LITMIR.BIZ

      It is with humble gratitude and an enormous amount of empathy that I offer you my compassion project. My sole purpose is to create a safe space for you to learn about the task at hand. It requires the strongest amount of human resilience. My desire is to offer the inspiration needed to vitalize an uplifting perspective on motherhood.

      With purposeful great sensitivity, this book brings forth information from pre-pregnancy through pregnancy in a means to provide direction and encouragement on topics closest to your heart and experience. I’m not here to convince you of anything other than my belief that one can become exactly who they’ve always dreamed of becoming and I want to offer reassurance that you make it through every struggle, wave of adversity and conscious or subconscious fears that arise in this unpredictable journey.

      During my first pregnancy, I was thrust into a whirlwind of emotions. I was so excited and in the same breath, realized I knew nothing about what I was supposed to do next. In the beginning of my journey, I followed the current traditional path of finding an OB-GYN who would give me tons of ultrasounds, so I could collect the pictures for a future scrapbook.

      I arrived to the office and was immediately handed a piece of paper: PLEASE SELECT THE KIND OF DELIVERY YOU

      DESIRE. I gazed at my husband with a confused look. How was it that in this moment, with my first baby and not even having met a doctor, I could be expected to select a cesarean section (i.e. major surgery)? Why was that even an option for me? Still uninformed about what was happening to my body, I continued to follow protocol. I met with the team (there were five different doctors at the office), each instructing me to “… just relax for the next nine months and enjoy eating for two.”

      Yes, they actually told me to sit down and eat.

      Five months into my pregnancy, my aunt, Dr. Rashida Cohen, asked me a question that would lead me to write this book: “Have you considered a home birth?” I wasn’t offended by the question. Rather I was upset with myself for still not knowing what was going on with my body or that there were even different options for any number of things including delivery.

      In that moment, I went home and started reading and researching — one of the very things my OB-GYNs had instructed me not to do as to avoid “getting scared by information online.”

      The more I researched, the more I realized I didn’t know much. The more I realized that I’d been willing to do more research on which hair dye I was going to use — more so than the technicalities of growing a life within me and the options I possessed for childbirth.

      The more I researched, the more obvious it became to me that most of us have no clue what is going on until we are knee deep in the game. In time, I discovered how embarrassingly high the United States maternal death rate is (the highest among all industrialized countries). The maternal death rate in the U.S. today is WORSE now than it was 25 years ago.

      According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’s estimated that approximately 900 women die from giving birth each year in the U.S. There are also roughly 50,000 near-death experiences that occur each year, with over half of those deemed completely preventable.