My Darling Doula

02/02/2026

Happy Black History/Future Month!! ✊🏿🥳

For 100 years, Black History Month has championed a vital narrative of unyielding strength that built foundations against all odds, and audacious courage that reshaped the world.

But at its heart, this is also a story of joy.

It is the brilliant, defiant joy that fuels our creativity, sustains our families, and lights the path forward. This legacy isn’t just tucked away in history books, it’s alive in our everyday lives.

To help you expand this month and intentionally invite more joy into your life, I’m sharing my Black Birth (& Beyond) Joy Challenge. This challenge is designed to help you find tangible moments to center joy and Blackness, because while we honor Black history in February, we celebrate Black life, Black brilliance, and Black joy 365 days a year.
✨❤️🖤💚

01/30/2026

12/30/2025

This season is a threshold. One year releases us. Another waits to receive us.

Before you write another goal, target, or milestone, pause and reflect. Look back with grace and clarity.

The blueprint for your next chapter is hidden in the patterns, lessons, and quiet triumphs of the last one. Uncover it. Honor it. Then step forward, from a place of integrated wisdom.

Honor where you stretched,
where you survived,
where you softened,
and where you kept showing up.

Here’s to entering 2026 anchored, clear, and aware of our own priceless worth.🙏🏿

#2026

12/22/2025

When you pray, move your feet.👣✨
~African proverb

A gentle reminder: your story calls for your participation. Partner with your spirit, your body, and your support team as you navigate the sacred ground of birth and postpartum.

To the Mama-to-be:
Your hope for a positive birth is a powerful prayer. Now, give it legs. Research your options. Fine-tune your birth plan. Create a playlist that feels like a heartbeat. Practice the breath that will anchor you. Curate your care team with heart: your doula, your midwife or doctor, and your inner circle of support. Don’t just wish for a peaceful birth; prepare your space, your mind, and your spirit for it. You are your own best advocate. Stand firmly in that power.

To the new Mama in the thick of postpartum:
Your longing for a supported, peaceful transition is a holy whisper. Pray for peace, patience, joy and then move. Prep freezer meals like you’re stocking your own sanctuary. Say “yes” to help before you’re overwhelmed. Set the phone down and take a real nap. Let your village show up for you. Your rest is sacred and your healing is non-negotiable. It is the essential foundation of this new chapter. To prepare for it is a deep, loving gift to both yourself and your new family.

Remember, manifestation in motherhood isn’t about controlling every outcome. It’s planting your feet firmly in your own truth, so that no matter how the winds blow, you know your center. You are the author of this chapter. Pray fiercely, and then take the next small, tangible step. That is how visions become reality. 👣✨

12/02/2025

The legacy of the Chokwe mask tradition, especially the Mwana Pwo, reminds me that our ancestors understood identity on a level far deeper than the surface. To them, a mask wasn’t just carved wood. It was a living presence; a doorway into memory, meaning, and continuity.

The Mwana Pwo, the young woman spirit, honors more than beauty. It embodies fertility, grace, and the foundational strength of the mothers who shaped communities. These masks weren’t made to decorate walls, but for instruction. They carried lessons in womanhood, harmony, and spiritual knowledge long before such things were written down.

So when I say Imma only get finer, hear me clearly. I’m not speaking of the surface, but the core. I’m becoming finer in the way I carry my lineage. Finer in purpose. Finer in how my steps are guided by ancestral wisdom. Finer in how I love, and how I honor the women who came before me, and those I now raise, love, and guide. Finer like someone who knows her lineage is her luxury. It’s the kind of refinement that doesn’t fade, but deepens with time. ✨️🌍

09/10/2025

With a heart full of love and a spirit lifted by peace, I share that my beloved mother, Rose Marway Marshall-Collins, has gracefully completed her Earthly journey. Surrounded by love, and with cherished family by her side, she was lovingly held in sacred space as she crossed into the eternal embrace of our ancestors. Holding her in those final moments was one of the greatest honors of my life.

Though I feel her physical absence deeply, I find solace in knowing she is at rest, cradled in peace. Her love, wisdom, and the countless memories she gifted me remain, to guide and bind our family together with enduring strength. She has not left us, but has gone ahead, her spirit now a gentle guide watching over us from the far shore. ✨️

My family welcomes your prayers and kind thoughts as we navigate this time, honoring her remarkable life and the profound legacy of love she leaves behind. Homegoing details will be shared in the near future.

08/30/2025

Let's take a throwback to a pivotal moment in Charlotte's history: the city's very first Black Breastfeeding Week event in 2018. Before public meet-ups became a staple and before widespread public outcry over breastfeeding disparities gained its current momentum, I (formerly known as ) saw a need and made it my business to plant a crucial seed right here in my community. This inaugural gathering was hosted at the Baby + Co. birthing center, which was a l fittingly supportive and intimate space for such an important beginning.

