Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Young.
Sarah, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Amy and I have very different personal experiences that have shaped us on our doula journeys.
My first exposure to birth per se was when I was living in Haiti immediately after college. After watching my mentor there have her baby unmedicated in a third world country, I knew birth was supposed to be different than what I had seen on TV or heard about from people in my community. Several years later, when I was back in the US and married and expecting my first baby, I knew I wanted to have a calm, peaceful birth experience like my friend in Haiti. I read Ina May Gaskin’s Guide to Childbirth and took a Bradley Method course taught by a friend at church. I realized I could choose the birth experience I wanted and began to advocate for myself more and more. I had a beautiful birth at Mercy and Truth Birth Center in 2009, and then went on to have 3 homebirths – one of them being an accidental unassisted birth because my daughter decided to come so fast! In a full circle moment, we have also adopted two boys from Haiti in addition to having our four biological daughters.
As soon I become a mother, I knew I wanted to help other women (and their partners) know about their options for birth. A passion stirred within me to come alongside expecting families to teach them about natural, physiological birth and to help them understand how to advocate for themselves to have the birth experiences they wanted. My degree is in elementary education, so I took my teaching background and applied it to childbirth education. I received my Bradley Method certification in 2010 and have been leading childbirth classes ever since then. I also began to support families at births, but on a limited scale from 2012 – 2017 because I was still having babies myself. Once my youngest daughter was 2, I was able to provide labor/birth support for more families and eventually needed to add a partner on to my business (especially since we were in the thick of the adoption process come 2021).
Amy and I have been friends for over 10 years, connecting in various moms and homeschooling groups. While I had wonderful birth experiences, Amy started out her journey to motherhood with heartache and loss. Her first son passed at 32 weeks, so her first birth experience was a stillbirth. She went on to welcome 5 living children to the world – including a set of twins, which she delivered vaginally and the second one was breech! The labor following her twins resulted in a horrific c-section, so traumatic she couldn’t even talk about it for a year. Thankfully, she went on to have one more baby and had an extremely redemptive VBAC!
In 2022, I had a client experience a third trimester loss for the first time. I immediately reached out to Amy, who was able to support the family as a bereavement doula. We have been partners ever since and are extremely passionate about serving and supporting families before, during, and after the arrival of their precious babies. We are so thankful to the families who have invited us into such a special time of their lives and honored to walk beside them in such a sacred space as they move throughout pregnancy into birth and then postpartum.
Recently, we have started hosting doula workshops so we can train other women to become doulas and help even more families have the support they deserve!
It’s been such an incredible journey and we feel so blessed to see our business grow and flourish as we pour our hearts out to the families we serve.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t think doula work is ever smooth because we work in such an unpredictable field!
Babies come when babies come – be it on a holiday, the middle of the night, or after a LONG hard labor that lasted multiples days.
Balancing family life with doula work can be extremely hard. We do miss time with our kids, but they have also grown up knowing we get to help welcome new life to the world and cherish that role with us.
Not every birth is smooth either. Sometimes the mom’s or the baby’s health lead to interventions or complications that result in a birth that doesn’t look like anything close to what the family had wanted or expected. Navigating changes in a birth plan can be tricky. Helping families process their disappointment or even grief is a heavy burden, but one we gladly carry.
We have also helped families through heartache as they plan a funeral for a stillborn baby or a baby who had too many health complications to survive after birth or babies who came far too soon to live.
Birth work is certainly rewarding, but it can also be so very hard. We never know how long we will be at a birth, or what our support will entail as each and every labor experience is unique. We never know when a baby will decide to come, so we are constantly on call and ready to go support our families whenever and however they need us. This means we never really get to turn off our phones – though having each other as teammates does mean we can lean on each other to answer questions, take calls, or meet with families while the other one of us keeps our normal routine.
We joke, “We’ll play it by ear,” because we are constantly working to shift prenatal appointments or childbirth classes or postpartum visits if we end up getting called to support a family in labor. We keep each other updated on what we have going on in our family life so we can cover for each other as needed, but inevitably our schedules and lives can’t ever be planned out nice and neat because babies don’t tend to check our itineraries before deciding it’s a good time to be born.
Flexibility is the name of the game and an absolute must for doula work!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Because Amy and I come from such different backgrounds in our own birth experiences, we feel like we have so much to offer our families.
