This is who I am: I am a midwife and a mother.

My path to becoming a midwife was a long one. In my first pregnancy in 2000 my friend’s mom gave me a copy of Spiritual Midwifery. There were notes scribbled in the margins and the spine cracked from use. She and her friends has used this as a guide book through each other’s births when they were new midwives. I remember re-reading the birth stories and soaking in every bit, word, lesson, choice. From that moment on I knew I wanted to be a midwife. 

I had my second baby three years later, and then began attending births as a doula. When my kids were three and six I started an apprenticeship, but found that midwifery was more devotional than I had space for at the time with my family. So I continued to study and attended births as a doula, always listening to the stories. What I learned was that as women gave birth to their babies they also gave birth to themselves. 

My children grew and as they entered  grade school I enrolled in the National College of Midwifery and started an apprenticeship with a busy home birth practice in San Francisco, Rites of Passage, with Nancy Myrick, CNM, and Ami Burnham, CPM LM, RN. I studied at The Farm and at the Kafoutine Clinic in Senegal. In 2012, nine years after attending my first birth as a doula and after three years of midwifery school, I earned my LM from the Medical Board of California and started Mothercraft Midwifery. 

My home birth practice has grown over the years and has rooted me in my community. I love seeing babies grow into children, people growing into families, women grow more into themselves. I see how midwifery care and birth are a time when we can connect more to ourselves and through that, our power. I truly believe that when we change the way we see birth, we change the way we birth. So in 2015 we opened The Root, a shared working space devoted to midwifery, where we can bring birth into the open and normalize it. I see my clients here for prenatal care, and then attend births at home, with follow up care mostly in home, but wrapping it back up at The Root where we started. 

Through the years I have continued to collect birth stories, amounting a wealth of trust and love for women and babies, and their ability to birth. If you’d like to read some birth stories you can find some here, written by the families themselves so you can hear their voices and learn more about what home birth is really all about.