Entering The Red Tent

Hi love,

This is a new section of our substack entitled ‘Doula Diaries’.

So many people don’t know about doulas until after a negative experience - at which point they may wish they’d had one, but it is sadly too late (I may be talking about myself here). Maybe they are unsure as to what a doula does or how they can support them & what their scope of practice is.

find my current doula work here

There are loads of amazing doulas online raising the profile of this amazing work on loads of different social media platforms. I work best with written words so let me attempt to use this space to show you our value, our knowledge base and to show you how I continue to grow in my practice.

I am starting to write this from the Airbnb that I am staying at whilst I complete my doula preparation weekend with Red Tent Doulas.

I have been supporting women as a postnatal doula for almost two years now (and generally in the postnatal period for much longer - I became a baby wearing peer supporter in 2014!). But this training will allow me to provide support to you antenatally and during birth too - something that has felt more important as we have grown as an organisation and since opening up The Women’s Health Hub.

Red Tent Doulas has been on my vision board for so long, but it wasn’t until now that I felt able to leave my own babies for the three day experience down in Yorkshire.

My Airbnb has been less than ideal - a lesson maybe in what I need to feel safe & welcome, I’m not sure - but the weekend as a whole has been truly beautiful and I am so glad I came along.

So what does a doula preparation weekend entail?

I think it started with the preparation. Sally tasked us all with preparing & bringing food to share with each other over the weekend. Food we might prepare for future clients. Food we have an ancestral link or a personal connection to. I was all in for that.

And, obviously, I made a cake (if you’ve followed me for any amount of time you’ll know I’m all in with baking).

Making cakes for people is just pure magic. It always feels like such a gift (albeit one that does require you to drive super slowly round roundabouts!).

This cake was special to me for a few reasons

I used foraged ingredients with relearned knowledge that my ancestors would have passed on - kindly relearned & shared by the amazing Lucy
I foraged the nettles from the place I walked daily when I was pregnant with Hannah - connecting me to my own maternal power
The rest I foraged from my wildflower garden - part of my own work becoming an Earth keeper & reclaiming the soil

I was so happy with it - even if the buttercream did start to droop on the two hour journey south in a hot Ford C-Max.

Our first day was about birth stories. Our own stories. Our mothers stories. The stories of those we had previously met or supported.

This is important because part of doula work is story telling & story keeping. We are your birth companion. There to hold the space you need to birth your baby but also, to be there afterwards, when you come back to centre. To hold the space you need to recover, yes, but also to fill in any blanks in your mind. To reassure, to help unpick, to support. As your doula, I am also there to listen. And this was an important exercise to develop those skills.

It is also important because the role a doula now plays would have, traditionally, been held by your mother, your sister, your cousin or friend. And so sharing the our stories, and the stories of those close to us, was an important moment of reflection. The births we witness or experience or hear about stay with us.