Episode 18 - Erika Davis: An Honest Dive into the Wholeness of Birth
Erika’s journey to conception overlapped with her foray into doula-hood - and, through her story, we find that neither process was straightforward. Erika's work is done through an anti-racist, pro-Black, pro-queer lens, and she de-centralizes whiteness in her work. Erika shares her eight-year conception story, what it was really like for her postpartum, and practices and rituals that help her connect to her essence.
[ID: A beige background and orange semi-circle. Text reads: The Intersectional Fertility Podcast Episode 18: Erika Davis @_wholebodypregnancy_ and Josie Rodriguez-Bouchier @intersectionalfertility.]
CW: In this episode, topics of pregnancy loss, difficult birth experiences, and postpartum depression are discussed.
To connect with Erika, follow her on Instagram at @_wholebodypregnancy_, follow her on Facebook, visit her website, or support her on Patreon.
Episode Transcript:
Disclaimer: This is an automatically generated transcript edited to be more readable. It may not be 100% accurate.
[00:00:00] Josie: I'm Josie Rodriguez-Bouchier, and this is the Intersectional Fertility podcast, where ideas and identities intersect to deepen our understanding of fertility and ultimately our whole selves.
[00:00:24] Erika Davis is a Puget Sound based birth worker, doula with a focus on childbirth education and postpartum support. She's also an educator and 200 hour certified yoga teacher. She's a transplant from Brooklyn, New York, where she completed her initial doula training with Ancient Song doula services, an organization focused on training women of color as doulas and making doulas available to parents who may not have considered them before.
[00:00:53] Erika believes that labor, birth, and the postpartum period are holy sacred times that should be honored and parent centered. She does this through her business, Whole Body Pregnancy. As a society, we tend to see labor, birth, and postpartum as three separate events. When in fact they all influence one another.
[00:01:13] We don't talk about miscarriage and pregnancy loss. We don't talk about infertility. We don't talk about abortion. And these are also part of the pregnancy journey. Whole Body Pregnancy aims to bridge the gap. Whole Body Pregnancy is a pause. It's a reflection, it's an intention. It asks you to consider the things you know about yourself and what you've been told about pregnancy birth and postpartum.
[00:01:40] It challenges you to reflect on the magnificent and powerful holiness our pregnant bodies manifest. It asks you to be intentional about how you proceed on this path. Whole Body Pregnancy believes there should be more connection to our ancestral roots and teaching more discussion about our fears and anxieties and worries, and how that plays into how we give birth and parent. More centering of Black and marginalized populations, more uplifting of people and joy, more celebration of life and experience. More trauma, informed care, more radical self love.
[00:02:21] Erika, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
[00:02:35] Erika: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:37] Josie: So will you share with us your pronouns and where in the world you're joining us from?
[00:02:43] Erika: Yes, of course. So I use the she series for my pronouns, so she, her, hers. And I am currently living in the Pacific Northwest on the lands of the coastal Salish people in a cute little seaside town called Steilacoom.
[00:03:02] Josie: Oh, how cute. I've never heard of that place.
[00:03:05] Erika: I know it's kind of nice. No one's ever heard of it. Even people in Washington haven't heard of it. Yeah, it's very cute and very military, which is not as cute. But when I, when I look out my window, I can see the sound. So that's kind of nice.
[00:03:20] Josie: Beautiful. Ugh. That's awesome. So I love hearing about people's stories and what kind of brought them to where they are now. Would you share with us your story about how you came to be a birth worker?
[00:03:34] Erika: Yeah, for sure. It's sort of accidental and purposeful. So I was living and working in New York City, at the time I was working in nonprofit. And I thought I maybe wanted to be a midwife and was researching midwifery in New York. I realized that the kind of midwifery work I would want to do, which would be like out of hospital midwifery work, came with a lot of liability, frankly.
