The Birth Nurse is a story of transformation.

First, after close to 10 years at the bedside, I found myself burning out.  I loved my work deeply and didn’t want to do anything else, but some parts of the job were hurting my soul.  I often felt like I wanted to do more for my patients, and what they were asking for and needed were at odds with the environment around us.

It was demoralizing and frustrating.  I went into nursing to help people—it was the reason I became a nurse.  But the reality inside the hospital wasn’t what I expected and after a while I knew things couldn’t stay the same.

I had to make a decision.  Would I leave nursing, or would I change nursing?

Could I change nursing?

This decision was the turning point for me.

I started looking for ways I could help my patients better, and I stumbled on the idea of Trauma Informed Care.  At that time no one was talking about it for birth, and many people in healthcare had never heard the term at all.

Everything started to click.  My burnout was linked directly to my patients’ experiences.  And, as their advocate in the birth room, feeling powerless to help them was at the root of my own emotional distress.

So I started learning how to actively create emotional safety for the people I was caring for—and the more I learned, the better my job got.  Births were faster; my patients were happier; my stress was lower.

And as incredible as that was, something else unexpected happened: I accidentally changed my own life.

The more I understood how to create safety, and how it feels in your body, I started seeing where in my home and relationships I wasn’t feeling safe.  Like anything else, the best way to teach something is to model it.  I could not keep teaching safety if I wasn’t living that way.

Slowly, I sought a path to safety that led me to deconstructing everything about my own marriage and career.

The stronger my skills got in advocating for my patients, the stronger I became for myself and my children.  In all aspects of life, I became faster at recognizing unhealthy dynamics and better at strengthening healthy ones.  I learned to put on my own oxygen mask first and it changed everything.

Within a few short years, I left my abusive marriage, started my own business, and began to become the parent I had always wanted to be.  What had begun as a side quest in nursing sparked an inside-out change at every level.

Trauma Informed Care as a nurse taught me to see all of our agency.  It showed me how much power I didn’t even recognize I had, and my patients had.  I am so serious when I say it has been a journey of transformation in every way.

As perinatal nurses, we know that birth is transformative, as well.  We stand in that space as women and nurses.  That makes our job the most important one in the world: we have the privilege of escorting our patients while they are in our care as they become the next version of themselves.  What happens in these sacred spaces ripples out into families and communities, and down generations.

And all of us, ourselves and our patients, have the right to demand more than just survival—more than just living through birth or finishing a shift.  We have the right to thrive, to become the nurses we dreamed we could be the day we started nursing school, to believe we have the power to change our patients’ lives and make the world a better place.  

And we can.  It starts with us.