Twenty years of first mornings

I have been a midwife in Kumasi for nineteen years and I have been present at more beginnings than I can count, which sounds like the opening of something inspirational and I want to warn you it isn't. What I'm writing about is what those mornings cost. Not in a complaint, just in a factual sense: the weight of sustained witness, what it does to your own sense of time and scale. I was trained at KATH and I've worked there since 2005 and I have a life outside the hospital that is full and ordinary. But the writing comes from inside the work, not from outside it. I'm writing memoir, I think, though I was not taught to call it that and the distinction between memoir and personal essay is something I'm still working out. I belong to a women's writing group that meets near Kejetia market on Sunday afternoons and two of the other members are also in healthcare. We help each other figure out when something is too close to write and when that is exactly the reason to write it. I don't have a finished draft. I have forty pages that I think are honest and fifty more that aren't yet.