So my life has totally changed in the last month or so.  I went from preparing to go to LA and jump right back into attending births as a senior apprentice midwife, to having it hit me like a ton of bricks that this isn't the right time in my life for me to become a midwife.  A lot happened in between - including all the ups and downs of trying to balance highly demanding birth work at a high volume birth center with being a mom and continuing to breastfeed my daughter whenever I had the chance to be with her, not to mention our terrible bout with thrush, which I'll talk about in a post later on. 

I think that this decision was literally the hardest decision I have ever had to make.  If you know me, you know that I was 4.5 years into midwifery school and was nearing the end.  I felt so close to being done with school and taking my exams, but in the end I just couldn't convince myself to put my calling as a midwife before my commitment to my daughter, my husband, and to be honest, to my own health and well being.

My plan now is to keep moving forward as a doula, pregnancy mentor, and birth educator - all roles that I absolutely love!  Birth work is my passion and no road block is going to keep me from being there to nurture and empower the women and families that I feel I am on this earth to serve.

It's funny, even though the last month has felt like an emotional roller coaster, I'm feeling very grateful.  I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how sacred pregnancy and birth are and how blessed I have been to be so intimately involved in the welcoming of so many new souls into this world.

As I reflect on my life purpose and my true goals, I see clearly that at the bottom of things is the calling to educate, support, and empower women during their pregnancies, births, and beyond; and to give them the opportunity to have a birth that not only goes quicker and smoother, but also has the potential to be safer than it would have been without the strategies I have to share. 

There's no way I can make the difference I want to make in women's lives and in the world unless I can somehow reach lots of women and simultaneously make the information and motivation I offer easily accessible.  So, that brings me to what I really want to share with you - or rather, remind you of if you are a friend or a regular on my blog!

As you may know, I have an awesome online program (it's all about how to nurture and nourish your body and soul so you can set yourself up for the happy and healthy birth of your dreams) that's absolutely packed with info, energy, and motivation.  Since it is online, it is easily accessible and can be used by women all over the country, and even the world, IF we can get the word out.  Here's the thing though, I need YOU to help me spread the word and make a difference!  If you believe in women, and babies, and birth, then just start talking about this.  The program literally has all the most important things that pregnant women need to hear and take to heart to have a chance at a peaceful, positive, empowering birth in out world today.

If you happen to be a doula or childbirth educator, let me tell you that having your clients use this program will almost surely make your job easier because not only does it spell out the most important things your clients and students need to know, but it provides both motivation and a system for staying organized and on track as they prepare their minds and bodies to give birth.  It pretty much sets them up for a quicker, easier, and even safer birth.  Plus, it gives them more reason to value their doulas/labor support people, and their birth educators.  You can either encourage them to invest in this and in themselves, or you might even consider giving it as a gift to your clients when they sign up with you (talk to me about a "bulk" rate if you are thinking about this option).

Whether you are a mom, a doula, a childbirth educator, or even just a friend reading my blog, by letting people know about this opportunity you are helping me empower women, support families, respect birth, and change the world - one nurtured mommy, one birth, and one baby at a time.

For more details click here:  3 Key Strategies to Get the Birth You Want 

I've seen a lot of amazing women birth their babies with strength and peace and I always wish I could rewind and witness the beauty over again.  Birthing is such an intimate time. 

Thought I'd share this video (not a client of mine) that I have gone back to many times just for the pure enjoyment of it.

Proud of this mama, even if I don't know her personally.

There's no way you are ever going to forget what your birth was like. 
I can't tell you how often I have the privilege of listening to women's birth stories.  I've heard stories from, strangers, friends, and family alike - everywhere from laundromats, to parking lots, to old age homes, to shul (synagogue).  And it always amazes me how much detail women remember about the day, or days, they gave birth.  Not only that, but regardless of how many times a woman has given birth, she remembers so many details and can so easily distinguish one story from the next.

The first time I realized how engrained our birth stories are in our minds was one of the last times I visited my Grandma Louise before her soul left this world.  I'm sad to say that by the end of her life she had kind of "checked out" and wasn't really in tune with reality anymore.  Some days she thought she was in some kind of dungeon back in Germany during the Shoah (the holocaust), other days she was just minimally responsive because she wasn't quite sure who all these people were who were visiting her and telling her about their day to day lives and how much they loved her.  It was so sad to see that she couldn't really hold a conversation with us anymore, but I kept asking her question after question because I felt like continuing to interact with her would somehow change things, or make things better.  One day I was sitting with her and asking her all kinds of random questions (that she couldn't really answer) when it occurred to me to try asking her about her births.

I'm sitting here in tears as I remember that day and how she went from seeming like she wasn't even there anymore to telling me about her births, one after another.  I so wish I had thought to write down what she told me, but I somehow thought by calling my dad and re-counting it to him afterwards I would remember her stories too.  Unfortunately, I don't remember the details, but I do remember her telling me about what she thought of each of her doctors, what her births were like, how much each of her 5 baby boys weighed in at, and their personalities as newborns.  I'm not sure that she could tell me which baby was which, but she did tell me some of the doctors names and some other details, just like it had happened yesterday.  I was completely in awe.

