My inaugural post.

This blog is long overdue, probably. I've been interested to the point of intermittent obsession with pregnancy and childbirth (the genesis of which I will post about later) for years, decades even. The thought of eventually becoming a doula has flickered on and off for the past eleven years, I realized, ever since my two best friends from high school had their first children within a month of one another.

The time just never seemed right. I had other things that needed to happen first - I had to live out a little more of my modern dance career, I needed to upgrade my day job from various obsequious positions like barista and bartender to licensed massage therapist (something that will serve me well as I serve women, I hope), and most importantly, I needed to have a baby of my own (another topic that I will wax philosophically on anon). Not all doulas have given birth themselves; it's not a hard and fast requirement, but this was important for me.

Now that Lily is over a year old, it's finally time to start the enterprise in earnest. I'll be doing both labor and postpartum training, and plan to do each certification with a different organization (for the third time, more on that later). the plan is to start this fall, within a few months. In the meantime, I'll be hitting the reading lists for both. Being me, it happens that I have many (if not most) of the titles on my shelf already. Did I mention the obsessive?

So why start the blog early? A little bit plain ol' "Why not?" And a little bit serious, garment-rending outrage at the "Pit-to-distress" scandal (because that's really what this is, an absolute scandal) that has erupted in the birthing blogosphere over the last few days. Please, anyone who is pregnant or knows anyone who is pregnant, I cannot overstate the importance of reading this.

Fellow birth advocates, I am starting to think that this exposure of OBs using "pit to distress" could be their Waterloo, or our watershed, or some other idiom signifying real change in our maternity care.

And so, I thought I'd start weighing in, instead of just constantly loading my Facebook feed with these articles and haranguing the other posters in the parenting section of my favorite message board.

I don't yet know what will come of this, if much -there are already so many terrific birthy blogs out there (my blogroll will soon overflow, whenever I get around to adding the links). At the very least, it'll be an outlet, and a chronicle of various doula trainings and eventually doula work (and midwifery, period, though that is FAR in the future), and probably will include the occasional snapshot of life with a Lilybean. (My other blog is a food blog I co-author with my birthmom, and we choose to stay on-topic at all times over there. Check it out, though!)

Thus, yet another birthy blog is born.