05/10/2026
With today being Mother’s Day, and this past week honoring Postpartum awareness week and Maternal Mental Health day, I’ve been reflecting on my own entrance into motherhood.
Sitting with the duality of it all, the beauty and the tender/painful moments.
The real and not so “insta-worthy” parts of my motherhood journey…
The parts that were sacred and overwhelming and full of gratitude…yet still marked by grief.
I had planned for a home water birth. I had prepared and invested in a very thoughtfully constructed kind of experience. I imagined laboring in the water, being surrounded by the care I had chosen, and feeling held through every part of bringing my baby home.
Birth requires a total surrender of self, expectations, hopes, and fears because it works divinely on its own timing.
My labor moved so quickly that there was no time for the pool. My water broke at 5:28am and Gaia was born by 6:40am…there was simply no time for the plan to unfold the way I had pictured it. My beautiful daughter was born in my bedroom, into the hands of my grandmother, about 15 minutes before my midwife arrived.
For a very long time, I held two truths at once within my body.
I was deeply grateful for a safe and successful unmedicated home birth. I was soooo so happy to meet my baby and see her little face and beyond grateful for the sacred and holy moment of my grandmother’s hands receiving new life. 💜
I was also grieving.
I grieved the birth I had envisioned and the support I thought would be present. I couldn’t stop crying over the parts of the experience I prepared for but never got to have.
That grief surprised me. I felt so confused, shameful and guilty to feel disappointed when everything had turned out “okay.”
Postpartum taught me that gratitude and grief can both live in the same body together, that a mother can be thankful and still need to process what happened. Birth can be life changing and special and still leave painful or tragic places behind.
Postpartum was not only about the birth…
My postpartum journey was about the quiet heartbreak of realizing my village did not look the way I thought it would.
It was losing friendships and never hearing from people again in a season when I needed connection and support…postpartum was feeling the absence of consistent family support.
It was needing help, but not always knowing how to ask and when I finally did…being told that we aren’t the only people who matter.
It was craving friends who could show up without me taking care of them, without judgment, without needing me to explain everything, without expecting me to be “back to normal” or “bounce back” when I was still becoming someone totally new and unrecognizable to myself.
Those pieces of the motherhood experience really affected me too.
Postpartum is not just about hormones and healing. It is truly an identity crisis. It is the feeling of hopelessness as you watch your relationship with your body suffer. It is having supportive loved ones and the lack there of.
I don’t think I can describe the emotional weight of becoming a new mother while also discovering who was truly able to show up for me in the most vulnerable season of my life.
With time, reflection, and integration, I came to see my birth not as something that went wrong but as something raw, transformative, and deeply spiritual. It was not the birth I pictured, but it was still mine. It was the most sacred experience and it was the beginning of me becoming a mother to Gaia in ways I could have never planned for. 💜
This experience is one of the synchronicities and reasons that led me to become a doula.
I am passionate about patient rights and the right to birth as one pleases despite pressure. I know what it feels like to need more support and I know what it feels like to wish someone had been there to help you process, reassure, and remind you that your feelings and experiences are valid.
I know and so many other people know what it is like to carry a beautiful birth story and still need so much healing and processing around it.
This is why parental support matters so much.
Research has found that birthing people who received doula care had 57.5% lower odds of postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety compared to similar people who did not receive doula care.
And we cannot forget the dads, approximately 1 in 10 fathers globally experience depression or anxiety during the perinatal period.
These statistics matter because new parents were NEVER meant to carry birth, healing, feeding, identity shifts, grief, joy, exhaustion and recovery alone.
New parents are meant to be witnessed, nurtured, and held.
We were meant to have a village.
This Mother’s Day, I’m honoring the mothers whose stories are more complicated and complex.
The moms who are grateful and grieving.
The moms who had beautiful births that still hurt to remember.
The moms who lost friendships and family after becoming a mother.
The parents who did not have the support they hoped for from their loved ones.
The moms who feel guilty for needing more.
The ones who are still trying to make sense of what happened.
The moms who look strong, happy, and have it all together but are quietly drowning and struggling underneath.
I see you. You are not alone.
Your birth story is allowed to hold more than one feeling and more than one truth…healing matters, parental mental health matters.
You deserve to be held, too.
Happy Mother’s Day 💙💝💐