[00:04:02] And I was like, Ooh, I don't know if I wanna take on this liability of like being, you know, responsible for the lives of birthing people and their unborn and being born children. So a friend of mine who was a doula was like, oh, you should look into being a doula. And I didn't know what that was about. And I did a little research and discovered Ancient Song doula services out of Brooklyn. And I was like, oh, this is exactly what I wanna do.
[00:04:33] Yeah, so my first doula training was with Chanel at Ancient Song about eight years ago, seven years ago, eight years ago, something like that.
[00:04:43] Josie: Nice, I love that. Yeah, it's interesting. Once you start learning more about what each profession entails I felt similarly about med school. I was like, Ooh. I dunno if I wanna go down that route.
[00:04:57] Erika: Yeah, yeah. I mean there are people who do that and I was not one of those people.
[00:05:02] Josie: Yes. Yeah, totally. I love that. And then I love the name that you chose Whole Body Pregnancy. I feels very in alignment with my Whole Self Fertility Method. Will you talk about how you chose that name and what that means to you?
[00:05:17] Erika: That's such a great question. So Whole Body Pregnancy has only been the name of my business for the past two or three years. I started out with a hard to pronounce word for people who aren't native hebrew speakers. So my business was Kavanah Doula Services and Kavanah is the mindset that you're meant to get into, like the intention you're meant to set before you enter prayer space in Jewish ritual.
[00:05:46] And I was like, oh, people need the same sort of, this mindfulness, this body awareness, this preparation as they go into pregnancy and birth. So like what a great name like Kavanah, like that's a great name. And then the Brett Kavanaugh thing happened. It's spelled very similarly.
[00:06:03] And like, people were constantly pronouncing it wrong and I felt like an asshole. Saying like, "no it's Kavanah." And then honestly, my own process in trying to become pregnant and then working with people as a birth doula and realizing that like, we really don't do a great job at all of setting them up for success once they have the baby.
[00:06:25] And then the combination of the fact that like, not with Chanel, definitely not with Ancient Song, but literally every doula training I took, every childbirth education training I took, every postpartum training I took was just focused on the physiological stuff that was happening. And there was no conversation around like, there's like a little bit of like PMADs, but not the other mental health stuff that comes up for people that is like outside of like a diagnosed disorder, but just like normal postpartum feelings.
[00:06:58] There was nothing that linked people's fertility journeys and their pregnancy and pregnancy loss journeys, and then their pregnancy and their postpartum. And for me, the acknowledgement of the literally spiritual, physical, emotional, mental aspect of all that when I was like, it's a whole body thing. It's just, it's in the whole body.
[00:07:23] I don't even think actually really works when I talk about it more, but like, I think that sounds less intimidatingly woo for people than if I was to call it like Whole Essence or whatever, like, I dunno.
[00:07:38] Josie: I like that. I like that too.
[00:07:41] Erika: But yeah, just like this acknowledgement that it is like not just birth, it's everything, and that it's not just physical, but that your mind and your body and your spirit are all working together in this process.
[00:07:54] Josie: Yes. Ugh. I love that. Yeah. You're so right. Cuz it's just so much more than just "you're pregnant!"
[00:08:01] Erika: Yeah. So much more than just you're pregnant and yeah. It's interesting, I think that we're in this place now where everyone understands like, oh, I need a birth doula. And I feel like that's so much better than when I started. It was very much like, why do I need a doula? And there's still a lot of that, but I think that there's still so much room for everything else.
[00:08:25] People's fertility journeys, like, just because you're pregnant, like you plop at a doctor's office. If you've been through fertility cycle, any length of cycle and whether or not they know your struggles, and how that impacts how you're pregnant and like, if you've had a history of losses, like how that impacts your pregnancy. For me, especially, it was really about trust and mistrust in my body. And allowing myself to feel, and nobody talks about that.
[00:08:55] Josie: Totally, yeah, yes. I love that so much. That actually leads me really well into my next question, which is, will you share a little bit about your conception journey? I know that's a big question. Maybe just what were some of the challenges, maybe some of the beautiful moments, anything.
