My journey to becoming a birth doula. The seed was planted long ago, but my adventure has only just begun.
When I was a little girl, my parents bought me a big red anatomy book. I would look through it for hours, but the page that always kept my attention the longest was the one about pregnancy. A picture of a full term infant in utero, with paragraphs of explanation. Birth has always fascinated me. I just couldn't stop looking at that picture and dreaming of the day I would get to be around strong mamas and brand new babies.
I started college as a nursing major with the intention of becoming a Labor and Delivery Nurse, but the farther I went, the more I felt that nursing just wasn't for me. I changed my major one year in.
"Birth has always fascinated me. I just couldn't stop looking at that picture and dreaming of the day I would get to be around strong mamas and brand new babies."
Just after I finished college, I was visiting with some old friends, and a dear friend asked me if I would ever consider becoming a doula. "I know you would absolutely love it and be good at it," she told me. That's all it took. I signed up for a birth doula training almost immediately, and dove into the reading and preparation.
I held a job for the next couple of years after completing this training (I cannot recommend Amy Gilliand's DONA International Training and her business Doulaing the Doula highly enough!) and had the very valuable experience of being in a career where I was consistently around expectant parents and helped educate them about pregnancy and birth. I attended my first couple of births during this transition time, and I absolutely knew that this was what I wanted to do.
Over 1.5 years after completing my birth doula training, I finally took the leap. I quit my full-time job, left my foster kiddos in daycare one day each week, and began to reach out to make connections in the community with other birth workers and mamas-to-be.
My journey in the birth world has only just begun, but I am so looking forward to all the parents I will get to meet and the births I will have the honor of being invited to.
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