I know that you, too, have grown up in a culture that has taught you to downplay and disregard your deep needs. If you are a mother, you can add the complicating fact that your children have legitimate needs that often interfere with your own. I know how tempting it is to be low-maintenance, low-needs, last in line. Having worked with hundreds of women, I can tell you that it doesn’t work. You’ll never be able to truly get better, feel safe or create the life you desire by being last in line.

This year’s Mother’s Day was epic. Somewhat terrifyingly so. I thought it was going to be a regular Mother's Day hike. A few miles. A few lizards. Lunch by the Rio Grande. But on the way back, quite a ways in the lead of the rest of the family, I walked right up to a rattlesnake, head raised, rattles a'rattling, ready to strike. I was just several feet away. With a baby on my back

My second son came into the world two months ago after a long, hard labor, dropping into my midwife’s hands as I knelt on my bed at home. This birth was a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) and I have, in essence, been planning it for seven years, shortly after my first son came into the world after 54 hours with the help of a surgeon’s scalpel, much to my surprise and my devastation.

Today, I had an encounter that reminded me that our experiences of safety and agency are often being overridden by those around us and how that experience begins at a very young age. 

I want women to be ever reminded that how you birth matters, not because cesareans are wrong but because they MEAN something to your health. But I don't just want to stop there. I want to be a part of the solution to the cesarean epidemic and to the path of healing after a difficult birth or before a next birth. 

I felt like I was making a life-or-death choice. Like choosing one place to live was a prescription for utter desolation and like choosing another would leave me bereft of my soul. I have been clearly "overreacting."

The second child in as many years left my body unexpectedly this last week. This time, when I realized I was miscarrying, I spent time thinking about what I wanted this experience to be like. Or rather, who I wanted to be in this experience. How I wanted to show up to it.

Have you experienced something in your body that fills you with fear and pain and a sense of failure? Have you felt so angry at how your body has betrayed you? Have you felt so hopeless and demoralized?

Women are coming away from birth confused and horrified by what has happened to them. We tell them it was their provider. We tell them it was their lack of education. We tell them it was their trauma. This is not the whole truth.