[00:09:14] Erika: Oh, were there beautiful moments? I don't think so. Yeah, so I'm very transparent and very open about how I got pregnant, because it was such a long process. It took us eight years. Yes, it was the same trajectory as becoming a doula. Like I started working with families and starting, trying to get pregnant around the same time.
[00:09:35] And been really open about it because I spent the first few years really isolated in our pregnancy in our fertility journey, rather. We started getting pregnant way before friends did, and then these friends started having babies, and we still weren't having babies.
[00:09:51] And like, it just was really lonely and infuriating. And I just started talking about it. At first to my partner, my wife's disapproval, and now she gets it. But when I had my miscarriage, I really just started talking about it. And like, she wasn't really into that because I think like it's such a- for her, it felt very private, but for me it felt really liberating to start sharing.
[00:10:18] Because it also allowed other people to A. Know what the fuck we were going through. Because if you don't talk about it, then you're doing this thing alone. And B. To normalize the fact that like, not all pregnancies are hard, not all pregnancies are easy to come by. And not all pregnancies mean that you have a baby.
[00:10:37] So we started trying to get pregnant eight years ago. We started immediately with medical fertility treatments options. Mainly because we lived in New York and the idea of finding a known donor in a city as big as New York. And we, I mean, we're gay. We didn't know very many cis men
[00:10:56] Like we knew some dudes, but like, you know, they're like dudes in their thirties, in New York. Like, they're not thinking about like, give sperm to queer people. So we just were like, let's just go through a fertility clinic. And we stayed at that clinic for a while, I didn't get pregnant.
[00:11:12] We switched clinics to a clinic that we actually really, I liked the person who, the doctor was amazing. He actually discovered that I had like several polyps in my uterus and he was like, this will prevent you from getting pregnant. And I was like, oh, it would've been nice if like that other clinic had done this, like preventative things.
[00:11:30] Like he did all these not preventative, but exploratory things like to make sure that my uterus was compatible with life, and turns out it wasn't. So I'd spent so much money and years at this other clinic for them to have, I don't know, it's a big mess.
[00:11:48] Then we moved to the Seattle area, we kept trying again. That's when I got pregnant and I was pregnant for nine weeks. We were going for the second ultrasound to check for a heartbeat and there wasn't one. I just having finally been pregnant and then not being pregnant. I was like, there's no way I wanna miscarry.
[00:12:05] Like I cannot see blood come outta my body. So right. I offered to have a DNC, it didn't work. So then they sent me home with misoprostol for four weeks and it didn't work. And then I went back and I had another DNC. My wife started trying, she also was not getting pregnant. She had an ectopic pregnancy of unknown origin, which is when they don't know where the embryo has implanted.
[00:12:34] So she had to go on some insane drugs. Both of our miscarriages took like a month for us to have. For me, for them to take out the contents of the pregnancy and for her like, to just have like low enough blood levels and we never. That's still a mystery.
[00:12:52] We did some ICIs with known donors here in the Seattle area. And then, yeah, I would say about two years ago we tried IVF. We had to finance our house, like definitely like a point of privilege that we own a house that we could take equity out of. I wanna just name that. But also fucked up that I had to remortgage my house to do IVF.
[00:13:15] But we did that. It didn't work. And we sort of were at this point where we were just like really fucking tired, and sort of like, our life is amazing. Like we were just like teetering on how many more times are we gonna try this? And are we gonna be okay if we don't have babies? And she was looking into adoption.
[00:13:38] And fostering to adopt. I have like, not personal with myself, but my sister died of a drug overdose and her children went through the foster system. They live with my parents now, their grandparents. But like, foster is too close to me. And like I just am like, it's best that my nephews are with my parents.
[00:13:57] I think reunification is how I feel about that personally. So like that was like some tension for us. So we were looking at private adoption which I was like still not a guarantee. And I finally started looking at donated embryos and we got pregnant with a donated embryo.
