I’m on the path to becoming a midwife and consider myself still very much an apprentice. The first birth I ever attended was my nephew’s when I was 16 years old. My sister had a long, difficult birth that involved a cascade of interventions that she had not at all understood. My nephew was delivered with a shoulder dystocia that resulted in a serious birth injury from which he still suffers today. This is not when I felt the call to midwifery. Instead it left me terrified of birth.
A decade and a half later I attended a prenatal yoga teacher training and it was there that I learned about the physiology and importance of birth and just how different an experience it can be. For years I worked as a crisis hotline volunteer for our local sexual assault resource agency and at the time I was taking psychology courses at UVA with a view to pursuing a graduate degree in psychology. In that prenatal yoga training it became clear to me that the confluence of my interests were calling me to midwifery and that my passion for counseling would continue to blossom on this new path.
As I was seeking the right route and program for me, I learned about a school in West Virginia and considered moving there to study. By some turn of fate and good fortune, within months of my seeking it out, the school’s founder happened to move to Charlottesville and started a school in 2014. I was among the first cohort of students. That same year I met my doula partners in that setting, joined Bright Birthing and continued to learn from and assist at out-of-hospital births.
Much of what I’ve said so far has more to do with my journey than my reasons for why I am a rising midwife. I want to be a midwife because birth is on a continuum with sexuality and I believe that a woman’s sexual experiences are sacred and matter deeply to her sense of self and to her well-being. As a result of my own personal sexual experiences in life and my education, I have come to care strongly about sexuality, respect and consent. There is a lot of mystery in birth and a lot at stake. Women are both at their most vulnerable and most powerful during the transformational passage into new motherhood. I consider it the highest privilege and honor to learn the art of how to listen, how to respectfully inform, and how to help a woman safely navigate that mystery.