09/23/2026
This work found me long before I knew it existed.
This work found me when I was in deep transverse arrest in my mother’s obturator foramen during labor and had to be manually rotated while she suffered immensely without the assistance of an epidural.
This work found me brought home to a makeshift crib dresser drawer padded with blankets to parents living in poverty trying to make it on their own.
This work found me as I grew up hearing the story of my mother, lonely and wearing only a robe, welcomed in the “nice children’s booksalesman” to the livingroom, wrote a check with money they didn’t have for those books her three toddlers cluelessly flipped through on that floor. That check would have bounced had my dad not tracked him down in the neighborhood upon getting home from work.
This work found me as I observed family dynamics unfold, with each family member unknowingly taking on their role in the system. People could be so different and yet so similar at the same time.
This work found me in high school as I rooted for the underdog, felt moved towards advocacy work when angered with social injustice, but smiled while always being highly attuned to those who needed more.
This work found me as I immersed myself in sociology, anthropology, and psychology studies in college, unable to learn enough about the limitless opportunities of human behavior, particularly maternal health and birth.
This work found me during my big city college summer internship when I was confronted for serving soup on a hot summer day and reckoning with privilege.
This work found me in my early 20s as my first labor progressed and the nurse communicated that no doctors were available for my care because a car accident had just brought in a dying pregnant woman.
This work found me as my infant son’s pediatrician desperately taught ways to embrace my screaming and refluxed baby in attempts to comfort him when medications and formulas weren’t effective in soothing his eroded esophagus. I still bleeding from a third degree tear, unaware of what I had survived that torturous and beautiful night.
This work found me as I heard the words, "She died last night," while cradling my 4-month-old. She was my vibrant and hilarious 22-year-old sister-in-law who met an untimely and sudden death.
This work found me the night the life I secured came crashing down with a phone call revealing what my body somehow knew but my consciousness couldn’t yet comprehend. The trauma too significant for recovery given the fraudulent foundation.
This work found me in the depths of those dark days of grief and shock, having to rebuild life piece by piece while wondering how I would and could ever raise a child in the ashes of a broken heart and soul. Unlearning and relearning all that I knew. Having to confront parts of myself I didn't know existed until everything fell apart. Learning to forgive her. While mothering.
This work found me when my current husband fell in love with my writing, encouraged me to go back to school and do something better and more purposeful with the potential he knew I had before I knew myself.
This work found me in graduate school, balancing unpaid work, parenting, dependency, long hours, and exposure. Crying in my supervisor's office, I told him I didn't know if I could do it. Him telling me, yes I could.
This work found me during the thousands of supervised hours post-masters graduation when I began bearing witness to their stories, I'd share with my supervisor and wonder why this area hadn't yet been an established resource. He then, believing in me once again said, well, if anyone would do it, it'd be me. Still mothering.
This work found me in the community of women who'd slowly start taking me under their wings, both broken and rebuilt, vulnerability their strength, mentoring me and modeling how hard things could be done. All while mothering.
This work found me in the hours of supervision and personal therapy still confronting difficult parts of myself, sitting in shame, and learning vulnerability. Learning that good parenting means bringing exactly that into mothering.
This work found me in my next postpartum, a redemptive and corrective birth experience. This time with an infant who refused a bottle for ten months. Driving to nurse her at daycare between seeing my own postpartum patients.
This work found me when I took a deep dive into Postpartum Support International and became certified and obsessed with in perinatal work in 2018.
This work found me as I'd turn each page to Karen Kleiman's Art of Holding, embodying the thousands of hours of experiences I'd spent by now being in that room with each one of those women. Story after story. Tear after tear. It felt like coming home.
This work found me as I got to meet Karen Kleiman and her team with the The Postpartum Stress Center in March 2020 at cusp of COVID-19 and begin mentoring with their group. Week after week, one heartache after the next. That group would meet weekly to release the pressure valve of responsibility we'd carry on our shoulders, assisting the survival of both our patients and our own. All while mothering.
This work found me upon connecting a collective of perinatal clinicians together determined to fill the vast gap experienced in the state of Louisiana in 2021 and respond to mamas in crises more promptly in response to the pandemic, support one another, and create connectedness so to not feel such isolation in a field where high-risk is so real.
This work continues to find me, fuel me, every trip back to the PPSC, again in 2023, in 2025, with every student, with every supervisee, in every case, in every chance I get to hold, to learn, to teach, to connect, to inspire. As this work finds them, both client and professional alike. Moving through her own story to get to a place of peace and purpose, the shifting and accepting of all that is becoming, while tending to the hurt and broken parts inside, so to carefully care for those who are cared for in her presence.
This work will find you, too, and when it does, I'd love to meet you.