[00:14:19] We were in this, there's a LGBTQ friendly donor embryo group on Facebook. I was in that group for a year, and as another woman of color, finding brown embryos is so fucking hard. I thought finding Black sperm donors was hard. But finding, any brown, my wife is white, so we were looking for biracial, but we were just like, we'll take Black, like 100%, no white, Black.
[00:14:49] Like we will just take, whatever. And at one point I was like, they're a Southeast Asian person. And my wife was like, we're not Southeast Asian honey. We can't do that. But that's how desperate we were like, or I was. So we're in this group for a year, we did match with a couple.
[00:15:07] They donated an embryo to us and I won't get too much into it, but it, it ended up falling through. But then this couple just reached out to us and it was a white woman and Black, queer family, white woman, and a Black man. And he had used his eggs and they used donor sperm and she carried their baby.
[00:15:31] And they had leftover embryos. And they donated six embryos to us and they kept four for themselves. And now I have a 10 week old baby.
[00:15:41] Josie: Oh my gosh. Wow. What a journey.
[00:15:45] Erika: It's crazy. And the plan was that we were going to try quickly after each other. So I did my transfer in December of last year, and then my wife did her transfer two months later but that didn't work. And now we're trying again for her. Cause we both wanna carry. I know, it's nuts.
[00:16:07] Josie: Wow. Oh, thank you so much for sharing that with us. I know a lot of folks are going to be able to relate to that story.
[00:16:15] Erika: It's so insane. Like it's just, and you know, I do know lots of queer folks who just got pregnant the first time. And I'm just, you know, it took me so long to be so furious with those people. Like so incredibly enraged at my like, friends that I love who would just be like, yeah, I don't know, we didn't time anything. We just had sex and put sperm in and now we have a baby. And I'm like, so nice. I'm so happy for you.
[00:16:50] Josie: Oh my gosh, yes. That anger is valid. That's so valid. Yeah, wow. Well, I'm wondering too, if you have any, I'm sure you have a wealth of advice, but if you have any advice that you'd wanna share for queer, especially queer BIPOC folks who are trying to conceive specifically, is there anything you wish you would've known or done differently or anything like that?
[00:17:14] Erika: I mean, the thing that I always have to remind myself of until I acknowledge is that like I don't come from generational wealth. But I had like enough funds to do the thing, slash good insurance because our insurance didn't cover anything in our ability to refinance our house. So I just wanna say that like a lot of what has happened, especially in the last three years around IVF was really fortunate for us.
[00:17:40] But I would say, if you're using a doctor, like a fertility clinic, to really make sure you find a doctor who's gonna listen to you. Because basically for me, for us, for our entire journey, until we switched to the clinic in Bellevue, Washington, which is from our house without traffic an hour and a half, which means we were driving an hour and a half, one way.
[00:18:04] And then with traffic, it would sometimes be three to four hours because that doctor was so good. And it was just her and her clinic. It's a big major clinic that has big offices in Portland. And I think they have international offices in China. This clinic has one doctor and like a handful of nurses.
[00:18:21] And when you walk in, she would say my name, and she would know me. It wasn't like some random person was doing my IUIs. She did every single IUI. She did every, IVF, retrieval. She sees you every single time and like she, except the phone when you call her, and like, she's amazing.
[00:18:43] Will you have to leave a message for her? Yes, but if you say I would like to talk to Dr. Massey, then Dr. Massey will call you back. Not her assistant or someone, and it may take a day or two, but if it's an urgent situation it will be. And then when we had our failed IVF, we got like five beautiful embryos that, you know, genetically tested wrong, whatever that means and whatever that is for people.
[00:19:08] But the test, the genetic thing was across all five embryos. The same genetic mutation across all five embryos, which is really, really rare. Normally people get this genetic mutation on this chromosome and this one on this chromosome and this embryo, but it was the same one off on all of our embryos.
[00:19:27] And she made that personal call and when we cried, she was choked up and sad. And then when she saw a picture of our baby for the first time, she was so happy. So it just having like, even through our hard shit in losing, you know, our fertility, I mean our IVF cycles and our embryos, she was just so there, so I think like trying to find someone who's going to listen to you is so vitally important.
