HEART Rituals: Helping Energy Awareness-Release Through RitualsFor the past 14 years, I have worked with low-income, incarcerated, immigrant, marginalized families as their childbirth educator, birth coach (doula), and breastfeeding counselor. I know that in order to change the trajectories for the health disparities in these communities, they need primary care providers and specialty interventionists to meet their specific healthcare needs. I know this as a Black woman living these disparities along with my clients.
This is layered with the need to allow the transition of death and grief to be expressed in personal and culturally solidifying means. I believed in my soul that my life has been to walk on the paths of healthcare and motherhood to care for my community towards this change. My path towards health equity has transformed me into a culturally competent, compassionate, and relatable doula for ALL people.
As a biracial child who identifies as BLACK…growing up in Kinloch/Ferguson, Missouri during the nineteen-eighties, I saw our country perpetually from two racial lenses. The ambiguity plagued my childhood with intra- and interracial traumas. But empathy, resilience and tenacity were sown to my ethical foundations. The constant parallel awareness cultivated an emotional intelligence that seeks to heal regardless of race, socioeconomic status, orientation and religion. The awareness is also weighted with the truth of racial injustice and systemic oppression. To be Black in America is to be constantly fighting for survival and equity.
My mother was a casualty of the crack cocaine epidemic and my maternal grandparents became my guardians as an infant, this is a chronic occurence in marginalized families. Due to grace of early literacy, my intelligence was exercised daily as the caretaker of the rapidly aging surrogates. Both adults were plagued by stereotypical African American health disparities such as hypertension, high cholesterol, chronic stress, alcoholism, obesity and diabetes. I was proficient in prescriptions, clarifying side effects, explaining dosages, administering blood sugar tests and giving insulin injections by the age of nine. Black and Brown women are birthed into caretaking.
Days of school were missed due to my ability to facilitate competent communication between my grandparents, other adult relatives and their physicians during appointments and consults. These responsibilities and my early sense of ethics fostered a deep sense of independence. I left home at the age of fifteen knowing that in order to change my future, I had to live to help change the social determinants fostering the poor health outcomes I was prematurely managing. I have lived in France and México, been to ten countries and three continents. The global health education was PRICELESS.
Adulthood called my name, I moved to El Paso, Texas and became a parent…….(and yes, it was a lot). My ability to be in the service of maternal healthcare was expansively opened. I spent my first years as a mother changing the narrative of my family’s health history via diet, breastfeeding, exercising and raising my son in a manner that minimized his risk of inheriting that history. Education became imperative as I enrolled in community college to begin a quest towards Obstetrics and Gynecology (that’s a whole ‘nother blog, child). DONA was the only doula organization around at the time and I made a rookie move of allowing people who did not look like me, tell me what birth was supposed to look like.
I excelled with flying colors and volunteered my time between school, home and mothering as a breastfeeding counselor with my local La Leche League group. My evening hours became divided by play dates, study groups, supporting military and Spanish-speaking mothers during their home, birth center, hospital and caesarean section deliveries. Thank you Universe for knowing better than me what life lived is like.
The demands of medicine were drawn out to me during two years as the only Medical Education Laboratory Technician at Texas Tech’s newest medical school. Hours were spent preparing the academic labs for medical students, maintaining cadavers and feeling the growing pains of establishing a medical school in the border community. Frustrations and politics were imposed as faculty evolved with the curriculum and increasing class sizes. It was as if I was a doula for the department. I kept my focus on supporting and hope on changing the future one birth and death at a time. All the while, I watched as black and brown people were not able to be born or die with emotional freedom.
Within those halls, I empathize with sleepless nights anticipating births as the future doctors in the study rooms and the residents on call. But in that empathy, I realized through the paralleled journeys of student midwives and nursing friends, that midwifery care was established and perfected by black and brown care providers. And, that midwifery care was actively disenfranchised from being accessed by those that made it so. Doctors were necessary to intervene when the natural becomes complex enough to need a scalpel and anesthesia. These same doctors are struggling to have comprehensive care delivered to patients due to the demands of cost-analysis, a crumbling healthcare infrastructure, and the inability to have a work-life balance (Sept 17th is National Physician Suicide Awareness Day. Marinate on that for a minute) Midwives and Nurse-Midwives are necessary if healthcare is going to survive in the U.S.
This truth infuriated me. The obstetric and gynecological healthcare system that was built on the use to enslaved black women, actively prevents access to affordable and personal reproductive health services. The anger was layered by the lack of conversation about black and brown people experiencing death, miscarriage, infertility, and the inability to grieve in a way that does not serve respectability politics or social capital. HEART Rituals is about accountability. It is about moderation. It is about having access to quality care that is SAFE, and that you can afford. It is about having me as your doula knowing I know how the pieces move, operate, and if I do not know, I know someone who does;). And, it is also about mutual aid. But, more on that if you want to book me;)
So, here I am. After all of this time. After supporting the rainbow (figuratively and literally;), offering concierge doula care in a mutual aid model, in Austin, Texas. If you want to hear birth and death stories, hang around. This site is not sprayed with images that reinforce this country’s social-economic-cultural norms for a reason and HIPAA. (LOLOLOLOLZ). Having a baby is NOT all registries, birth plans and joy. Death is NOT a casket, ten-plus-thousand-dollar event that ends when a body is buried. I do believe that I have been graced with the moral compass, tested ability and genuine affection to reconcile healing, humility and humanity.
Welcome to HEART Rituals:)