About Me
My Experience
100+ women supported during pregnancy
50+ births attended
3 years in medical midwifery
5 years in nursing
4 years + attending births outside the system!!
My Story
I have walked many different paths during my time in birthwork, This has created a well-rounded base of knowledge for me. I am so grateful for the mentors, teachers, and mothers who have taught me so much about life, birth, and serving families. I have unwavering confidence in birth because I’ve seen it work so magically when respected and left undisturbed.
At 20 years old I discovered I had a strong calling to support women in birth as a homebirth midwife. When I looked into how to become a midwife, the only path I found was to go to nursing school to become a Certified Nurse Midwife. I had a deep knowing that this was my life mission and I was willing to do whatever it took. So, I enrolled in nursing school intending to get my Bachelor of Science in Nursing and then continue to get a Master's in Nurse Midwifery.
I was a dedicated student and I loved learning about the magnificent processes of the human body. I enjoyed my classes but as I made my way through nursing school something was off. I noticed many contradictions in what we were learning. Whenever I would question incorrect information I would be scolded and told to just answer questions the way I was being told to. This was deeply unsettling to me. This is where I started losing my faith in the medical system.
My husband introduced me to a local midwife when I graduated from nursing school. She shared with me that there are different avenues into midwifery and I didn’t need to suffer through 5 more years of nursing school. What a relief! This is when I started my apprenticeship to become a Certified Professional Midwife.
For 3 years I trained with multiple different midwives soaking up all of the knowledge and experience I could. I worked as a nurse at night, I attended prenatal appointments during the day, and I attended multiple births a month as a doula and assistant midwife. I was busy! I have attended births at home, at birth centers, in hospitals. I have attended all kinds of births - twins, breech, VBAC, c-sections, and births with no intervention at all!
In the spring of 2022, I traveled to California where I stayed for three months to work in a high-volume birth center. At this point, I still wanted to become a medical midwife but was definitely starting to question the system in which I was participating.
During this time I was also taking an online course with Freebirth Society’s Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark called the Radical Birthkeepers School. This program changed my life in so many ways. The self mastery tools that we learned taught me how to take complete responsibility for my actions and how to show up for women in full integrity. This course also helped me decipher some of the things I was seeing in the medical world and in birth.
I was seeing so many births that were seemingly being sabotaged by midwives. This was so confusing for me because I saw midwives as the saviors who were helping women have a natural birth at home and avoid the hospital. At this point, I definitely saw doctors in hospitals as the villains and midwives were the heroes rescuing women from the evil hospitals. After attending births for years I started to notice that many of the midwives were doing the exact same things that they were criticizing doctors for doing.
I noticed that medical midwives were also sabotaging births, recommending that women transfer to the hospitals when it wasn’t necessary, and overall acting out of integrity. I was deeply hurt and confused by this realization. I felt like my entire world was crumbling around me.
Medical monitoring and procedures inherently disrupt the birth process and can even cause complications. Now I see that even the respectful and well-meaning medical midwives are sabotaging births by practicing cervical exams, listening to fetal heart tones, and unintentionally fear mongering women to distrust their bodies and the birth process.
Whenever any kind of medical provider is present in the birth space it causes a power dynamic where the midwife or doctor is the expert and the authority. This causes women to second-guess their intuition and outsource their power to this authority.
I have seen so many instances of a birth going perfectly and then the midwife does a cervical exam and reveals the woman is only 2 cm dilated. I have seen this happen so many times where the energy of the birth space completely changes, contracts go from tolerable to unbearable, and the woman’s confidence and trust in her body is deflated.
This is why I have shifted into becoming a traditional birth attendant. In my role as a Traditional Birth attendant I provide holistic care for women throughout their entire pregnancy, birth, and postpartum journeys. We dive into so much more than a medical assessment ever could. We talk about fears, hopes, goals, visualizations of dream births, and so much more. I feel this really prepares women to have a successful birth.