April 2018
I was 21, stationed in North Dakota with the Air Force, freshly married, and pregnant.
It was the dead of winter. Freezing, isolating. And I had no family nearby. Just me and whatever scraps the military handed me for pregnancy resources.
I didn't know the words for it yet, but deep inside, I wanted a different kind of birth. I researched, hired a doula, went to childbirth classes, and planned a home birth. I checked ALL the boxes.
For a while, it looked like it was going to work. At 41 weeks and a few days, I went into labor at home.
But after laboring peacefully through the night, my midwife noticed my baby's heart tones needed closer monitoring. So we made the decision to transfer to the hospital.
The moment I walked in, everything shifted.
The contractions felt unbearable. The fluorescent lights were blinding. The coldness of strangers' hands made my body tense. When I decided I wanted an epidural and the anesthesiologist came in, I thought relief was coming. Instead, I was stuck in my spine six, seven, maybe eight times. Jolts of pain shooting down each side of my body as he dismissed my cries and told me, "That's not pain, just pressure."
Hours later, when my baby was finally born and the nurse asked me to guess her weight, I remember thinking, "I don't care. Just make this pain stop."
My daughter was perfectly healthy, but I left that birth physically injured and mentally broken.
I remember holding her in my arms and asking myself, "How did this still happen? What did I miss?"
And yet, out of that pain came a calling.
Two months later
She was in my arms at my first doula training.
It didn't feel random. It felt full-circle.
Years earlier, I had started down the path of becoming an OB/GYN. But sitting in microbiology classes, doing all the right things on paper, and realizing it would take a decade before I was truly at a woman's bedside... it just didn't feel like the side of the work I wanted to be on.
Doula work made sense. It was immediate. It was intimate. It was exactly how I had always envisioned showing up for women. Not from a distance in a white coat, but shoulder to shoulder, walking with them through one of the most powerful moments of their lives.
Shortly after my doula training, I filed for separation from the military and stepped fully into birth work.
I supported women in hospitals. I attended home births. I saw firsthand what an empowered, confident birth could look like.
I loved every single second of it.
But there was a little voice in the back of my head: Am I an imposter? I was helping women create the very experience I hadn't yet had.
Fast forward to 2022
I was pregnant again, back home in Georgia.
This time, I knew something had to shift. It wasn't enough to be "healthy" or "educated." I had to decide if I actually believed a different kind of birth was possible for me.
That pregnancy was the most peaceful I've ever felt in my life. I cared for my body, but even more than that, I cared for my mind. I tuned in. I trusted. I believed.
And when my daughter was born in my bedroom, in the quiet, in the calm, under twinkling fairy lights, I whispered, "I did it."
That moment was everything.
It showed me what birth could be when all of you (body, mind, and spirit) are prepared and supported.
It shifted the way I work with women, because I realized birth isn't just physical. It's belief. It's trust. It's mindset. It's INTUITIVE.
Now, that's the work I do.
I help women prepare for birth not just by handing them information, but by helping them step into the kind of grounded, confident, empowered state that makes everything possible.
If I could go from traumatized to empowered, from broken to whole, from doubting to whispering "I did it" with tears streaming down my face...
So can you.
Let's work together.