One of our CAPPA trained and certified doulas, Phoebe, shares in her own words how she started her career as a doula after a devastating loss on her own fertility journey. And how that ended up fueling her passion to work with childbearing women and their families as a perinatal professional.
Hi my name is Phoebe. I am a CAPPA trained student doula working towards certification. My husband Ben and I, and our large golden doodle, live in Cincinnati. I have been fascinated by birth work since I was a child! I am extremely passionate about empowering women with evidence-based support in the safe space that is birth, walking with them through this experience and offering compassion and encouragement. I want every mom to feel seen and heard and supported in her vision of her birth.
I began my journey to becoming a doula at a very low point in my life, after we had two ectopic pregnancies back-to-back in one year. It was extremely shocking and left me feeling stuck, sad and without clear direction. I had always wanted to do birth work, but I thought it would come later in life, after I had children of my own.
The longer our fertility journey went on, the more desire I had to go for it sooner rather than later. I was sure it would be hard sometimes, to work around mothers when I desperately wanted to join the mom club myself. I just couldn’t shake the desire to do the work, and I thought it would be good for me to put my mind to something I knew I was passionate about.
What I wasn’t expecting was just how life-giving it would be for me. The community of women in birth-work, the joy of working alongside families in such an incredibly sacred time for them, to be invited into the most vulnerable of moments to offer support, the honor of watching someone become a mother. It has given me so much joy and direction to become a doula, to channel my love for mothers, families and birth somewhere where I can actually help someone as they make this incredible transition.
I found that a doula doesn’t have to have children of her own, which I had known before but now I really know it. I found that my history with loss really can actually be used to help other women. I found that being in this space with so many powerful women, many of which have also experienced loss, made me feel a whole lot less alone and also inspired me to no end.
I found that putting my hands to good work made the grief a little easier to carry. It’s not gone, but it is easier. This work is very important to me, I feel unbelievably humbled that I get to do it. In my free time my other interests are cooking, writing music, church life and thrifting for vintage treasures. I am grateful to be part of our birth community here in Cincinnati and at Nurture, and I look forward to meeting you soon!