We like to think we provide a full range of services. I offer engaging, hands-on birth classes for both our birth clients and others who just want to feel more prepared for labor but don’t hire us as their doulas. Families have the option of taking 1 or 2 classes or a series of 6 classes. They can join a group class or schedule a private session if their schedule requires.
We also provide extensive personal support all throughout pregnancy. We are available to text or call 24/7 from the moment the family hires us as their doulas. In addition to regular check ins via text, we do a FaceTime call around 24 weeks and go over Spinning Babies stretches they can start doing to help give baby the most space and get in the most ideal position come time for labor. Furthermore, we have gone to regular prenatal appointments if a mom is anxious. We have been with clients during an ECV where the doctor tries to turn their breech baby. We let our families know we WANT them to reach out with questions, but also with updates about their baby shower or nursery decorations. Our families aren’t just clients to us, we truly love and care for them deeply. We love our 37 week visits at our clients’ homes that we do as one final check in to make sure they are as prepared as possible for labor whenever baby decides to come.
Because we attend quite a few births, we have gotten to know both nurses and providers at various hospitals quite well. We love these connections and believe they help our clients have better birth experiences because we are familiar with the people on the birth team and can truly work together for the best interest of our families. We even dropped off holiday baskets at Christmas time last year to several of the hospitals we frequent the most – to let the nurses know how thankful we are for the amazing care they provide for our families.
During labor, we try to take pictures so our families can look back and treasure those moments forever. We aren’t professional photographers and just use our phones, but we love capturing memories of labor and birth for our families. Often they don’t even realize we are taking pictures or a short video, but when we send them their private album, they are overwhelmed and so thankful.
We have also been known to transport placentas if the family has decided to keep theirs (for whatever reason – be it encapsulation, planting it with a tree, or doing a watercolor print). We will serve as Door Dashers and go get food for our families so their first meal can truly be whatever they want. We can wait and take pictures of older siblings meeting the baby for the first time. We joke with our clients that we don’t really have a “typical” support protocol because we want to specialize our support to meet them where they are at and provide the encouragement they need at that specific moment in time.
Our support doesn’t end once the baby is born. We always do at least one postpartum visit to check on everyone to see how they are doing physically, mentally, and emotionally. We bring a homemade treat to celebrate baby’s arrival – be it a BIRTHday cake, brownies, cookies, or a drink and pastry from their favorite coffee shop. Even after we leave that visit, we make sure our families know they can continue to reach out to us – they get us for life is what we tell them. We get pictures of baby’s diapers to see if their poop looks normal. We connect families with lactation consultants or chiropractors or other providers who can offer more in depth support and resources than we are able to do. We love getting pictures of babies at 3, 6, and 9 months. And we always check back in to wish them a happy 1st birthday!
We also offer extended postpartum support – both daytime and overnight. Amy has given up countless nights of sleep so our families can get the rest they need to enjoy their babies during those first weeks and months. I do daytime support so a mom can catch a nap or truly enjoy a shower without worrying about baby. I also do light housework so the family can focus on the baby and not deal with dishes and laundry.
So we feel like we provide quality, in-depth, personalized care and support before, during, and after the baby’s arrival.
We have certifications from a variety of organizations – Bradley Method, CAPPA, Stillbirthday, VBAC Link, and have also attended Spinning Babies workshops.
Amy and I are most proud of how deeply we care for our families. Doula work isn’t just a job to us. It’s a full on life that we have embraced with our whole selves. We feel like our families understand this about us and have invited us to baby showers and first birthday parties. We are truly honored and blessed to walk beside a family during pregnancy and then labor, celebrate with them as they welcome their baby to the world, and then STAY in their lives to watch those babies grow up. It is seriously the best job in the world!
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Surrender.
We can’t control pregnancy.
We can’t control labor.
We can’t control how postpartum goes.
Everything in our world is unpredictable – despite there being norms for all those things. We truly have to accept that we can know lots of things and still not know how each birth will go.
We can plan and prepare and help our families know as best as possible what to expect and how to advocate for themselves, and still things can go so differently than what we thought they would.
So surrender is essential, and an ongoing lesson we will keep learning for as long as we are in the birth world
Contact Info:
- Website: https://birthandbeyondkc.com
- Instagram: @birthandbeyondkc
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/birthandbeyondkc
