What gets you all excited to the point that your ears focus in, you can't look away, and you could engage and discuss and debate for hours?
Maybe the answer to that question isn't pregnancy and birth - or maybe it is as you've found yourself here reading!
Helping women find their power and their own victorious birth story, is exactly what triggers that excitement in my belly.
I took me a little while to find my life passion. I graduated with a history degree (that I loved working for!); I found gainful employment as a bank teller; I applied to nursing school on a whim; I happened into a cardiac floor and followed the flow to the cardiac ICU.
All the while, I was happy, but felt like something was missing. In nursing school, I had had an exceptional interest in women's health and reproduction, but had sort of chalked it up to my own "baby fever" as a newly engaged 20-something excited about growing a family.
I had my own baby and victorious birth story thanks to an awesome team of midwives that held space for me to find my inner strength.
Then, after several years in the ICU - a job I had envisioned being in long term - I realized that this interest hadn't just been my own "baby fever" and while I was floating through life as an ICU RN, my real passion was with the mamas and the babies.
In a whirlwind process, I committed to transferring to Labor & Birth at the same hospital, and allowed myself to begin dreaming about midwifery school again.
Along the way, I became interested in acquiring the distinctly special skills of a birth doula, and I found the amazing joy in being able to focus primarily on the emotional, physical, and educational support aspect of walking through pregnancy and birth with a woman and her support team.
Throughout the process, I've become more and more apt to bring up and talk about all aspects of the childbirth process whenever the opportunity strikes (or whenever I can craft an opportunity!). I apologize if you've ever fallen into this trap of mine, but then again, I'm not at all sorry as the more we talk about birth the more we normalize it!
Here's to whatever my future in birth work holds for me, and embracing it one glorious step at a time.
And if you ever want to dive into the topics of women's health, child bearing, or any of it, I'm your girl.
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