Wife. Mama. Doula
My journey to becoming a doula is much like my journey into becoming a mother: unexpected, messy, and now I can’t imagine doing anything else. It all began with a serendipitous car ride with a young Navajo mother in rural New Mexico. During the trip she told me about her birth center birth, her home births, and how empowered she had felt during them. Later, the conversation played over and over inside me, brimming with questions: Wasn’t birth completely horrible? How could it be empowering? How are there different location options to give birth? The questions lead to answers, which led to an e-mail of curiosity to my local new-to-me midwives and doulas and the rest is Bear & Nurture history.
I am now a Certified Professional Birth Doula trained through the Center for the Childbearing Year in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I began serving women as a doula shortly after my training in 2016. Actually, my first month of clients was also the month I got married, and I even had two births in one night! In 2017 my husband and I moved to Almaty, Kazakhstan where he worked as a teacher. Though I knew my Russian language was not good enough to serve the woman of Kazakhstan as a doula, I continued doing online consultations with woman in the U.S. for healthy pregnancy prep and even travelled home to attend a birth!
It was during that visit home that I found out I was expecting my own babe. My daughter, Miriam Sarai, was born without pain medication in the hospital after an unexpected case of pre-eclampsia (birth will toy with all your plans, folks.) However, thanks to my own supportive family, nurses, OB’s, and my own doula, I consider her birth to have been an empowering and joy-filled time.
My Vision
One word that greatly describes my doula-practice is “open-minded.” I support both home and hospital births. I believe birthing people are powerful creatures and that birth is primarily a natural event, and I also believe in the considered use of medical intervention and the compassionate use of epidurals. This means I support both those wishing for natural and those wishing for medicated births. I believe to some, birth is physical and raw, and to others it is spiritual and ecstatic (to most of us, it’s a lot of both.) I have worked with people with and without partners, and from a variety of backgrounds. I am a proud ally of LBGTQ+ of all identities and am honored to serve clients who make up a rich variety of families. My first and foremost goal is to understand your wants and needs, ensure you feel supported, and do everything in my power to ensure your birth is an empowering experience no matter the setting or scenario. -Alexandra
My Life Outside of Birth / Things You Might Vibe With:
-My favorite pastimes are finding awesome children’s books, gardening, cooking, and hiking.
-I was raised a Trekkie, and still love watching Star Trek.
-I’m an incurable yoga addict and keep other low-key hippy interests in herbalism, mindfulness meditation, & homesteading.
-My husband is a public school Montessori teacher and I homeschool our girls. It’s an interesting setup that works great for us and means you can usually find us doing mid-week fieldtrips to new nature spots!
-I studied for a spell at the University of Oxford, Wycliffe Hall, where I “read” Victorian and Modern Literature.
-My husband hiked the Appalachian Trail when we were dating and this inaugurated my love of hiking when I joined him in summiting Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak.
-In the summer of 2018 we took out 9-month-old on a hiking trip abroad and I carried her on my back the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago from France across Spain.
-Right after getting married my husband and I moved to Almaty, Kazakhstan for a year of teaching abroad and from 2021-2022 we lived in Belmopan, Belize for a year with our daughters.
-I do a lot of independent research on gentle and respectful parenting and have an extensive personal library collection ranging from postpartum nutrition to baby led weaning to child development.
