Not all who wander are lost.

Chances are, you'll be just fine! In fact, MAP's own Jen Gabler was very bad at coping with blood before she decided to pursue midwifery. In Jen's words, the important thing here is to learn to view blood at a birth as generally being a normal event, not the result of suffering or illness. Once you're comfortable with normal bleeding, you then need to take just one more step to be able to cope effectively and efficiently when faced with abnormal bleeding. Let your 'knowledge of your knowledge' take over here, and just act to do what needs doing. There are also many great midwives who started out with a phobia of needles and overcame this to do blood draws, start IVs, and administer medication. Set your mind to it, and you can overcome your fears! (But it might be worth observing a birth or two before committing to the program!)

Midwifery comes with huge responsibilities, and our goal is to only graduate students when they are safe and ready to take on that role. We're more than happy to help you during office hours if you're struggling on a particular assignment or feel overwhelmed. If you're still finding the material too difficult to understand, you're obviously more than welcome to look in other textbooks, watch videos, talk to other students, or ask other midwives including your preceptor for support. If none of this helps, it may be that midwifery is not the right destination for you. We strongly encourage you to talk this through with us before making any decisions. If you fail a module, you can resit it for an additional regrading fee, which varies from one module to another. Please reach out for details if you think this might apply to you.

We never know what's around the bend in our lives' journeys, and, here at MAP, we understand that events can sometimes mean we need to pause our midwifery journeys. If you feel you need to (or even just feel you should) take a break from MAP, please let us know, and reach back out to us when you're starting back up again. There's no deadline you need to meet with didactic training, though continuing to move through material, even if at a slow pace, is a great option for many. Preceptors will have their own rules and expectations, so please ensure you understand these fully before committing to training with someone. Note that a minimum of 10 of the 20 required 'Phase 3' (final phase before you can sit the NARM exam) births must be within the three years immediately prior to sitting the national NARM exam.

The crafts you'll complete as part of MAP are all things that you might find useful as a midwife. Some are teaching tools, some are clinical tools, and some are simple artwork that you may wish to hang on the wall of your office/birth center space, or may want to gift to a preceptor or other birthworker. You may also want to make more copies and then sell them. However, the goal with all of these projects is not simply to create something useful, but to teach you something useful. If your anatomic models fall apart or your paintings have splodges but you learned about musculature and cell structure in the process of creating them, you have not wasted your time. You will be assessed simply on whether you have demonstrated an understanding of the material, not on how great an artist you have shown yourself to be.

If you stay in the birth world for long enough, then yes, you will probably have the pain and the honor of assisting at a stillbirth or expected neotatal demise. These are very difficult experiences for everyone involved, but you will be in the position of helping make the moments a parent has with their baby incredibly special ones. You may also have a birth with an unexpected neonatal death or other poor outcome. It's important to know that birth is not risk-free, and bad outcomes do occur, regardless of where and with whom labor and birth occur. If you pursue midwifery, your job will be to become a safe midwife, able to provide exceptional care to your clients. Your job cannot be to guarantee a good outcome. We're here to support you through your journey, whatever it might hold.

Some will hold views that conflict with some of the things we teach, such as a personal opposition to same-sex marriage or to trans men. As long as you feel able to keep your opinion to yourself and can treat everyone with respect, MAP may still be 'right for you'. In other areas, you might personally choose not to circumcize or to vaccinate, but you can still learn what the research says about these topics, and we expect you to be able to present unbiased information to your future clients. Note, this may conflict with your preceptor's practices, and we defer to them for all clinical work you do with them. Racism, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric or rhetoric against any religion will not be tollerated. We will aim to help individuals correct errors, but repeat or egregious violations will result in a student being removed from the program.

All you need is to be empathetic, and willing and able to learn. You don't need to have experienced labor to know that it can be very painful, nor to have experienced racism yourself to believe it has a huge and pervasive impact on those who have. You just need to listen to and believe the experiences of the person in front of you. There are many wonderful midwives who have never been pregnant, and many of them who do not have the anatomy to be pregnant. At the same time, there are midwives who have given birth who still have 'room to improve'. Going through pregnancy and birth does add a new dimension to an individual's understanding of it, but so does every single class you participate in, assignment you complete, clinical appointment you attend, and birth you get to be a part of.

If you have the physical and mental ability to learn how to and then be able to provide safe care for clients, then you're not too old! Many students come to midwifery after their children are grown enough that the midwife can leave home for a birth without needing to arrange childcare, for example. In fact, having a wealth of lived experiences behind a student might mean that they can bring more world-understanding into their care than younger students.
On the other hand, many students begin their midwifery journey when they're quite young. These individuals might bring more energy to their care than an older student, which can help on a clinic day after a long birth!
We each walk our own path, and that includes exactly when in our lives we start a MAP journey... and, of course,  when we finish it. 

Becoming a midwife can be a huge financial challenge. At MAP, we try to mitigate this as much as possible, by allowing extended pauses in didactic training, as well as working to keep our costs low, having automatic scholarships for historically marginalized groups, having almost all materials you'll need for MAP included, having you create materials that can be used to make some money, and learning skills that can be used in part-time careers, such as running childbirth education classes. Regarding clinical apprenticeships, you will need to agree with your preceptor whether there will be any cost to you. 
If you do discover that you can't afford to complete MAP, ensure you get the paperwork for your didactic time signed, and you can then use this towards the PEP application to NARM.