feeling good. I have adjusted back to studying again a discipline that quickly leaves you when you let your brain atrophy on CWTV and teen vampire fiction.

Class and having someone to tell you what to do in your free time still bug me but it is preparing me to do something a year ago I told you was a pipe dream.

New and Nervous, like a Middle School Dance.

Today I will begin to write things that I want others to read on the Internet. This concept is so foreign to me that I was embarrassed to even tell Devin. Sure I’ve flirted with the concept of Internet Ego padding: I have Facebook. Though I am waaay too cool for MySpace I like it when people look at me, think I am pretty, smart or funny.

This endeavor however is for people to think I am pretty, smart and funny on my journey to becoming a Nurse. This process will be long (3 years) and will hopefully end with me obtaining a job doing one of the most beautiful and frightening things possible, helping people bring life into the world.

So if you would like to follow my journey, do it here. I want to write about school, classes, great and hilarious situations I encounter and also reach out for support and encouragement.