My Story

My own path of healing led me to Integrative Medicine, and I have always loved my work as an Integrative Pediatrician. But, I found that, as much as I tried to cram into a visit, it just wasn’t always enough.  Many families needed more. Most families needed more. And much of what they needed they wouldn’t bring up in the context of our visits.  Parents often didn’t feel entitled to use the time of our Pediatric visits to address their needs, and, indeed, sometimes there really wasn’t time in the visit to talk in any meaningful way about how they were doing. Since addressing their children’s needs really had taken up all the time we had.  I knew something needed to change. 

Then my life changed.  I became pregnant with my second child and took a leave of absence from my medical practice at the end of my pregnancy.  I had already had one child, and our postpartum journey had been, in retrospect, quite supported and smooth. 

This time, it was different.

This time, I was hit by life, bodily and spiritual changes that overwhelmed me completely. This time, I did not have the same support I had had after the birth of my first child.  Often, after the first child, the world thinks we have it figured out and don’t need support anymore — but the world is wrong about that.  With determination and a lot of luck, I found my people — my support network that got me through that period.  But it was a long road.  My healing – physical, spiritual, mental, and environmental – took much longer than it had the first time around. 

In retrospect, there had been warning signs that I hadn’t seen. Calls from my body to pay more attention. Paralyzing fear and anxiety that hadn’t been there during my first pregnancy. A push to “get back into normal life” that had been blissfully absent around the birth of our first child. There had been signals of imbalance that I hadn’t seen or understood at the time. And, with no one else there to call attention to what my mind and body were trying to tell me, I was left to move through the chaotic and painful aftermath of a very difficult postpartum period.

As I finally began to move from shell shock into actual healing and thriving, I was able to reconnect with the truth that my story was not unique.  There were literally millions of parents all over the world experiencing that same sense of aloneness and lack of support that I had felt.  Our whole world had changed and yet the world did not in any way allow us the time needed to heal and transform. 

And then…

People started to call me.  Family, friends, friends of friends who were pregnant or who had just had babies.  They had questions and fears and curiosities.  Concerns they thought were too silly or small – or not focused enough on their babies – to ask their Pediatrician or Midwife. Questions about babywearing or about their last doctor’s visit or about food.  Sometimes we started in one place and ended up somewhere completely different.  I realized that life was inviting me — calling me — to create a place for parents to feel the support we all need in order to emerge from the postpartum period thriving, healed and transformed instead of alone, drained, and scared. 

Our society wasn’t making space for it, but we would — one family, one conversation at a time. 

With the knowledge I had gained and honed through my years in conventional as well as complementary, alternative, and traditional medicine, I was able to offer families ways to support their journeys that were truly Integrative.  Since the “Integrative” piece of Integrative Medicine means we integrate the practices that are the best fit from all the worlds of medicine.  And “Integrative” also means we approach each person and family as an integrated whole.  Equal parts body, mind, and spirit but also deeply impacted by environment, which includes not only the spaces we are in, but also the beings with whom we share those spaces.   

Modern medicine often does not have great ways to address postpartum healing – traditional practices do.  And, since we are living in such a global society, rather than being limited to the local cultural practices, we actually get to choose which practices from around the world feel the best to us, whether it’s a mind-body practice or something from an ancient medicine tradition like Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) or Ayurveda.  All this wisdom from so many sources means we get to customize our own paths to healing based on our own comfort, wants, and needs.

My mission with Moonflower is to support families, so they can hold and experience the sacred space needed for the profound transformation that is childbirth.  Childbirth transforms the birthing parent, the baby, the family and the world – as there is now a new being in the world who did not exist here before.  Honoring this time allows everyone involved to emerge as their fullest, most healed, most nourished self. 

It isn’t easy – transformation never is – but it doesn’t have to be hard for the wrong reasons, namely lack of support and reverence for this singular time.  When we focus our energies on the work at hand instead of wasting it navigating the ways in which the world does not support our healing, we emerge from this period revitalized and ready for the coming adventures of our new selves and our new life.   

It makes sense that our old lives and old ways wouldn’t totally fit us anymore after a transformation as profound as childbirth.  Our bodies change, our spirits change, our world changes – and we need time and restorative practices to fully embody our new selves in our new world. 

I liken it to cocooning and emerging as your newest, truest, most powerful self.  We cannot transform without the cocoon.  Without it, we become a weaker version of a self whose form no longer fits.  We need to stop, hunker down, and heal for that transformation to happen.  But we can’t do it without support.

Moonflower is that support.