[00:19:58] Because a lot of times, it just felt like we were just numbers. You'd have to retell your story to whoever was there. I'd be like, oh no, I don't do that because like, blah, blah, blah. And they'd be like, oh, okay. And then for us, it was really important to take breaks.
[00:20:17] Like we didn't try for eight years straight. I say it took us eight years because that's when we started. And, and now we have a baby eight years later. But we took at one point, I think we took a year off. Because we were spending so much of our time trying to get pregnant and not living our lives, that we were just like, we lost sight of each other as a couple, for sure.
[00:20:38] We were just like, we lost sight of ourselves as individuals. So we were just like, let's just live a little bit and like enjoy our lives and have fun and not think about this. So if you can take breaks, to take breaks yeah. To find community, I think like sometimes it can be interesting.
[00:20:59] So, I was in this, and like you find community that like works for you in the stage of pregnancy you're in. So I was in this like repeated loss Facebook group and it wasn't queer, but it was just people who had been like trying for a long time and like having lots of losses and not getting pregnant.
[00:21:15] And it wasn't for advice, it was just people sharing their stories. But then when I got pregnant, it was so overwhelming to continue to stay in that space. So then I found a new group, I did find actually a queer pregnant group, on Facebook again, which felt better to be in this space with other people who are pregnant versus people who are trying.
[00:21:36] So finding support. And I think people will do what they wanna do, but a friend of mine announced her pregnancy as soon as she got a pink stick, as soon as she had the second lines, which is not what we do as a society. Generally, we tell people to wait. But she was like, she gave me the best advice ever.
[00:21:56] This was just her Facebook post. This was, her kid's three years old now, or four years old, but she was like, I can either do this alone or I can do this publicly. I'm gonna need community around me, whatever way this goes. So I'm pregnant. And if I'm not pregnant in two weeks, at least, you know that I was pregnant and you can offer me support that I may need and versus like doing it by myself.
[00:22:18] So I feel like as we kept trying, I kept talking about it so that I would be able to have people who were A. Sending me good energy when we were going in for a transfer or we were doing an insemination so that I was like surrounded by support. And then B. Like if it didn't work, I had someone who would be like, I'm so sorry. It didn't work. Versus like us just sitting with each other and being sad or whatever.
[00:22:40] Josie: Totally, yes. I love that advice. Oh, those are such good tips. Yeah, I love all those. I would love to also kind of, especially within the context of this eight year fertility journey, talk about the postpartum experience against, against that background, because, you know, I can imagine.
[00:23:01] You know, if there's any sort of down experience in the postpartum phase, the guilt that would come up. You posted recently something that just resonated so deeply with me because I didn't feel an immediate connection with my first baby and my postpartum experience was pretty rough.
[00:23:23] And I felt like just so much guilt and shame come up for me around that. And I just, I really want to normalize a full spectrum of feelings and experiences right around the postpartum phase. Yeah. So yeah, I would love to hear anything that you are comfortable sharing about your postpartum experience.
[00:23:45] Erika: Postpartum is no fucking joke. I think that we do a shitty, shitty, shitty job as a society supporting people postpartum. I think we set up shitty fucking expectations. So about how people should feel. I think we do a shitty job of supporting people when they don't feel those ways. My postpartum was, I'm still very much postpartum.
[00:24:08] Immediate, like early postpartum only 10 weeks postpartum, 11 weeks on Monday. But yeah, it has been really interesting. I'm definitely in the stage right now where it's not as bad because we're sleeping more. Thank God. And because our baby smiles at us now oh. And like is really into connecting with us.
[00:24:30] And like, if we like left the room and go back in, she like smiles big and she's laughing and she's like the cutest. I swear a lot, I'm sorry. She's like the cutest fucking kid ever. But I mean, but literally if we rewind four weeks, even, I was just like so deep in the, like, this is the biggest mistake of my life.