I was reminded of this experience today when I got into a conversation with another woman who has 6 or 7 grown children and she told me a little bit about some of her births.  She too shared with me incredible details, about what happened when and who was there, what they said, that there was a light drizzle outside, and even the details of an interaction that happened during her birth that made her very angry - and my interpretation was that at that moment she felt violated and disrespected by her care provider.

It just goes to show how each of our births stays with us for the rest of our lives.  Who says that the experience of giving birth doesn't matter?

I never cease to be amazed by women, their strength, and how their births shape them and stay with them as women, mothers, and even grandmothers.

I want to challenge you today to go find someone who is a generation or 2 older and wiser than you are and ask to hear her birth story in its entirety (or stories).  Please come back and share with us one detail that really tugged on a heart string for you.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you. <3

In my doula business I talk a lot about the safety net that each woman should have at her birth.  While we would all love to just trust birth and have complete faith that everything will go smoothly according to plan, we know that there is a reason that there is fear surrounding birth in the first place. 

If you're in my line of work, you see things stray pretty far from the plan once in a while.  Babies get stuck, placentas abrupt, moms bleed too much, moms pass out, babies need a little bit (or a lot) of help getting started once they are out...

I am not telling you this to scare you.  I am telling you this to give you the opportunity to be realistic and to consider all of your options.  And I am telling you this so you understand why I believe in having a safety net in place.  I don't care how healthy you are.  I don't care how many babies and perfectly healthy births you have under your belt.  The shit could still hit the fan.  In fact, if you've had quite a few babies, your chances of hemorrhaging are actually higher in the first place.

Now, let me just say that 1) the less routine interventions and medications you have and the less you interfere with the physiological process of birth, the less likely anything will go wrong (and by the way, interference could mean anything from Pitocin, epidural, slowing down labor with too many people watching, inducing in "natural" ways, or pushing just because you happen to be 10cm dilated but aren't really ready to push yet).  And 2) thank God there are both holistic and medical solutions for so many of the things that come up in labor and birth.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe in a woman's right to choose her place of birth, her care provider, and even to have an unassisted birth if that is what she feels is right for her and makes informed decision after informed decision along the way.  But I want you to know that no matter how much you know, how much you prepare, or how healthy you make a point to be, you are not free from the potential of having something go wrong.  You are human.

And that's why we have midwives and doctors.  If we could prepare and know that everything would go 100% smoothly, we wouldn't need midwives or doctors in birth. Period.

But we know that we need them sometimes.  And If you feel confident you will never have to use your safety net, great.  I hope you will never have to.  But you just might be glad you had one set up "just in case."

I want to challenge you here to think about your own choices in choosing your safety net - past, present, or future.  You might be someone who believes that your safety net should be a doctor and a hospital (or only a very specific doctor and hospital), or you might be more comfortable with a particular midwife as your safety net, whether in hospital, birth center, or at home.  Whatever your instincts tell you is probably the right decision for you.  So be realistic, but trust your instincts!

If you'd like to share your thought process or get input or information from others in the Nurtured Mommy community, please feel free to post below.  Let's just all make a point to be respectful and nurturing to one another, even if we don't all agree that what is right for us is also right for the next person.

So I said I might share with you the mistake I made on my daughter's birthday.  I'm going to write this post as a stream of consciousness and not go back to edit anything because I think that's the only way I'm going to get this one down "on paper."

My pregnancy went nothing like I imagined it would.  I thought I knew so much and was so prepared having been a doula and a student midwife for a number of years already.  Well, nothing makes you do your research and internalize what complications mean and all the possible solutions - both holistic and medical - like going through it yourself.  I'm not going to get into all those details right now, but I feel like putting that out there because I'm going to open up and tell you and the rest of the world that I had a cesarean birth.  I originally didn't want to have a c-section.  My identity was so totally wrapped up in natural birth and out-of-hospital birth, to be quite honest, that I just had such a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of having to have my baby in a hospital.  And having a c-section... well that was obviously something I had to come to terms with and I honestly thank God that I had about 10 weeks to get used to the idea of not having the birth I wanted.

The day Daliya ended up being born, I woke up in the morning and checked my email.  The first thing I opened was lab results from Kaiser from my 2nd (or maybe it was my 3rd...) 24 hour urine test to watch for protein in my urine.  The amount of protein had gone way up and I was surprised that no one called me right away to have me come in for other lab work.  It was Christmas, so I guess no one was checking that day - or maybe it was just overlooked because of having less staff on duty.  I called L & D and alerted them to the results that had been automatically sent to me.  I was told to come in right away, so I did, and they ran a bunch of other tests.  The labs showed that my liver and kidney function were changing, and obviously not for the better.

