One of the questions I get asked most about my time at Shifrah and Puah is what I actually did. Not in theory, not as a philosophy, in practice, in the room, when something was happening. The honest answer is that it depended entirely on the birth. My role shifted from one woman to the next, sometimes from one hour to the next within the same labour. What I want to share in this post is four births that show that range, together they give an accurate picture of what showing u

One of the birth room in Shifrah and Puah Birth Center. Twenty-five births in a month. I did not set out to count them. I was too busy being inside them. But when I sit with the full weight of what this month has been, that number is the one that holds it most honestly. Twenty-five women. Twenty-five babies. Twenty-five times I walked into a room not knowing what was coming and walked out the other side carrying something new. This post is not about any one birth specifically

I have been at Shifrah and Puah Maternity Center in Mbale, Uganda for a month now, and I leave next week. I had come with a question that has been forming in me since I started this work, a question about whether matrescence, the profound transformation of becoming a mother, is truly universal. Whether the psychological and identity-level dimensions of that passage move through every woman regardless of where she lives, how she births, or what cultural container holds her thr

There are things you can read about birth and things you can only understand by being in the room. Optimal Maternal Positioning sits somewhere between the two. It is a body of knowledge that makes intellectual sense when you encounter it, and then makes a completely different kind of sense when you feel it in your hands. I recently completed the OMP live workshop, and I want to write about what it gave me. Not as a course review, but as an honest account of what shifted in my