I’m back from my doula training class at Seattle Midwifery School. My instructors – Penny Simkin and Carrie Kenner, were nothing short of fabulous. Some of the highlights of the four days included:
- Hearing what a diverse group of women we were. Many had come from out of state and we even had one student from Taiwan hoping to introduce the role of the doula to her country. (She got a heartfelt round of applause.) There were massage therapists, RNs, midwifery students, medics, homebirth advocates, and newbies just like me. The one thing we all shared was a passion for helping pregnant and laboring women.
- Listening to a birth story of an emergency cesarean where the father, who had sung to his baby every day in utero, started belting out “Here comes the Sun (son)” in the middle of the operating room to his distressed baby. The baby calmed down and all their wasn’t a dry surgical mask in the room.
- Hearing how studies have proven that women remember their birth experiences like it was yesterday for the rest of their lives, and that having a positive memory of that experience does not correlate to whether it was a cesarean birth, or if there was pain medications, or if there were interventions that were unexpected. The women who develop positive memories are the women who were well-supported, respected and treated kindly during their birth.
- Watching videos of how birth used to be in our country. General anesthetic and little to no choice or support during labor was the norm not long ago. “All you need to bring is makeup and other things to make you look pretty,” said the old AMA video. “We will take care of the birth.” We’ve come a long way, baby.
- Hearing Penny describe how an obstetrician (was it Michel Odent?) stresses at every speech he gives, with tears in his eyes, “Be kind to the mothers”.
- Learning communication skills, tips tricks and techniques that will carry me through my career as a doula. I feel better equipped to support a woman in labor no matter what that labor might look like.
- Watching birth videos and listening to birth stories and sharing my own. I’m a fairly emotional person, but I was pretty much a puddle of myself all week.
- Listening to Penny tell the story of her own long labor that finally ended in a general anesthetic and foreceps delivery (she was choking up just telling us about it). She said she thought she had failed and was really being hard on herself when her doctor came in for rounds. “What a trooper,” he had said. And she stopped beating herself up and started to view her birth in a more positive light. Those words were the ones that inspired her 40 year career. Little does that doctor know how powerful those three little words were – they’ve helped thousands – perhaps millions – of women and have started a revolution in maternity care.