My Story
Being pregnant for the first time was a glorious time for me. I loved cradling my belly and seeing it swell over the months. I delighted in the kicks and counted down the days until my baby boy’s arrival. Unfortunately, during this time, I didn’t value the importance of birth or postpartum planning. I waved it away and naïvely thought that unplanning was less stressful than planning.
Fast forward to the birth and postpartum period and I emerged feeling like I had failed in some way, seeing myself as less of a mother than my peers. I felt broken and inadequate. Postpartum complications compounded these feelings.
For months and even up to a year postpartum, I would try to find a birth and postpartum experience like mine in hope that it would normalise it. Perhaps then I would feel less alone in my grief. Of course I didn’t find one. Our births and postpartum are as individual as we are.
When I fell pregnant with my second boy a few years later, I was on a mission to make this experience not necessarily better, but different. I was going to take back control with knowledge and preparation. I invested in a beautiful doula, pregnancy Pilates classes and birth courses. I immersed myself in an endless stream of birth stories and plastered the walls of our home with birth affirmations.
Although the labour and birth itself strayed far from the ideal birth I had pictured I still achieved a healing birth. I did not feel broken. I felt wholesome.
I bathed in this baby bubble for months. When I finally emerged from it so did my belief that every woman deserves this and so my journey to become an accredited doula through The Australian Doula College began.
I am very grateful for my two very different birth and postpartum experiences because it has given me an enormous love and empathy for women and their motherhood journeys. Becoming a mother is the most pivotal event in a woman’s life. While it can be a time of great joy and love it can also be a time of vulnerability, fragility and self-doubt. Having walked this path myself, I know that I can walk beside you on yours and be the support that you need.
