Why I became a doula

I am the mother of two daughters. My first birth flowed like a text book, moving from one stage to another seamlessly, with my only partner, Pip, supporting me. It was us against the world and we did it. I felt like with Pip at my side at birth, i needed no-one else…

My second birth, however, did not flow. Birth stopped and it started, it started and it stopped. It turned out baby was tangled in her cord and her decelerating heartbeat was revealing her distress. At various points during her birth we started to edge down a spiral of intervention that we were confused about and didn’t really want. Pip – who was my entire team of advocacy and support – worked his absolute hardest to help me out of the spiral of intervention (finding out about a mobile monitoring machine so I could move about whilst still listening out to the baby, closing the blinds and dimming the lights to bring me back into a feeling of deep animal safety, asking the vast medical team to leave the room bar all necessary people, shielding me from the magnetism and fear inducement of the machines). And, thanks to Pip’s single handed practical and emotional support (and the good grace of the universe), eventually, she came, naturally and healthily. 

But by this point, with our healthy baby in arms, Pip was so stressed out by the responsibility of what he had just faced alone in that birth and in supporting me and the baby without any support for himself, that he couldn’t truly be present in one of the most important moment of our lives so far; the birth of our child. 

Suddenly, I understood what a doula was for; to create a solid team of love, advocacy and emotional and practical support around both the birthing person and their birth partners . In this moment of realisation, my new identity as a doula was born. Five months later I trained to be a doula with my baby about to crawl away, and it has been my life’s work ever since!