How I came to be a birth doula

When my husband and I decided to grow our family we had no idea what to expect. Neither of us had personally experienced pregnancy before and we didn’t know what or how long it would take. We especially didn’t know that it would take 18 months and a miscarriage. 

When I first got pregnant after a year of trying I was so excited that I wanted to meet with midwives right away. I called the Puget Sound Birth Center and got on the schedule to meet with one of their teams within the week. Looking back I am so glad that I did. Normally a midwife will meet with you around 10 - 12 weeks into your pregnancy, I was in week 4! My husband and I left our meeting excited and couldn’t wait for the next meeting at 12 weeks. Then around 10 weeks in to my pregnancy I started bleeding. I called my team and they got me in for an ultrasound, at which point we found that our baby didn’t have a heartbeat. We were devastated. After a procedure to “remove the product of conception” we were told that we would have to wait 3 months before we started trying again. Three months after that we. Found out that we were expecting again. This time we went into the pregnancy a little more causally. We were thrilled when we had a little girl about 9 months later! 

After my experience with the midwife team I thought that I would start working toward becoming midwife myself, them had such a profound impact on me. I started taking prerequisites toward getting a degree in midwifery.

About a year after the birth of our daughter I was invited to be a support person during the birth of someone very close to me, we will call her Mary. Mary had her partner and a doula with her during her labor so I was truly just an extra support person. Mary was also using the same midwifery team that I had used and they had a student midwife at the time. Just my luck, I would have the opportunity to see what I could be doing in a few years if I stuck with my studies! While Mary labor beautifully and moved in to the pushing phase, her baby started to show some signs of stress. Mary pushed for about an hour or so and the baby stopped recovering as well after the pushes. The midwife and the student midwife decided that it was time of an intervention. The decision was made to preform an episiotomy. While I watched from next to Mary’s head the midwife opened the surgical scissors, handing them to the student midwife and talk her though the procedure. While it was absolutely what was needed, it was in that moment that I learned that I did not want to be a midwife, I didn’t know if I had what it would take to preform such a procedure. Thankfully Mary and her baby were both happy and healthy! A little over 5 years later I got to be Mary’s doula of her 3rd baby and I was so happy to step into that role for her. 

I am so grateful to the midwives and OB’s as well as every birthing person that I have had the honor and joy of working with, but I am especially grateful to Mary and that team of midwifes that taught me a lesson that I could not have learned in a book, and that was where my place was in a birthing room and that’s as the role of doula.