This Is My Beautiful, Messy Path to Freedom, Motherhood, and Doula Work…

In 2014, my world unraveled - first slowly, like fog rolling in over familiar ground…and then all at once.

Some losses crept in so gradually over years that I didn’t see them coming until they’d already emptied me out. Others came like a tidal wave - sudden, disorienting, and absolute. I lost a baby. I left my job. I birthed my daughter. I left a nearly decade-long marriage. I fell apart. And, somehow, I fell in love - both with another person, and also with myself. I moved across the state. I started a business. I stopped starving myself and I discovered how to move my body in a way that felt good instead of using movement as a way to make my body look good. I became a family again. I bought land, prioritized community, and began to rebuild a life that felt like mine. And I survived all of it with a kind of quiet, humbled strength that still surprises me.

This - every messy, nonlinear, beautiful bit of it - is how I came home to myself. And to this work.

In my daily life as a doula, I witness how hard we are on ourselves, especially in parenthood. There’s this pressure to appear like we’ve got it all together, even when we’re unraveling on the inside. I’ll never forget a new parent looking at me once with teary eyes and sharing vulnerably and longingly how she wished her life was as flawless as mine, and could I please, please share my secrets with her?

I was finally able to share honestly from a place without shame. I didn’t deflect or minimize. I told the truth. That this life I love so much is built on layers of grief, reckoning, and becoming. That the joy she saw was real, but it didn’t arrive by avoiding the pain. That my family is happy, yes, but not perfect, and not traditionally nuclear. That I spent the first two years of motherhood trying to convince everyone - including myself - that I was fine, even as I battled deep postpartum depression and anxiety. That it wasn’t until I fully crumbled years later that I finally felt like I became a mother.

And that the comparison she was making between her raw beginning and my present-day reality wasn't only unhelpful, it was heartbreakingly unfair to herself.

I show up for the families I serve with the same honesty and compassion I wish I’d been offered in my hardest seasons. Because I know what it feels like to question your instincts, your identity, your enough-ness. I know that behind every parent who looks “put-together” is someone quietly wrestling with fear, fatigue, and the deep longing to feel seen.

This is why I became a doula - not to celebrate just the sweet moments, but to hold space for the whole, complex truth. The ache and the awe. The doubt and the deep love. The unraveling and the becoming.

I believe your intuition is sacred. I believe hard doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. And I believe that when we stop hiding the shadowy parts of ourselves, we make space for connection, healing, and real joy to take root.

You don’t have to do this alone. I’m here for the messy middle with open hands, steady presence, and deep trust in your path.

You're allowed to be exactly where you are. And you don’t have to be there alone.