[00:24:59] It just broke my wife in half. I was just like, I don't want this, like, this was bad. I was like, we were good, we were good. We had a great life, we were having fun. I really was like, this was a huge mistake because I was so, I was really detached from her.
[00:25:27] Like my birth story was like in general. The birth was a planned Caesarean and it went fine, but I had a postpartum hemorrhage that wasn't able to leave my body because my cervix didn't open. So I had to go back in for a DNC and I almost died. Like, nine hours after giving birth. So there was like a detachment there where I just like.
[00:25:47] I couldn't connect with her in postpartum, in the hospital immediately, because in retrospect, I was bleeding out, but not able to bleed out. So my body was just filling with like dead blood, essentially. And I was so loopy and so out of it that I didn't connect with her there.
[00:26:04] And then yeah, I did not fall in love with my baby. I loved her in an obligatory way. Like that's how, that's the language I've been using around it. Is like, I loved her in a way that I knew I had to keep her alive and that I was her parent. And that my job was to nourish her and provide for her, with my body.
[00:26:25] But there wasn't that, I see you and I fall in love with you thing. And I like posted on my Instagram, I would say, "I love you" all the time to her because it felt like I needed to keep saying it to try to make it stick.
[00:26:42] Yeah, the no sleeping thing was impossible. It really felt like I was like drowning on dry earth. I was just like, this is so, so bad. I felt incredibly guilty like you said, like, I was just like, what a waste of money and time and heartache, right. Like for me to be here, this thing that I thought I wanted and worked so hard at, but I actually kind of hate. I felt like such a dick, my wife was madly in love with this baby. And just like took to motherhood, like whatever analogy that is slipping my mind right now.
[00:27:22] She was just so good at it. And like, there was no doubt in her mind that we made the right choice. No doubt that she loved this kid. And I was just like, I am a shitty person. And I never, like, it was really funny. I was talking to my therapist about it and I was like, yeah, I had this dream where I was on this beautiful scene, it was a giant quarry or a ravine. And I placed the baby on the edge, and I jumped into the quarry. And she was like, is there anything tall and steep near you?
[00:27:56] And I was like, no. I think it was the dream. It might have been a day dream. I don't know. It was like one of those nights where she was just up screaming all night. Cause she would just be up screaming all night. And I was just like, oh my God, this is so bad. And then something started to click around six weeks when she looked at me and smiled and was actually looking at me and it shattered my soul.
[00:28:31] I literally broke down. I ugly cried and was just like, oh my God. Like, that's that love. And now like four weeks after that, 10 weeks in I'm obsessed with her. I love her so much. Undoubtedly, I love her and you know, it's still feels not quite like me. It still feels very much like I'm still evolving into me. And yeah, she's funny. She's hilarious at two months old. She's so funny and so cute. And I think also sleep has helped it. Her smiling and then also getting like consistently like five or six hours of sleep at night has been fun.
[00:29:26] Josie: I was gonna say, that really changes everything, getting enough sleep because I mean, you really can't think straight.
[00:29:33] Erika: No, and my friend who has three babies and her husband is in the military, she was like, sleep deprivation is a torture method for a reason. It's fucked up.
[00:29:45] Josie: Yeah, it is so fucked up, I know. I mean, thank you for sharing about this, especially cause it's so fresh. I really appreciate you sharing this experience.
[00:29:57] Erika: And I might start leaking any minute.
[00:30:00] Josie: I remember that. But yeah, I can still like very clearly remember some of the feelings that I had and just when my oldest would wake up and need to feed in the middle of the night after I was so sleep deprived and just being like, no. Like, yeah, I cannot do this one more time.
[00:30:17] Erika: Yeah, and I really, I'm working on doing the things that my parents never said. But you know, I do, I get like mad at this little human. But then I have to remember, these are my emotions, not her emotions. I need to regulate myself to be good for her and to apologize for her. I've said, I'm sorry to this little baby, so many times for being so frustrated. With her inability to speak.
[00:30:48] Josie: Just tell me what you need!