This event was the foundational act, the first of many that I would  organize. I had a powerful vision to gather the community in a spirit of celebration and solidarity, while simultaneously casting a vital light on the profound breastfeeding disparities affecting Black American families.

It was more than just a meeting; it was a declaration. A declaration that Black parents deserved unwavering support, accurate information, and a community that saw them, celebrated their journeys, and fought for their right to nurse their children. A huge shoutout to every single person who was there to answer that call and help build the foundation for the movement we see growing in Charlotte today. This was where it started.✨️
milk

08/26/2025

One of the joys of celebrating my birthday season is that it always falls during Black Breastfeeding Week (August 25–31). This year’s theme, “Boots on the Ground: Rooted in Breastfeeding Success, Grounded in Community Support,” is a powerful reminder of the collective effort it takes to nurture, educate, and sustain healthy families through breastfeeding.

Since 2018, I have made it a personal mission to submit Proclamation requests to the Mayor’s Office each year, ensuring that formally recognizes this important week. Each proclamation serves as both a celebration of
the resilience, history, and legacy of Black families while bringing visibility to the unique challenges and triumphs within our communities.

This year is no different, and I’m deeply grateful to Mayor Vi Lyles for once again signing the Proclamation in honor of Black Breastfeeding Week. Your support amplifies the message that breastfeeding equity matters, that community support makes a difference, and that together, we can continue to build healthier generations.

Here’s to another year of awareness, advocacy, and celebration. Happy Black Breastfeeding Week, Charlotte!🤱🏾

06/12/2025

Before the first breath,
the first cry, the first touch... there was the cord. The first poem of existence.

An intricate, pulsing lifeline, formed in the sacred darkness of the womb, where time bends and the unseen takes shape.

A holy bridge of becoming,  through which nourishment, breath, and ancestral memory flowed.

A silent architect, weaving a universe between two heartbeats, mother and child tethered in a sacred choreography of creation.

The cord transcends biology. It is a symbol for all life-giving connections; the unseen threads of love, support, heritage, and spirit that nourish us throughout our lives.

It speaks to the fundamental truth that we are all brought forth into being through connection, sustained by intricate networks of giving and receiving, visible and invisible.🙏🏿✨️

05/05/2025

There’s a profound transformation that happens after you give birth that doesn’t get talked about enough. You don’t just birth a baby, you rebirth yourself. The person who emerges is irrevocably changed; softer in your edges yet fiercer in your love and a deepened perception. You now carry wisdom not just in your mind but in your bones, your breath, your scars.

Giving birth is a sacred metamorphosis.🌀 When we honor this threshold, we nurture more than the mother. We root families in strength. A mother granted space to heal teaches her community the language of tenderness. A mother anchored in her power raises children who recognize their inherent worth. A mother seen in her fullness becomes a compass, a living example of resilience and a quiet storm of wisdom for generations to come.💪🏾

Yet too often, we rush her, urging her to shrink back into a world that no longer aligns with the vastness of who she’s become. A mother is not a problem to solve; she is a bridge. Her transformation is the soil from which families grow, societies bloom, and cycles of care begin.

To mend our fragmented world, we must tend to mothers as the sacred alchemists that they are. We must make space for their becoming, not out of obligation, but because their wholeness is the bedrock of our collective future. She deserves this. And in honoring her, we honor ourselves.
🎥

04/24/2025

🎬 The 1972 revolutionary documentary, "Code Blue," exposed the harsh realities of systemic racism in American healthcare, that many refused to see. Over 50 years later, Trump’s policies prove systemic racism evolves, but never dies. Black women are still fighting for bodily autonomy, in hospitals AND at the ballot box. 

The more things change...

🔴 THEN & NOW 
• Black maternal mortality was 2x higher in 1972 → Now 3x higher and up to 12x higher depending on the state
• Pain under-treatment was documented → Still persists today
• Medical deserts existed → 80% of Black ZIP codes still lack trauma centers

This isn't history. It's today's emergency!

04/22/2025

If reinventing the wheel was a hospital initiative...🙄  ACOG ( American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) has released "new" guidance advocating for a transformation in U.S. prenatal care delivery.

On paper, it sounds revolutionary, but the truth is that patient-centered care takes money out of hospitals. Hospitals and large health systems profit from volume, not value. From interventions, not continuity. From short visits, not relationship-based care. Patient-centered models that involve listening, collaborating, and slowing down enough to meet real needs, are less profitable in a system built around billing codes and procedure counts.

Until hospitals and insurers are willing to invest in relationship-based care, and in the people who have always provided it, I’ll continue to trust midwives, not memos.✊🏿