I have now been doula for almost nine years.
I sometimes compare us to wedding planners.
Obviously, the couple that's at the center of it gets to make the decisions.
Birth is something that, in my opinion, at least, you should really be in charge of.
My name is Samantha Griffin.
I am 34-years-old and I live in Maryland near Washington, DC.
I'm a doula and the owner of DC Metro Maternity, and I make about $85,000 a year.
A doula is a person who supports birthing persons during
pregnancy, birth and postpartum.
We're there to answer any questions, make sure that our doula clients understand what's
happening with their bodies and with their emotions, and during labor itself, or they're making
sure that people are hydrated, that they're fed and that they're comfortable.
I was in my mid-20s when I first became a doula.
When I first started out, I had a lot of what I would now call imposter syndrome.
Some of it was definitely that I hadn't had kids of my own.
I also think some of it was just that this was such a departure from anything that my parents had
done. My mom worked for the Department of Defense and my dad is retired from the army.
My dad always told me specifically not to go into the military.
It was always the expectation that I would go to college, and do a good job academically and then get
a good job. In 2009, my very first job after college was at a
small nonprofit that focused on helping mostly young women in the foster care system.
A third of young women left the child welfare system in D.C., either pregnant or parenting.
All of their birth stories just sounded sad and lonely, and I remember thinking
like, this should be different.
As a community, we have higher rates of infant mortality and maternal
mortality than everyone in the U.S.
other than Native American women.
When I was Googling what the solutions were to maternal mortality, I learned about midwives and
doulas.
In order to become a doula, you take a training, it's usually a two day training, but my very
first doula training took two to three months to get through.
Each side of the pelvis, you can create like 15 degrees more room.
One of the challenges of being a doula is that the hours are
strange and long.
So, babies often come in the middle of the night, and it was really hard to juggle multiple things
as well as go to people's births.
Eventually, I realized that I actually was much more happy doing doula work than
sitting at a desk doing nonprofit work.
So, I quit everything: my day job, at nonprofits and quit grad school.
Hi Stephanie, it's Samantha.
I hope you and everyone are doing well.
There was a time where I felt a little bit sheepish about asking for money, for something that feels
really personal and also something that I do love doing.
But this is hard work.
It can be hard on your body, it can be hard on our own personal relationships, and I also think that
charging has benefited my clients.
They're in charge, I'm not doing anyone a favor, and instead, I'm just helping someone have a really
empowered experience where they feel safe and peaceful.
I run DC Metro Maternity, and there are 10 of us right now that are
labor and postpartum doulas.
At the moment, all of the doulas on the team are black women, which is awesome because that's mostly
who we serve.
We get a decent number of doctors, lawyers, dentists, lots of people who are used to being
experts in other areas of their lives, and so, they're really hiring a doula to be an expert in
pregnancy. This is where the milk would be stored and then that's how it travels.
Okay. We know the different options, we know different hospitals, different providers.
We're also one of the continuous faces that you see through things.
In the medical system, they would call it continuity of care.
We can be with our clients all the way from pregnancy to as their baby gets older,
in a similar way that your wedding planner might take you through: "hey, we just got engaged," all the way
to the big day.
If we're working with labor clients, then we do a couple of meetings with them ahead of
time. We call these prenatal meetings.
We'll talk through birth plans.
Also, we'll talk through what we call comfort measures in labor.
That's anything that helps someone cope with all of the sensations that come with having a baby.
Does that feel good? Ok then, yeah, for you, that works.
There's different positions, there are massage techniques, breathing techniques.
Sometimes, the person that we're most supporting is not the person who's giving birth.
When we're working with the non-birthing parent, dad, mom, whoever, we're helping them stay
calm, helping them figure out where they fit into birth and how they can become
a parent.
I worked a lot with clients last year.
There were times where I would have a daytime client and then
go home, take a nap, and then do a 10 or 12 hour overnight shift.
And so I think the most that I worked was 75 hours a week.
If I can fulfill something for a client that we've promised them, then I want to.
For people who are trying to conceive right now, are currently pregnant or in the
early postpartum phase, the first thing that I would recommend is breathe, drop your shoulders, take a
really big breath all the way from your belly and then just let it out.
Most of us are carrying a lot of tension, and being stressed out is a really hard
way to give birth or figure out what it's like to be a mother or a parent.
I really hope that I get to be a doula until I am old and gray.
The issues that led to maternal mortality rates in the U.S., which frankly are
great for white women or other women in the U.S.
besides black women, they've existed for a really long time, so it's going to take
more than the not quite a decade that I've been working for that change
to happen, but I'm hopeful that we're at least headed in the right direction.