[00:30:50] Erika: I know I'll sometimes be like, baby, what do you need? And she'll scream, and I'm like, Ugh.
[00:30:58] Josie: Exactly. Well thank you for normalizing that.
[00:31:03] Erika: You're welcome. It's so vitally important.
[00:31:05] Josie: Yes, I agree. Yeah and I'm curious too, what's the Jewish perspective on the postpartum phase? Or, is there any Jewish or even other rituals or traditions that you've engaged with throughout this process that have been helpful?
[00:31:23] Erika: Yes. And so I wanted to do a lot of research and stuff and like, do like really good creative stuff around this. And part of my Jewish priestess process is to have a project. And this is my project, like exploring Jewish ritual around fertility, pregnancy, birth and postpartum. But I haven't done anything.
[00:31:47] Josie: Yeah. We that's totally fair.
[00:31:49] Erika: We had her naming ceremony, which was very lovely, it was very sweet. And there's like interesting things. Like when Jewish baby boys turn three, they get their first haircut. And they start reading Torah at that age, or start learning the alphabet, rather, at that age.
[00:32:07] So we're gonna do that for her anyway, cause it shouldn't be just a boy. She'll get to do that too. And there's really fun things, there's this medieval practice of, I think it's the first six weeks someone is pregnant. Well, like in, you know, medieval, Jewish times, they would say when a woman was pregnant a man or other women would like circle their house with a big sword to like keep away equal spirits. We didn't do that.
[00:32:32] Josie: Okay. I love it though.
[00:32:35] Erika: Isn't that fun? I mean, I think like postpartum traditions tend to be the same across cultures. Like keep the person warm, keep them well fed and support their healing.
[00:32:47] Josie: Yeah, nice. Oh, I love that. I love the visual of the sword around the house, that's awesome.
[00:32:56] Erika: Maybe for our next kid.
[00:32:57] Josie: Yes. Yeah, totally. Oh, that's awesome. So something that I love to ask all of my guests is, you know, something that I teach is bringing the whole self to the fertility journey and connecting with, the Chinese medicine term for fertility is your essence.
[00:33:15] So it's funny that you brought that up earlier. Yeah so it kind of like literally translates to your essence, you know, the essence of who you are, like your authentic self, your whole self. So I talk about that a lot. And I'm just curious if you have any like personal practices in place that allow you to connect with your essence or your whole self?
[00:33:37] Maybe even before baby came, if you had any practices in place that maybe are, you know, maybe not quite you know, happening right now.
[00:33:45] Erika: They're not there right now. They're not there right now. I think for me, it really has been this evolution of really stepping into and being unapologetic about my intersecting identities. And that's been sort of a way for me to step into my essence or my whole self. I think before, I don't know when this happened, honestly. But it has been just this process of like, not shrinking parts of me to be comfortable for quote unquote society and just being really unapologetically myself feels like the best and most authentic way for me to be my whole self.
[00:34:27] I don't remember something happened where I was like, oh, I have real friends, and I have people who are not my real friends. And like had started having zero patience with people who like I had no patience for. And I think it's like important lesson to like, have as like a parent too.
[00:34:50] Especially like raising a biracial Jewish baby with two moms. It really is about modeling for myself, but also for her, just being myself. And it's hard, and it takes work, and it's sometimes annoying, but it has allowed me to really not give a shit about anybody. And truly not giving a fuck what other people think is so liberating. To like really not give a fuck, like is really kind of nice.
[00:35:27] Josie: Oh my gosh, I love that. I think that's the best practice you can do for connecting with yourself.
[00:35:32] Erika: And it's hard. You'll be like, oh no, I've disappointed this person. And it's like, how did I disappoint this person by actually stating what's best for me? We are just so socialized to make other people comfortable. And obviously I'm not going around and hurting people, but I'm putting myself first. And if that doesn't align with someone else's needs of me, then, like that is not my responsibility.
