A Midwife's Birth Stories and Honoring the Lying In Period - Shafia Monroe

I think my water just broke. I felt like things really intensify. She was right there and she was coming. It was it was an amazing feeling. I'm gonna cry just thinking about it. I could feel her head. We heard her cry. We were squeezing hands and she was screaming.

I'm Brynn Hunt Palmer and you're listening to the Birth Hour. This podcast is designed is a safe place to come together and share childbirth stories. Stick around and join us to hear informative and empowering birth journeys from all over the world.

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of pregnancy through obviously preparing for birth and then postpartum and feeding your baby as well. And with enrollment in that course, which is called Know Your Options,

you'll get free access to our other course called Beyond the First Latch, where we talk all about pumping, feeding baby, storing milk, going back to paid work,

if that's part of your plan, all of those things as well. Okay, so if you go to thebirthhour.com slash course, you can see everything laid out in the course,

module by module, as well as an FAQ section, which will hopefully answer some of your questions If you have any things like how to get it covered by an FSA account and things like that, it also talks about the bonuses that come with the course, including by monthly Zoom calls

and access to our private Facebook group. So again, that's thebirthhour.com. And you can use the coupon code 100FF for $100 off enrollment as a podcast listener. We would also love to welcome you into our listener supporter group via Patreon.

Visit patreon.com slash birth hour and by becoming a Patreon supporter, you get access to all of our archived episodes. This podcast launched in 2015, so we have over 800 episodes in the archives that are not in the main podcast feed.

So you can get your fill of birth stories and you'll also get access to our private Facebook group for Patreon members, which is a great place to honestly just to search the past post to get answers to questions. But then of course to ask new questions, find community.

a really, really great supportive group of people. So I highly recommend joining that. We would love to have you there. We also do monthly Zoom calls with our Patreon supporters and you get an opportunity to enter your birth story via a different submission form than everyone else uses and we choose two Patreon members each month to share their birth stories.

So that is again at patreon.com slash birth hour. Today's guest is Shafiya and she is a midwife who has had seven babies of her own. she shares her birth stories with us today, with a focus mostly on her first and how she really lacked postpartum care with that first birth and what she learned from that. And then

she talks about her seventh birth and how that was a hospital birth. And so she got to see kind of both sides of the system there. And we talk about the importance of mothering the mother postpartum and how the work that she's done as a midwife and as coming from the culture of being an African American woman inspired her recent book, which is actually called Mothering

the mother, African American postpartum tradition, recipes, and healing, so it's a fun discussion at the end after she shares her birth stories. Today's episode is in partnership with Air Doctor. I wasn't sleeping very well at night and it turned out my home's air quality was

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