My long road to becoming a doula.

When working with new clients, I often get asked, “how long have you been a doula? What made you become a doula?” Like many doulas, my story about how I became a doula begins with a birth story of my own. Many (but not all) doulas begin their stories with some variation on “I had a baby, my experience was (great/amazing/awful/challenging), and it made me realize I wanted to support other people to have better birth experiences.” While doulas don’t always jump straight from their own birth experiences into their work as doulas, that pattern seems to be a bit more common than those of us who explore other careers before finally becoming the doulas we were always meant for me. For me – someone who took 15 years to explore other careers between my birth story and becoming a doula – it can make telling the story of how I got here a little more complicated.

In truth, I feel like I was always on the path to becoming the doula I was meant to be, even if I wasn’t aware of my destination as I walked along the path. Even though it has taken me a long time to end up in this place, I can look back at my professional trajectory and see how every role I’ve worked in has helped me to develop skills that are essential in my doula role today.

Nursing

Perhaps my nursing experience is the most obviously transferable into my doula role. When people hear that I used to work as a nurse in NICU and pediatrics, their response is usually, “oh! That makes sense!” And in truth, it really does! While I only worked as a nurse for a handful of years before deciding that working within the medical system didn’t allow me to support families in the ways that I wanted to support them, it unquestionably gave me a complex understanding of the human body, pathology, medical treatments and interventions, working within the medical system (both in terms of the procedures and culture of the hospital environment), and then the more specific skills I learned about caring for sick or vulnerable children – infant feeding and care, knowing the signs that a baby might need medical support, and working with parents to best care for the unique needs of their children. As a doula, my ability to work within the medical environment, to understand and explain medical concepts to clients, and to negotiate the attitudes and culture of hospital staff directly helps me to support the people I work with. Being able to explain what is happening in the room and speaking to medical staff in a way that shows an understanding of their concerns while also advocating for the needs of clients allows me to walk the line between medical and emotional support. Being in between worlds – no longer medical staff but not the patient/client – helps me to better bridge the gaps between them so we can work toward the best quality care possible for families through their journeys (from fertility, through birth, and into the postpartum period).

Social Work

Hoping to support families in a less clinical way, I decided to obtain my bachelor’s degree in social work. While I recognized even within the degree that social work was closer to where I wanted to go but still not the right fit, it was an incredible skill building opportunity and I use those skills all the time as a doula (communication and counselling, anyone?). Social work’s focus on understanding the interconnections between individual experiences, social connections, and social structures helps me to better understand the way that your experience as an individual person going through fertility treatments or birth are impacted by your social relationships, the culture in which you were raised, the social and structural environment in which you are being cared for, and more. Further, it helped me to advance my understanding of the way that our current social structures advantage some members of our society while marginalizing others. Learning how to recognize and respond to abuses of power is essential knowledge as doulas, who work with clients from many different social positions and realities who experience these systems differently. Finally, I also focused my social work education on looking at community social work and programs, which absolutely influences how I understand the doula work I do today. As doulas, we recognize that it’s not just about supporting individual parents or families, but about connecting them to the larger community and the resources that are available to support them. Nurturing families is a community effort.

Sociological Research

Recognizing that social work practice wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be either, I decided to nurture my budding passion for research. This move into graduate research in sociology ultimately led to my move to Nova Scotia to study at Dalhousie University. One the major reasons why I was interested in research is because I began to recognize in my social work degree that how and what we know about the world around us shapes how we act. In order to make positive changes in the world, we need to think about what we know and how we know it. I saw research as an opportunity to further understand some of the social issues I could see happening around me so that people in positions of power to do something about it – doctors, nurses, social workers, politicians – can make better choices. In particular, I was interested in exploring how our ideas about right and wrong (morality) influences how knowledge is created and used. The idea that knowledge is not neutral – but rather created by people with interests, biases, facing moral and political pressures – has continued to fascinate me. What it means in my doula work is that I have a different way of thinking about the knowledge that we use to support families. In a time where we, as doulas, are increasingly interested in evidence-based practice to improve the quality of care that people receive, it’s important to also be able to understand how that evidence came into existence, how to evaluate it critically, and to avoid the slippery slope that sometimes happens when ‘evidence’ is used to dictate that choices that families are morally allowed to make for themselves (telling people what they ‘should’ do based on evidence that, itself, is politically charged). It’s a bit of a complex idea, I know, but the point is to be able to add nuance to ‘common knowledge’ so that people truly get to make the choices that feel right for them without pressure or coercion.

There’s undoubtedly a lot more than I could say about each of these things, but we’ll keep it brief for today. For those of you who made it to the end, thanks for reading! And if there’s something here you would like to know more about, send me a message about what you’d like to see me cover in future blog posts!