My own births showed me how the transformation of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum can feel.
Guiding and holding families in their own unique birthing has come from experience, perspective, and time. Starting on a path to doula work gathered up a lot of different threads for me – working as a biologist, fascination with the beauty in growth and change, building community after traveling and feeling rootless, experiencing complete transformation in my own birthing, and feeling what it feels like to have support, and to be without it. Every step teaches something new. For nearly 8 years, it’s been an incredible honor and joy to be invited to attend families navigating big life moments.
How does doula care look for you? Pregnancy, birth and new parenting are times that deserve to be honored. As a doula, I affirm your family and the meaning of your experience. I provide a listening ear to your deepest wishes, concerns, and anxieties. Your body has innate resources and strength that you will draw on in birth. As your doula, I help you find and hold your power. Whether you’re pregnant, making the adjustment to life as a new family, or navigating conception, I offer honest and evidence-based information to help you find your best path forward and navigate this time in a way that’s completely true to you.
Please be in touch to talk more about the ways I have supported families like yours, in hospital, birth center and home births, unmedicated and medicated labors, VBAC, planned cesarean, medical complexity, multiples, pregnancy after assisted reproduction, and on journeys with loss or grief – in Missoula, the Bitterroot, and surrounding parts of Western Montana.
Working directly with families is the best learning environment, but I also value continuing education and engaging with community. I maintain certifications with DONA International (birth & postpartum doula), ICEA (childbirth education), and TALPP (lactation counseling), and have dived deeply into the emotional and mental health needs of pregnant people and new parents (PSI), companioning through loss and grief (Institute for Birth, Breath, and Death), guided self-inquiry through art (Birthing From Within), navigating fertility and conception (BADT), creating comfort and ease in pregnancy and birth (Spinning Babies), and the foundations of family-centered evidence-based care (Evidence Based Birth).