"This Goes Out to All My Baby Mamas": The role of doula explained through Black Girlhood Spirituality
I am a trained labor and delivery doula and I will let anyone who will listen know that being a doula is the job I didn’t know I needed to do. June 2017 I was sitting poolside at my family’s vacation when I received a text from one of my colleagues that I knew from graduate school. In our text exchange she shared with me her exciting news, she and her husband were pregnant. I congratulated her and asked her to let me know if she needed anything. All the while, during this exchange, I was thinking to myself that our relationship was not close enough where I was above learning about her exciting new news via facebook status. She followed up with the ask that changed me forever, for the better, “will you be my doula?” I quickly followed up and told her maybe she misheard me in an introduction of myself, but I was not a doula. She confirmed she knew, but thought her education as a doula and my spirit was what she would need to bring her baby earthside. I was blown away that I wa...