My story begins a couple of years before the birth of my first daughter. I suffered two miscarriages before having her, and before my first miscarriage I did not even want children, so I knew very little about birth or caring for babies. When I was significantly into my third pregnancy I began to research how I wanted my birth to go, what I should know, and what to expect. I decided to hire a birth doula, which was one of the best decisions we made in regards to the birth. I would like to say that my birth went as planned, but almost everything that could go wrong went wrong, and I ended up on the operating table paralyzed by drugs and fear.

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I was not prepared for having a cesarean section. It hurt to walk, cough, sneeze, and housework was impossible. To make matters worse my husband had to go to work only four days after birth, leaving me home alone to care for this brand new tiny, helpless, human being. I had not prepared for the postpartum period, for being alone, for being in pain, for keeping a baby alive by myself ten hours a day, or for realizing what it meant to have a traumatic birth story and to be hanging on the edge of depression. Neither of us had family nearby to help, and we were new to our neighborhood. I will be forever grateful to a woman from our church, who is now a good friend, who offered to come to our home each week to help me. She brought me coffee, prepared food, sat and talked with me, let me vent, showed me better disposal of diapers by rolling them, walked with me, let me nap by taking care of baby for a bit, did dishes, laundry, and best of all she changed our sheets! Seems like a silly thing to be excited about, but I had, ahem, lactated all over them that morning and was laughing about it with her, and while I slept on the couch she changed them out for clean ones. She was not even trained as a doula! She just had four kids and knew about life with babies. 

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I began to think about other people who may not have family nearby for support, and after some research, found out that I could be a trained Postpartum Doula! If my friend, who was not trained, could help me so much how much more could I help others by learning all that I could about caring for mothers and families in the "fourth trimester". I could let a new mother know that breastfeeding is not supposed to hurt, or leave you bleeding, that it's okay to sit and relax, to mourn/celebrate your birth story, and most importantly that they don't have to be a supermom and do it all alone. As a postpartum doula it is my hope to provide families the proper care, education, and local resources to succeed and be healthy after the birth of their baby.

 

I attended a professional, DONA International approved intensive postpartum doula training April 2018, and am very connected in the bluegrass birth professional community, which allows me to be able to refer and connect clients to the services they need. I am excited to continue my education in this area, and to share it with all of my clients.

 

I trained through Center for Pediatric Sleep Management to obtain my sleep consultant certification , May 2022, and graduated June 2022. To learn more about why I became a sleep consultant visit my blog post about it here!