The fire
Twenty years ago, in a hospital delivery room, I lay on a bed and watched the ceiling while strangers made decisions about my body. The midwife was talking to the doctor. The doctor was talking to the nurse. Nobody was talking to me.
My partner stood by the wall. He wanted to say something. I could see it in his face. But he did not know what he was allowed to say, or who he was allowed to say it to. So he said nothing. And I said nothing. And when it was over, I had a baby and a wound I could not name.
That was my first birth. It took me years to understand what happened in that room. Not the medical part. The medical part went fine. The part where I stopped being a person and became a procedure. The part where my voice went somewhere I could not find it.
I did not know the word for it then. Now I do. It happens to one in six women, according to the research. It happened to me. And the moment I understood that, I understood what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
That woman was not my client. She was me.
The births
My second birth was better because I was angrier. I asked questions. I pushed back. I made them wait. But I was still fighting within their system, on their terms, in their building, under their lights.
My fifth birth was at home. In the quiet. In the dark. With a midwife who sat in the corner and said almost nothing. And I understood. I finally understood what birth could be when nobody was managing it. When the clock was not running. When there was no shift change coming.
Eight children over twenty-three years. Four in hospitals where I learned what was wrong. Four at home where I learned what was right. Each birth peeled something away. Fear, first. Then compliance. Then the belief that someone else knew my body better than I did.
Not managed. Not monitored into submission. Just a woman, doing what women have done for two hundred thousand years.
What I believe
I do not believe birth is dangerous. I have watched it too many times to believe that. I believe we have built a system that makes it dangerous, and then points to the danger as proof that the system is needed.
When you remove the fear. When you remove the clock, the fluorescent lights, the stranger in scrubs who checks you like you are a car in for service. When you remove all of that, what is left is a woman who already knows what to do. An intelligence older than language, older than medicine, older than every protocol ever written.
The research backs this up. Countries with midwife-led care and low intervention rates have the lowest maternal death rates in the world. The ones with the most technology and the most procedures do not. America spends more on birth than any country on earth and has the worst outcomes in the developed world. That is not an accident. That is a system working exactly as it was designed. Designed for efficiency, not for mothers.
Your body was built for this. Twenty years of watching women give birth has made that the one thing I am most certain of. My job is to make sure nobody talks you out of trusting it.
How I work
I am fierce about your rights. And I am soft with your fear. Both of those things are true at the same time.
I will hold your hand at three in the morning when the contractions come close together and your partner has fallen asleep on the couch. I will answer the text you send at midnight, the one that says "something does not feel right," even when it turns out everything was fine. Especially when it turns out everything was fine. Because next time you will text me sooner, and that matters.
I will sit with you in silence when there is nothing to say. After the birth, when the room is quiet and the baby is sleeping and you are trying to figure out what just happened to you. I will not fill that silence with advice. I will just be there.
I will also tell you things you do not want to hear. That the birth plan needs to change. That your body is asking you to slow down. That the thing you are afraid of is not the thing you should actually be afraid of. I do not tell you what you want to hear. I tell you what you need to know.
This is not a service you purchase. It is a relationship you enter. I am in it with you from the positive test to months after the baby arrives. The length of that commitment is what makes it work. You cannot prepare someone for birth in a weekend workshop. You cannot support someone through postpartum in a single phone call. It takes time. I have the time.
The life
The short version: trained nurse, doula for over two decades, mother of eight. I have lived in five countries, homeschooled all my children, and built this practice from nothing.
The longer version takes more time. Nine years abroad. Sweden, then further. Each country taught me something different about how birth is treated, how mothers are seen, how families are supported or abandoned by the systems around them. In some places, the midwife comes to your home and stays for hours. In others, you get seven minutes with a doctor who has already decided what is going to happen.
I came back with a very clear picture of what works and what does not. Low intervention. Continuous support. Trusting the mother to lead. Giving her the information and the backup to make real decisions, not the illusion of choice while someone else runs the show.
No clinic. No waiting room. No staff. A phone, twenty years of experience, and the patience to sit with you while you figure out what kind of birth you actually want.