the difference fifteen years makes

I sent off my Gonzaga application today in the mail. I realized that I last applied to college/university fifteen years ago. How different my life is now. Here's the story behind going back to school. Two years ago, I entered into a twilight zone style conflict with my former boss. It was a very strange thing to have a conflict about and even stranger in how big it got. It boiled down to the fact that she thought I was closed to learning and I thought she was very wrong about that. She finally said "I either have to let you go or we need to drop the issue and I've decided to drop the issue." But the fact that the issue came up in the first place and the fact that it became big enough that she thought it was grounds for firing me - I decided I didn't want to work for a person like that. A couple months later I had a dream. My car was parked in a long term parking lot and somebody had smashed into it. The next day I went to get my car to fix it but it had been totally demolished and I knew I had to get a new car. My interpretation of the dream was that my life was on hold (I was newly pregnant and had a ten month old) so my car was in a long term parking lot. My car or career had been run over by my former boss. The message was that I needed to get a new car or a new career. I had been thinking about becoming a mid-wife and that my particular massage skills would tie into it somehow. I'm still not sure if I'll focus on the birthing part of mid-wifery or the massage part of birthing/well-women care/newborn car, etc. But the extra credentials will expand what I can do with massage (i.e. if a woman has internal scar tissue from endometriosis or whatnot or pelvic floor dysfunction, I'll be able to work with her internally if need be) and I might just find that I'm called to help bring babies into the world. My feeling right now is that I'll do the baby part for about ten years and then I'll teach massage skills to mid-wives, labor delivery nurses, and doulas and teach pregnancy/childbirth/infant skills to massage therapists. So to become a mid-wife I could either be a homebirth mid-wife with less training or a Certified Nurse Midwife with more. I decided I wanted the medical background because I think western medicine and alternative medicine should be more integrated and I can't be part of that integration unless I have the western medicine training. So I start with getting a B.S. in Nursing and become an RN. Since I was a music major before, I don't have many classes that will go towards a B.S. in Nursing so I will literally be starting over. It falls into place nicely, though, because my husband is a professor at Gonzaga so I can take advantage of spouse/dependent tuition benefits. Fifteen years ago I would never have dreamed of becoming a mid-wife.