Why I’m here (and why now)

I’m here because I keep having the same thought, over and over again, usually at inconvenient times. Mid conversation, halfway through a birth debrief, or while someone’s aunt, friend, or mother in law is confidently explaining how birth “just works” if you just “relax” enough.

You can have the birth you want. But wanting it isn’t enough.

I’m an Australian mum of two toddler boys, married and currently living in New York. Before this, we lived in Singapore. The original plan was always to return home to Australia, and maybe that still happens. Along the way, I’ve practised across all three places, inside very different cultures and maternity systems, with very different ideas about risk, responsibility, autonomy, and what a “good” mother is supposed to look like.

Once you’ve seen that much variation, it’s hard to unsee it. You start to realise that a lot of what we treat as universal truth is actually cultural habit, institutional convenience, or something someone once said with confidence and was never asked to explain.

I’m a doula. I work alongside a midwife. I’m not a clinician, and I don’t pretend to be. My work sits in the in between space, between evidence and lived experience, between what’s written in guidelines and what actually happens in rooms with labouring women, partners, and occasionally a very opinionated relative who “had three kids and knows how this goes.”

The women I see having births that feel deeply aligned with their choices are not luckier, and they are certainly not more virtuous. They have usually done uncomfortable things beforehand. They have asked questions that made appointments run long. They have read studies they did not want to agree with. They have pushed back, explained themselves, and sometimes sat quietly while people around them changed their entire view of birth in real time.

That last part happens more than you might expect. It is actually one of the reasons I am here.

This is not about control. Birth does not work like that. But it is about relationship. Relationship with your body, with the system you are birthing in, and with the people who will influence decisions when you are tired, vulnerable, or simply trying to get through the next surge.

You do not arrive at a physiological birth by accident in systems designed around efficiency, liability, and timelines. You arrive there through informed choice, preparation, and a willingness to see the system clearly, rather than assuming it is neutral or automatically aligned with your choices.

And this is where things can feel uncomfortable, because the responsibility for that work cannot be outsourced. Not to your provider. Not to your doula. Not to your partner, no matter how supportive they are.

Support matters deeply. But responsibility still sits with you.

Right now, I am writing this on bed rest with a fractured ankle, which feels like an oddly fitting moment to start something new. I have been forced to slow down, sit still, and ask myself whether this is what people do now. Start Substacks when life interrupts the usual pace.

Is this for me to write. Are you going to read. Is this just another voice drifting into a very large internet void. Hello.

Maybe. And still, I am here.

Because I have changed my mind about a lot. About hospitals. About parenting. About perfection. About how reasonable it is to expect anyone to stay calm all the time while raising small humans. And about how much energy I have left to keep offering informed, nuanced perspectives in a world that often prefers birth and motherhood packaged as glossy, intuitive, and uncomplicated.

This space is where I put the thoughts I cannot shake. The reflections that do not fit neatly into social media. The ideas I want people to pass along to a friend, a partner, a doula, or yes, even a mother in law, and say this made me think.

Some of it will be educational. Some of it personal. Some of it unresolved. A lot of it just musings.

If you are here, you probably already sense that there is more to birth, motherhood, and care than the simplified versions we are usually offered.

I am here to explore that more, in conversation, in real time, one perimenopausal thought at a time.