Becoming a Birth Worker

I've always been a nurturer. People have called me ‘Mom’ or ‘Mama Walts’ in various group or community settings. I always found it kind of odd, but it would typically and quickly become a thing. Maybe it was my nannying experience, my love for kiddos, or my Mary Poppins status bags, or my Miss Frizzle spirit. Honestly, I think it started way before that. I was always my mom’s little helper- classic middle child. My favorite toy growing up was a sweet doll that I seemed to have brought everywhere with me because it appears in so many of my childhood pictures. I used to really practice with this baby doll (and I mean really practice), but for some reason I would usually pretend that it was someone else's baby. Maybe even then I was a doula in training?

*CW* (Miscarriage mentioned)
Before my first career shift, I asked my mom what she thought I was going to be when I grew up. I imagine she'd say teacher, or artist, or dancer. Her response: a mom! She always thought I was going to be a mom? At the time I wasn't quite sure what she meant. I was always the second mom to my younger brother and to any younger friends that I happened to take under my wings, but I just thought this was a part of my personality.  And now, as a mother, I'm starting to get what she meant. Being a parent is incredibly difficult at times, instinctual at most times, exhausting, beautiful, magical, physically demanding, mystical, connective, reflective, and the list goes on.

Now that I’m here, motherhood feels very right, like a deep within the bones kind of right. At times, I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, but I actually really do. With this newfound confidence (and continuous questioning!), I could feel something churning that couldn’t be ignored, so I turned to my journal and my Google Keep notes to put it out to the Universe:

Google Keep Note: September 2020
TITLE: Jen Musings

• My professional future…

• Pandemic: How is the pandemic impacting my future plans? Hiring freeze.

• Childcare?? Montessori Training? How is it all going to work?

• Interested in guiding people/using my educational background
  Interested in more presence in my career
  Interested in 'quality of life’

• Really dig the free lance vibe

• Really love all things birth related

• Doula: Where does one begin with this?
  Birth? Postpartum?
  Childbirth education?
  Yoga?
  Photography?

• All of my passions and skills combined…Doula. Look more into this…

From a distance, it may look like I have shifted careers pretty rapidly. The truth is that I have been thinking about this for quite some time. I used to think labor and birth (and becoming a parent) was a mysterious door that I was curious to open. My experience as a mother, to our angel baby and our rainbow baby, has opened and widened my understanding of birth and its spectrum. On my journey, that one beginning door has become many…it’s like I opened up one door into a room of hundreds of other doors…hundreds of other doors that intrigued me and excited me and ignited a passion within me that I hadn’t felt before. I'm opening each one at the pace of a new parent, and taking time to reflect on how I got here in the first place has been rewarding.

I imagine many birth workers feel a certain sense of initiation if they have given birth themselves and soon after become curious about the larger systems and structures surrounding all things perinatal. For me, I think my stepping-over-the-threshold began shortly after our family’s miscarriage and loss. My partner and I dove head first circumstantially into the taboo side of the birth world where we met birth workers that guided us through our loss and continued healing. As one might feel during a situation out of their control, and a societally stigmatized situation at that, I felt compelled to educate myself more: about fertility, genetics, pregnancy, loss, labor, birth, and the postpartum experience.

Anxiety and curiosity, two sweetly unexpected friends, led me by the hand as I devoured podcasts, books, documentaries, HypnoBirthing classes, long and meaningful conversations with other expecting/ birthing parents, and perinatal professionals. My desire to learn more continued to stir. Opening more of myself, perhaps unknowingly, to the possibility of joining the community of birth workers that were guiding me and helping me to surrender.

I became pregnant so quickly after our loss that I relied heavily on my circle of people, of professional healers and friends and family. With massage therapists, midwives, therapists, and support group facilitators, I felt like I was connecting with other beings in an entirely new and important way. I felt held through an ending and a new beginning by a community of dedicated professionals whose sole purpose was to focus on the very first moments of a person's life in this world. I thought a lot about how profound, poetic, and spiritual their work must be. And I think that's when a sneaky seed was planted.

In the midst of our 2nd pregnancy, I had made the decision to leave the high school classroom and pursue a career in elementary school as a Montessori guide. Even that work was oddly connected to a person's first moments of life. I spent that summer learning all about early childhood development, exploring the ins and outs of human brains from the moment they're born. As the training continued to dive into the later years of a child's life and development, I kept always going back to the beginning. How a baby enters this world can alter a family. Perhaps the family, whatever its configuration, is reborn in this instant as well. I didn't know it at the time, but as I studied babies’ and toddler’s brains I was really most curious about each person’s beginning- how each family unit prepares for what could possibly be the most transformative experience of their life. How can I support and hold space for those that need a cosmic kind of nurturing? That's what all birthing families deserve regardless of the outcome.

The more birth workers I met in our journey, the more enchanted I became. I have been bitten by the birth bug. Okay, enchantment and bug bites in back-to-back sentences…not my finest imagery, but isn’t that all that’s wrapped up in birth? The enchanting and the scary. The gorgeous and the pain. Its fleeting nature and the longest wait. The loss of an old life and the beginning of a new. The laughter and tears. All of it. All of it. I just want to wrap up the experience of birth and gift it to anyone who wants to feel every feeling they could possibly feel in this life. Want to feel the most alive you’ll ever feel while also feeling closer to death than ever before? Okay, let’s do this. I will look you in the eyes, anticipate your needs, and fiercely believe in you.

This is the first time in my life in which I truly feel called to enter a space that I am just beginning to understand. I'm going for it, and I'm pumped. I'm trained, and I'm learning. I'm connecting, and I'm eager. I'm becoming a birth worker, and for some amazing reason it feels like the task ahead of me has always lived within me.