5min read
One year into birth, and so many amazing things have happened. I’ve met some really dope people, and learned a lot. As a doula It’s been very rewarding to successfully assist families with resources, advocacy, labor, emotional support, and breastfeeding. Finding a way to make space in my life for births/clients. Wellll that’s another story. It’s been quite an adjustment. When I started taking on clients, I would naively cancel or overlook any social activites that were too close to my client’s estimated due dates(EDD). Doulas are on-call two weeks before your EDD, and two weeks after. Because babies come when they want. The anxiety that comes with being on-call used to be terrifying. Hearing text messages dings that were not really there. Smh. Or “hearing” your phone ring, and thinking it was showtime. I was helping all these people but forgetting to refill my cup. Thus the fire and passion I started with was dwindling, and forcing me to rethink my career path.
I was forgetting about myself.
After my training was complete, I was excited that I finally got to do a job that I had waited five years to do. I focused on getting to a numerical birth goal, and taking all the trainings I could, to sharpen my craft. I was running in a race, to only realize I was the only competitor.
God has a funny way of forcing your ass to take breaks. For me some of the more obvious signs, were irritability, lacklusterness, all which attribute to autopilot. A major physical sign was being super exhausted and feeling like I wanted to pass out. My partner saying “you need a break, can you have a day off when you’re actually off?”
2018: The prequel to Learning how to be comfortable without doing anything:
This year I’m at 15 births, and I’ve decided to take my own advice. Which is the same I give to my expecting clients: you have no control over when the baby comes, live your life, have sex, and it’ll happen. I unpaused my life and started being social again.
Currently, The only thing that can be spontaneous in a Doulas life is a birth, everything else must be planned.
This work isn’t easy. I love supporting folks that look like me, and getting monthly updates with the cutest baby pics. In the midst of witnessing the strength of a laboring wombman, I needed to remember my strength, my why:
Why did I choose to support pregnant people?
Why did God show me all these signs before I finally took my Doula training?
Why did I decide to become a birth worker?
Writing down your why’s is great, because when when you start to lose the will to go on, reading your why’s can give you a much needed boost.
Or
You can go and do some shit that makes you happy. Yes I’m a birth worker, but, that’s not my only social role; I’m a friend, girlfriend, daughter, sister, aunty, and “recovering” professional shopper.
Sometimes you have to say fuck the why’s and remember The Who’s. With the most important one being:
Who are you outside of your work?
Quite frankly, the work will continue, with or without you.
Yes, there will always be disgusting stories of birth trauma, but there will always be beautiful ones to Balance shit out. Yes, there will be disrespect in birthing environments, or family members/ friends of the birthing person who don’t fully understand nor support your role. The aforementioned has nothing to do with how you view yourself in this work. Now, I’ve learned to not feel guilty about what I do, or say no to, because I don’t want to be a martyr. I don’t want this work to leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Everything I say yes to comes which much thought, about how much energy it will take from me, and ripple effects of it’s future workload.
When folks ask me how it feels to be a doula? I want to be able to tell them the beautiful things, because that’s who I was before. There are pros and cons in everything, I was naive to think that the love of the work would be the only fuel I needed.
Dealing with daily stressors, such as micro aggressions I refuse to be broken by systemic & institutional racism. Saying it and doing it is two different things. Doulas need to recharge too. Hell humans need to recharge too! When you have to read about health disparities and deal with micro aggressions on a daily basis. You must recharge.
Smithsonian African American Museum September 2018