Grab your bucket

…Because it’s gonna get sappy up in here.

So much of the time, doulas spend the days and weeks following a birth (especially a difficult birth) going over the “what if”s and “I should’ve…”s. We doulas are empathetic little beings, that’s part of what makes us great at what we do. So when a mom doesn’t cope with labor well, gets an intervention she didn’t plan on, or just flat out has a shitty fucking birth, a lot of us blame ourselves.

We’ll talk more about doula guilt in a later post, because right now I’m going to talk about the opposite of that. Sometimes… awesome birth, shitty birth, doesn’t matter… a client or former client says something to you that fills you with warm fuzzies, switches on the waterworks and makes you beam with Super Awesome Doula Pride.

That happened to me today. I’m still a relatively new doula, as I’m a couple days away from my first doula baby’s first birthday. The very first birth I attended was a fucking incredible, short, intervention-free hospital birth of an enormous baby boy. I could tell when her transition hit, I could hear the “pushiness” in her birthing sounds, and was a great support to the couple – especially for it being my first birth. It was so easy, so amazing. I was on a birth high for weeks, and felt absolutely invincible.

Then the next 9 or 10 births were hard as fuck. Seriously, I almost quit about eight times. A 24 hour birth. A cesarean. A forceps delivery. Two births in three days. A Christmas Eve morning induction…where the baby wasn’t born until evening on Christmas day. Yep, I’ve had a challenging first full year as a practicing doula.

Today one of my former clients from one of my first births who had a particularly difficult situation and a rough labor e-mailed me. I won’t say what she said, but what she wrote in one sentence was enough to flood my body with the warm fuzzies and my face with tears. I did the ugly cry, y’all.

For a second I felt like the stars aligned, the universe and I were on the same wavelength, and a burning bush affirmed what I often wonder: “Should I even be doing this crazy ass work?” And the answer was, “Yes, yes you should. And dude….stop beating yourself up for things you have no control over, and worry about the shit you CAN change.”

And so I shall begin year two of doulahood at peace with the fact that every mama isn’t going to have a perfect birth… but that the affects we doulas have on these mamas births lasts long after the cord is cut.

So give yourself a high-five (clapping works too), go grab your doula bag, and rock some fucking births.

by P