1. Welcome to the Into the Wonder Birth Blog: A (Not-So) Brief Guide to Who I Am and How I Got Here (Part 1)

I remember wanting my own online space so badly when I was in high school. Back then everyone used Xanga and LiveJournal to share the intricacies of their teenage lives. Unfortunately, my mom wouldn’t let me have one. Thanks, Mom. (But really, it probably was a better choice just to write in my diary.)

Now here I am, two decades later, a mom myself and finally in charge of the rules. And the rules say, “Kate Goodwin shall have a blog. And it will be the place for her to talk all things birth so her family can finally get some peace at the dinner table.” (Typical dinner: “Can you pass the pasta? Also, do you want to know the real reason why they first started using Pitocin to augment labor in the 1970s?”) Actually, I make no promises about said peace. It’s a point of pride that my oldest can give a mean double hip squeeze and demonstrate a forward-leaning inversion.

I haven’t always been a birth doula though. After college, I taught high school English, and then after that, I got my MFA in creative writing. It wasn’t until I had my second baby that I became fascinated by the emotional landscape of birth and the lack of attention it gets in both birth preparation and actual labor. I dug into the research on people’s experiences of their births, hoping to find some concrete answers on what made birth positive versus challenging or even traumatic. If you’re here reading this, you can probably guess the depressing results: a lot of the time, no one really cares what a birther’s experience of their birth is like. When you go into the hospital to have a baby, you stop being a human being and become this container ship carrying a baby, and then people descend with their cranes and forklifts and become obsessed with extracting your cargo. Often, the container ship gets completely forgotten. No one asks if it wants a drink or some honey to keep its energy levels up. If it’s scared. What happened the last time it pulled into the port to… deliver some cargo? (Yes, I can make this metaphor work if I want to.) The number of times I’ve heard care providers talk about the birther like they aren’t even in the room when something big is happening…  

This is deeply fucked up. (I curse a lot. It’s best you know this now.)

And before you #notallhospitals me, I know there are many wonderful hospital births with many wonderful providers. I’ve supported clients through them. I’ve been there myself. Almost everyone gives birth in a hospital, and that’s the setting I want to support people in. But overall, the system is messed up. There are many reasons why this is (stay tuned for future posts on this topic), and these reasons really have to do with larger cultural issues and not individual providers. 

At first I was crushed. Short of waving my wand and making everyone’s births beautiful and easy, how could I help people have positive experiences? I’m only one person. I can’t change an entire system.

But then I realized that if I could shift off of the system and focus in on the birthers themselves, I could re-center people in their own birth experiences (thanks Britta Bushnell for that language). If all the work I did started with the individual, we could move the power back to them. If I dedicated my prenatal time with clients to listening and asking questions, I could deeply connect with birthers and understand what they themselves were looking for. 

Birth is incredibly personal. It’s also an incredibly powerful experience. And it requires digging into that personal side to know what’s going to make it a deeply meaningful experience. 

I’ve always been struck by the fact that two people can have basically the same birth experience, and one person can find it empowering whereas to the other, it’s traumatizing. What’s right, what’s best, is completely based on the individual and everything they’re bringing with them into their birth. Those 15 minute appointments you have with your provider? They’re not enough time to get deep, to explore what’s important to you and why. To look at what would be uniquely challenging for you and how you might move through it. 

That’s where we are — birth, an incredibly personal and powerful process, stuck in a system that isn’t centered around birthers. That’s what I’m here to support you with. 

My mission, whether it’s here on this blog or through working with me more directly, is to prepare you for a positive and deeply meaningful birth experience. My framework for preparing you has three main parts: understanding yourself (so you can figure out what’s important to you), understanding birth (so you can build the skills you need to cope well and make decisions), and understanding the context of the maternity care system (so you can get the care you want). I want you to go into birth knowing that you’re the expert of your own experience and that you can confidently navigate whatever comes your way!

So what exactly will I write about here on the blog and who will it be most helpful to? Tune in next week for part two: Welcome to the Into the Wonder Birth Blog: A (Not-So) Brief Guide to What You’ll Find Here