My 100th Birth
Three weeks ago I attended my 100th birth.
It’s an amazing milestone. So wild. I’m extremely proud of myself and the birthworker I am today. But with such a meaningful milestone, I’ve been asking myself – what does it MEAN to have been to 100 births?
“How many births have you been to?” is a familiar question for birth workers. Client interviews, networking events, job interviews, even casual meetings with new doulas, often all ask for your number of births. It is a question that helps us assess each other’s experience. Does the number of births we’ve been to tell us much about what kind of doula we are?
When I first started working as a private doula, another doula called me, desperate for back up. She had Covid and had a client whose water broke and was going to the hospital. I was the only doula she could find who was available, and we had never met but had been connected through an agency. At the end of our conversation she paused, then said, “and can I ask, how many births have you been to?”
“About fifty.” I replied
“Oh thank god.” I still remember the relief in her voice. “I’m so relieved not to be sending someone who has only been to 3 births or something!”
But what does it prove that I had seen fifty births at that point, or that I’ve seen a hundred now? This milestone makes me think of settler-colonialist language around humans dominating nature: “catching waves,” “bagging fourteeners,” even “delivering” and “catching” babies. As if somehow we can conquer or possess oceans, mountains, and births.
What mastery could I possibly claim over the wild, untamable force that is birth?
So I resist the temptation to hang my hat on these 100 births – which is actually 101 102 103 now because it took me so long to finish this blog.
That number, one hundred, usually evokes wide eyes from my clients and friends, even other birth workers. While I agree that one hundred is a significant milestone, it’s a hard time to really enjoy it.
According to Al-Jazeera news, 100 Palestinians are killed every 6 hours (nearly half of whom are children) in Gaza right now.
I think of all the energy goes into one birth, one life, one baby being born. One mother’s transformation. It is unfathomable, considering all that, to wrap my mind around the speed and magnitude of death unfolding in Palestine.
I wonder why it is so much easier to destroy than create. It is so cruel to think of the ten lunar months it takes to grow a baby inside oneself, and the hours or even days it takes to birth, compared to the seconds it can take to end a life.
To be clear, I believe that experience, training, and skill matter in birthwork. I’m certainly not trying to minimize the expertise of doulas who have been doing this for decades. And certainly in midwifery. What I think I’m trying to do is decolonize my work.
The desire to dominate nature is a feature of white supremacy culture and the project of colonialism. This passage from Tema Okun of whitesupreamacyculture.info explains how white supremacy culture and colonialism are intertwined:
“White supremacy is a project of colonization - a project of ‘appropriating a place or domain for one's use’ (according to the Oxford Dictionary). White supremacy colonizes our minds, our bodies, our psyches, our spirits, our emotions... as well as the land and the water and the sky and the air we breathe. White supremacy tells us who has value, who doesn't, what has value, what doesn't in ways that reinforce a racial hierarchy of power and control that diseases and destroys all it touches. When I say…that our goal is to get free, what I mean is that we are engaged in the collective project of freeing ourselves from this project of colonization. We are decolonizing ourselves - our minds, our bodies, our psyches, our spirits, our emotions, our work, our homes, and the land, water, sky, and air.”
I’m working on decolonizing my emotions around my work, how I feel about the number of births I’ve been to and what that means about my value. I think this is essential for becoming the type of birth worker I want to be. Birth has always been an uncontrollable act of nature, and I can’t dominate it whether I’ve been to one hundred or one thousand. People are impressed with a hundred births because that must mean something right? Well, to me it mainly means that I’ve seen enough to know that I don’t know shit.
I’ve seen enough to have deep awe and reverence for birth, and to know it shouldn’t be messed with if you can help it. In fact, we know that despite higher rates of intervention, the U.S. is the is not saving us from being the worst performing nation in the Global North for infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. (If you’re not already following Robina Khalid’s writing, you should be) I could, and just might, write pages upon pages about the ways the medical industrial complex embodies SO many of the tenets of white supremacy culture, and that pattern of dominance leads to worse birth outcomes in the U.S.
The last great irony of my 100th birth is that this milestone comes at a time that I’m stepping away from doula work. I haven’t posted enough about my midwifery journey - but I plan to start! This Fall I am starting as a student at Authentic Birth Care in Wauwatosa, WI (outside Milwaukee) and I will be up there one or two days per week. I’ve stopped taking new doula clients and after October I’m not planning on doula-ing anymore. It feels wild to be turning away client inquiries when I spent the last year trying SO hard to build my business. If you’re one of the dear people that found me during that time - know I absolutely adore you and I’m so grateful to have been a part of your journey. Maybe I can be your midwife next time?