I wasn't going to go into so many details, but now that I'm writing I feel like it feels right.  Daliya was still in a breech position so the doctor wanted to automatically do a c-section.  I told her that I wanted her to check me because if I were dilated more than a couple centimeters I wanted them to try an external cephalic version to try to turn her head down so that they could just put me on Pit and I'd still be able to have a vaginal birth.  The doctor was so sure that I wouldn't be dilated, even though I told her that I had been in early labor a few nights before and made it stop (I think she might have thought I was a little crazy, but she doesn't know me and know what I know about the physiology of labor).  So she humored me and seemed shocked to find that I was 3cm dilated.  She got me set up for the version.  They gave me a drug to relax my uterus and Daliya's heart rate shot up and stayed up until she was born.  It was seriously nerve-wracking.

They tried to turn her 4 times.  It didn't work.  At the time I didn't know as much as I do now about versions and one of the key factors in it being successful is having a really really full bladder to lift the baby as far out of the pelvis as possible.  Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different if I had know that.  But I didn't know.  And it didn't work.  I felt ok with having a cesarean at this point, especially knowing that this particular hospital didn't have any doctors on staff who were comfortable or experienced with breech birth.  Even if I was comfortable birthing a breech baby, I wasn't comfortable having a doctor who was uncomfortable with it as my safety net.  I was more comfortable having a cesarean.

I think I just mixed up the order of things here a little, but hopefully you're still following.  After the doctor on call checked me but before the version (I think I have the order right, but my husband might correct me if it is less of a blur to him) she came into the room with my birth plan, pulled a chair up to sit right next to me, and proceeded to go through every single point on my birth plan with me.  It was incredible and I felt so respected.  I am literally tearing up right now thinking about it.  On a side-note, I always say that the care provider who ends up being at your birth is probably the one who is meant to be there, and for many reasons I do believe this was true for my birth as well - I might get more into that later, but let me get back on track for now.

We talked about my birth plan and what could and what wouldn't happen.  And she was straightforward in telling me that after I had my baby, we would be separated for a minimum of 12 hours, but more than likely 24 hours or more, because they were going to put me on Magnesium Sulfate.  I just about lost it (inside) at this point and as soon as she left the room I said to Jordan, "Should we leave and go to UCLA?  I feel like it would be different there."  We talked about it and the fact that my insurance wouldn't cover any treatment there, and I said I still would feel more comfortable there regardless of what was going to happen.  I don't remember which one of us suggested calling a friend for advice, but I called a friend of mine and asked her if it would be different there.  I remember her response sounding so quick and confident, and she told me the hospital policies would be the same there.  I for some reason let her response decide for me that I'd stay where I was.  That is the mistake that I feel like I am still healing from.  I later found out that the hospital I was at was one of the only (if not THE only) hospital in the area that had that policy.  If I had gone to UCLA chances are I would have gotten to spend that first couple of days with my baby.  It still hurts so much to think about her being whisked away and being told it was all because of hospital policy, and later that they could have bent their policy but they were short on staff because it was Christmas weekend.  They didn't even let me hold her before they took her away.  It didn't have to be that way.  IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.  Ugh, it still makes me so mad and sad.

I try to tell myself that there were reasons that I decided to stay at Kaiser... that my instincts must have actually been telling me to stay even though for a long time I blamed myself for not trusting the instinct to go somewhere else for my birth.  I have to remind myself how supportive of VBAC's the doctor I ended up with is and how she kept telling me, literally multiple times, with excitement how the incision she did and the fact that I was already dilated meant I would probably have a successful VBAC with my next baby.  I honestly wanted to scream each time she said this because I wasn't in the mind space to think about my NEXT baby!  I was just trying to deal with everything that came along with THIS baby's birth!

I have to say though, that looking back, I remember so clearly that when we sat down to and looked at my birth plan together I said to her repeatedly, if I could pick just one thing from my birth plan, INCLUDING if I were having a cesarean, that I would ask her to let the cord pulsate and delay clamping for as long as possible, preferallby until it was done pulsating in its own time.  Well, guess what, during my c-section, she let the cord pulsate and stop on its own once Daliya was out!!!  This is still so exciting to me that I'm getting all teary again.  This was so so so important to me, and most doctors would not have waited, ESPECIALLY during a cesarean birth.  But she waited.  She waited, she told me when it stopped and when she was going to cut it, and she even showed my husband that it was white before she clamped and cut it!  Jordan took the most amazing picture of Daliya still attached to the cord and the placenta, the placenta still inside me.  It is seriously incredible.  Maybe I will post it above.  Can I get away with posting a picture that includes my abdomen completely open in surgery?  I think I can. :)

Anyway, I guess you can see that even though I still think about the decision to stay where I was as a mistake I'm really moving towards coming to terms with it and working on believing that I was meant to be where I was and that in the long run the birth I had and the things that happened during the process are what needed to happen to give Daliya the best and most healthy entrance into the world. 

There is some more to the story, but I think I'm emotionally spent at the moment, so I'm gonna leave it at that.  Maybe I should have titled this post my birth story - or maybe I'll do that at a later date when I feel up to going back and filling in all the details including more details about the birth itself.

If you're reading this, please leave me a comment.  This is probably the most intimate thing I could have posted on the internet today and I would so love to feel like the people reading it are becoming a community, my community.

Thank you. <3