Birthwork From My Lens as a Loss Mom and a Doula

It’s a strange tension, sometimes, the beauty of birth. It is refracted through this lens like a prism into a million colors; the fragments all a whisper of what life might be like if babies didn’t die. If my babies didn’t die. And the grief, like beauty, is also refracted a million different ways. 

I often have wondered if my grief disqualifies me from this work, if my pain means I could never support someone wholeheartedly. If I can have pure joy for a mother while being reminded of my grief. But recently I’ve come to believe the opposite. 

What if my grief has made me a better doula? What if the sanctity of birth, the beauty of life, is deeper understood by someone who’s had it ripped from her white knuckles? 

It is commonly thought and the idea promoted that if something is hard, brings up a traumatic event, or otherwise triggers something inside you, you need to protect yourself from it. I disagree with this school of thought. I throw myself into birth because I see my sons, my daughters, my pain, my grief, my love so clearly in that space. I dive into the grief and it fuels my passion, fuels my strength, and makes me a better doula than I would have been without it. I am a better woman than I would have been without the grief; a stronger one. Doing hard things has helped me heal, to tend the wounds and stand face to face with my grief as an equal rather than looking up at it from the floor in fear. 

So yes, I sometimes cry on the way home. I water their rose bushes and tend to my heart. But remembering my children as I support someone doesn’t make me selfish or weak as the evil voice in my head often tempts me to believe, it makes me stronger. It cracks my heart open to grow deeper and fuller and envelop her whole as the wave of intensity washes over her. It brings me down with her to the depths so I can support her through it and help her greet her baby with tears of joy. 

I am sowing in grief and reaping in joy.