What is a doula?
by Eden Schmidt
If you’re new here, welcome! My name is Eden Schmidt and I am a Postpartum Doula based out of Santa Barbara, California. I have worked alongside families for over two decades, starting as a mother’s helper and working my way up to babysitter, nanny, preschool teacher, birth, and then postpartum doula. If you’re not sure what a Postpartum Doula is, my favorite way to describe my vocation is to explain what I am not. I am not a chef, a housekeeper, a lactation consultant, a sleep expert, a therapist, or a newborn care specialist, but rather I touch on everything. I cook for almost all of my families. I pick up and straighten so your space feels neat and orderly. I help explain the nuances of breast and bottle feeding. I help you learn how to care for and understand the developmental needs of your newborn. I listen as you process your experience and give feedback when appropriate. I am the introduction to every part of postpartum, and I care for each of those needs to the fullest of my capacity, which sometimes is enough, and when it is not I help guide you to the correct professional that can provide more specialized support. Often mothers feel themselves just making it through the day during their postpartum, however, I believe that postpartum can be so much more than that. My goal as a doula is to work with families to meet their needs and allow them to thrive rather than survive in the postpartum period. My role is to mother the mother!
When people ask me how I learned how to do my job it took me a long time to figure out how to answer that question. My mom has been a childbirth educator for the last 43 years (and in fact I am an instructor in her postpartum courses!), so I grew up sitting on her lap through birth classes, enjoying birth videos more than cartoons, tagging along on postpartum visits during the summers or years I was homeschooled, giving me an invaluable amount of experience that was simply ingrained in my being since childhood. I attended my first home birth when I was 10 and knew that this was the field for me. When I chose to pursue education I decided on a Bachelor's degree in Child and Adolescent Development and a minor in Nutrition which has aided me well in working with families to understand their infant’s development. Nutrition is one of the cornerstones of pregnancy and postpartum and I work closely with each family to help mom meet her nutritional needs while also maintaining any dietary restrictions they may have. After college I was trained both as a birth and postpartum doula, and began working with other doulas in my community to understand the nuances of the job and where I fit into the birthworld. I decided to take some time away and went to Madagascar to work in a Birth Center, working as a birth doula as well as teaching my doula course to the local midwives, writing a curriculum on culturally appropriate baby care, modifying their food programs to help moms have the best nutrition base possible, and writing a course for partners to learn how to best assist a birthing mother. My time there was invaluable in how I learned to care for moms without being told what to do, which is something that I strive for even now with each family that I work with.
Each of these things has given me something that I now use daily in my work, helping me learn to be creative, problem solve, and create an empathetic environment where my clients can flow through whatever range of emotion they may need to and then move forward into confidently and comfortably welcoming their new member into their midst. So what does that all have to do with this course? Since I have never advertised my services, it took a few years to build my name and reputation in my community through word of mouth. About 5 years into my journey I began needing to turn away over half of the families that reached out to me, and while I was grateful to have plenty of work, I hated telling people no. My solution was to begin slowly compiling lists of my most asked questions and creating scripts to help people learn the basics of what you would receive when working with a postpartum doula. These courses are in no way designed to replace doula care, but instead to help give you a base to ask better questions and advocate for yourself and your family well. I was blessed enough to have the support of my community and had other doulas, childbirth educators, nurse practitioners, midwives, OBGYNs, and every mom I have ever worked with look over my content and give me suggestions and encouragement in how to make the best and most informative course that I could. After many months of revisions, filming, editing, and being excited and nervous here is my final result! I hope you enjoy and are encouraged in your postpartum journey! Thank you for being here. <3 Eden Schmidt
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