The Wild Moon Story

I first felt the call to midwifery when I was pregnant with my daughter. I remember sitting across from midwives I was interviewing for my own homebirth and thinking, this is the work I want to do, talking about bodies, guiding people through pregnancy, walking with them into parenthood, holding space for both medicine and mystery. But my own first birth was not the shining story I had dreamed of. I lost my way in it. I found myself caring for everyone else in the room, my midwife, my doula, my mother, instead of standing fiercely for myself and my baby. I did not yet know how to trust myself enough to ask for what I truly needed. That labor broke me open. It taught me more than any class or apprenticeship ever could. Those lessons became the seeds of the midwife I was becoming. They asked me to grow fierceness, to grow tenderness, to grow trust in my own knowing. When I became pregnant with my son, I chose to step off the well-worn path. I carried him through an unassisted pregnancy and birthed him in ceremony, in my own home, clay and charcoal on my skin, leaves laid on my body, my breath carrying me into the den I had become. That birth healed me. It showed me the immense power of simplicity, trust, and the ancient wildness of the birthing body. I have walked a winding path of apprenticeship, study, ceremony, and clinical training. Along the way, I have attended many beautiful births, some straightforward and others tangled with complexity or grief. I have stood with families through miscarriage, stillbirth, and chosen endings, and I have stood with families as they roared life into the room. Each one has taught me more about what it means to serve at the gates, those gates that swing both ways, birth and death always near each other. This is the work I know I am meant to do. To be with families in the fierce and ordinary mystery of birth. To guard the wildness and variation that is normal. To lean on love and trust as the ground of my clinical judgment. To call on medicine when needed, but never let fear lead the way. I am, always, a student of birth. And I am endlessly grateful to every family who invites me into their story.