I've started this letter about ten times. Deleted it about ten times. Because how do you sum up four and a half years in a place you never planned to love?

We came here for two years. That's what the orders said: Fort Bliss, El Paso, two years, and then we'd be somewhere else, some other dot on a map I'd have to google before we moved there. Two years turned into four and a half and somewhere in the middle of all that time, without me ever deciding to, this desert became home.

I keep thinking about the woman who drove in here all those years ago. She was still asking herself if she was allowed to want this, if birth work was something she could actually do or just something she talked about. ALL. THE. TIME. That woman is not who's driving out... I built something here.

A business (a whole identity, really). I quit my corporate fashion job in NYC and traded it for something that scared me more and mattered more. I figured out how to become a Tricare provider, which anyone who has tried knows is its own kind of labor. I became the Community Manager at Wombs of the World - an organization striving to improve maternal health on a global scale. I've supported over 150 families on their journey to parenthood. Birth work carried me to Africa, to Mexico, to Germany, and every single time, I came back here.

But I can't reminisce on my time in El Paso without mentioning the parts that weren't easy. Two nine month deployments and more TDY than I can count. Almost two and a half years total (Thanks, Army *middle finger*), alone, in a city I was still learning how to love. I adopted a second dog. I made friends here who felt like family and then watched them get orders and leave, over and over, because that is what this life does to you. I said goodbye more times than I can count and made new friends, because staying closed off never once felt like the answer.

I remember when there were only a handful of doulas in this city, and you could feel how unsure the hospitals were about us. We were not welcome, we were questions, we were still proving something. I don't feel that anymore. Now I walk into a labor and delivery unit and someone says "yay, it's you," and that sentence still makes me want to cry a little every time. We built something together, the providers and the nurses. We built rooms where people are allowed to be scared and brave at the same time, but they have an entire room working together to support them.

Most of the hospitals here are teaching hospitals, and I need to say this clearly before I go. There are residents coming up through this system right now who give me so much hope. They ask questions. They listen. They are going to be the kind of doctors this work needs, and El Paso got to shape them, and some tiny part of me got to be in that room too... witnessing them and slowly restoring my faith in the future of obstetrics.

To every family who let me into the room with you (whether it be the birth room or your living room on day 3 postpartum). You let me into some of the scariest, most powerful hours of your life. Thank you doesn't cover it, but it's what I have. You trusted me when you had every reason not to trust anyone, and I will carry every one of those births, prenatal appointments, and lactation visits with me for the rest of my life.

El Paso, you were only supposed to be a stop in this crazy life. But instead you became the place I became myself in.

I will miss you more than I ever thought I would. So for now, it's back to packing boxes, making final goodbyes, and starting our next adventure: Alabama. 

All My Love El Paso, 
Kyndrick