[00:35:59] Josie: Exactly. I think that that's, you know, as difficult as the pandemic has been, I do think that that's been kind of a major blessing from all of this. Is it almost like distilled, like what's important? What needs to change? You know, what's up for renegotiation, like, cuz we're just kind of starting at least for me, it feels like everything's kind of starting from a blank slate.
[00:36:24] Erika: Totally. 100%.
[00:36:27] Josie: Ugh. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that.
[00:36:30] Erika: You're welcome.
[00:36:31] Josie: So how can folks support you, connect with you, if you are open to that. Or find you online, all that good stuff.
[00:36:40] Erika: I have to think about these things. The best way to support me if you're not a pregnant person and you want to support my work, would be to join my Patreon. It's Whole Body Pregnancy. There is a link on my Instagram. I don't think I've linked it to my website. I should do that. But for sure, linked in my Instagram.
[00:37:00] And I started my Patreon. I think it's been two years that, that year where people put those fucking black squares all over their internets and said that they were fighting for anti-racism that summer. When George Floyd died, it was the summer George Floyd was murdered. I started it then because it was just so annoying how performative people's activism was.
[00:37:21] And I was like, put your money where your mouth is. So my Patreon is a little less active than it used to be, but basically around once a month, I send out thoughts and reflections and ways for people to engage in anti-racism in their everyday life.
[00:37:36] Josie: Oh, awesome.
[00:37:36] Erika: Not like posting a black square or reposting something from a black author, but like how to have conversations with your racist grandmother. And why that's important and like, why you shouldn't be silent when you hear something fucked up at a school board meeting, but like, you should use your white privilege and talk about it, even if it's not happening to you.
[00:37:55] So that's the best way for people to engage and support me. And it's helpful because it allows me to make scholarships for my classes. And it allows me to like pay myself as a person who owns a business. So sort of multifold. And then for folks who want to learn from me I have childbirth educator training and postpartum doula training that's open for everyone.
[00:38:19] So I've had people who are maybe like massage therapists or they're acupuncturists or they're not necessarily birth workers, but they work with pregnant people, who have taken these classes because it can be a really great way to see pregnancy as a whole thing.
[00:38:37] And it's from an anti-racist lens. It's from a lens of being pro Black and pro queer. And sort of decentralizing whiteness in this work and making sure that like the perspective and the lens from which I teach. From people who look like me. Which as we know, brown people make up more of the global population than white people.
[00:38:59] So it makes sense that we teach from this angle. So those trainings are available. And then I'm very active on Instagram. It's @_wholebodypregnancy_. And I am very active there. And then my website is wholebodypregnancy.com and then Whole Body Pregnancy on Facebook.
[00:39:18] Josie: Okay, perfect.
[00:39:20] Erika: I think I got 'em all.
[00:39:21] Josie: I think you got 'em all. Oh, that's great to know about your classes because I've seen those, you know, you've posted about them and I wasn't sure exactly who they were for. So that's awesome. And I know I have a lot of you know, other acupuncturists and healthcare practitioners who are in my audience. So that's, that's great for them to know that.
[00:39:39] Erika: Yeah. It's definitely open for everyone and like, yeah, the last few cohorts, this will be the third cohort. For childbirth ed, and then there's a cohort of postpartum doula training. And both have had people who weren't traditional quote unquote birth workers, but people who were sort of adjacent working with pregnant people.
[00:39:57] Josie: Okay, cool. Oh, that's awesome. Okay, great. And I'll put the links to all of that. Everything you just said. I'll put 'em in the show notes. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you so, so much, Erika, for taking time out of your very busy day, I'm sure that you have so much going on. So I really appreciate you coming and sharing space with us today.
[00:40:16] Erika: Of course, thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate you asking these important questions and normalizing this conversation.
[00:40:23] Josie: For sure.
[00:40:29] Thanks for listening to the Intersectional Fertility podcast. To get customized fertility recommendations based on your Whole Self Fertility Method element, join my mailing list at intersectionalfertility.com and get immediate access to my two minute quiz.
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