Answering The Call
I am fourth of my mother’s nine pregnancies, third born alive. December 11, 1990 was my first initiation into the outside world, my first rite of passage into the human experience. I don’t remember that day myself, but my mother tells me it was fast and intense. My mom established herself as a very fast birther, ranging from 3 to 4 hours of labor with all seven of her vaginal births. Because of the speed and relative ease with which my mother gave birth, she never really had time to use pain medications. The story goes that during her labor with me, she asked her doctor for an epidural and he told her “No.” that was the extent of his explanation – he didn’t explain that I was about to be born faster than the anesthesiologist could run down the hall with his cart of implements. Forty-five minutes after Mom’s arrival at King’s Daughter’s Hospital in Greenville, MS, I made my grand entrance.
Following this initial experience with birth, it’s fair to say that I grew up constantly adjacent to birth. Because her first birth was an emergent surgical birth, my mom was afraid to let my siblings and me into her birth rooms – she was traumatized by that experience and didn’t want any possible emergency to create fear in us. Despite being barred from the actual birthings, about every 12 months in the Tellifero home you could expect an announcement; either of a new pregnancy or a birth. From 1987 until 2003, our family was like a revolving door of welcoming new souls into the physical world; and my mom was the portal. I developed a love for pregnancy and babies, and a fascination with birth. We celebrated each squishy new baby; and our shared border-line-obsession with that “new baby smell” caused my mom to joke that we should make a bumper sticker declaring “WE SNIFF BABIES” on the back of our 15 passenger van.
My path to midwifery has been extremely organic and fluid. Thoughts of working in birth lingered in my mind, even as I pursued other occupations through my 20s: a bachelor’s degree in music, nannying, a job as a youth pastor, and a career as a yoga teacher. It’s that final occupation – teaching yoga – that lead me to birth work. As I learned the skill of holding space for my students and helping them to nourish their bodies through movement, I became a compassionate voice in their lives. I was teaching a women’s specific yoga class at my church when a woman I worked with encouraged me to train as a doula – a role I was then unfamiliar with. Interestingly, this woman would later become one of my dearest friends and neighbors and eventually we were both able to serve each other as doulas. I am so thankful that she had this vision for my life, even before we knew each other so well! Anyway, I did take a doula training and began attending births. The more births I attended, the more I learned and wanted to immerse myself in the world of birth. I utilized all the experience and education to plan my own first birth, which took place in hospital with a midwife.
I felt pleased and proud of my own first birth, and it sent me hurtling deeper into my passion. As I processed my hospital birth experience, I had a strong sense that it could still have been so much better, so much freer and more peaceful. When I became pregnant again, I knew I wanted to pursue homebirth, but still had some lingering fears. At 32 weeks pregnant, I went to an undisturbed birth class with a local midwife that gave me the vision and confidence I needed. 7 weeks later, I gave birth to my daughter at home, and this time the transformation of birthing solidified my call into midwifery. The freedom and autonomy that I found throughout my pregnancy and birth was like nothing I had experienced before. I saw my own authority and wisdom and was inspired to help other women see that in themselves. Even as a very active doula, no one had ever exemplified or painted a picture of this kind of freedom for me prior to this experience of autonomous, undisturbed birth. So many women think they must bargain or beg a doctor or nurse to allow them even a modicum of choice in birth, when the power and authority have belonged to the birthing women all along. Now I am reclaiming my own sense of autonomy and working to support other women in reclaiming their own. Through faith, sisterhood, pregnancy and birth I hope to be part of creating a better, more compassionate and gentle world where my daughter’s daughters will birth their own babies in peace.
“So many women think they must bargain or beg a doctor or nurse to allow them even a modicum of choice in birth, when the power and authority have belonged to the birthing women all along.”
