Doula Chana, Pregnancy and Parenting Support Services

11/23/2022

{This is part 2 of a series 😂!}
What an honor to chat again with my friend and colleague and favorite podcast host about my 2nd and 3rd births. I love sharing these pieces of myself and my story and my one wish is that it lands in the heart of someone who needs it.
🧜🏼‍♀️ 🚑 😇
Always grateful for the support that surrounds me and the hearts, minds, hands and voices who lift me up.
🔐❤️🫶🏻

06/14/2022

Having a baby this fall 🍂🍃 or winter ❄️☃️?
www.doulachana.com

12/30/2021

I hold a lot of stuff as a birth worker. Physically I hold people, up or in my arms, in the backseat of a bumpy, godforsaken car ride or while we walk into the hospital (no, we don’t need a wheelchair but thank you, very concerned Security Guard.) I hold babies, even partners, and partners’ eyes when they watch their person have a freakin baby. I hold hands and hair, I hold bags 💼 in elevators and while we walk down hallways. I hold buckets of vomit 🤢, I hold wires and IV poles no matter how many times we walk to the bathroom 🚽. I hold feelings, so many feelings. Excitement and anticipation, worry, fear, trepidation. “What ifs” and “I can’ts” (but you can.) I hold secrets and stories and boundaries.

As this Solar 🌞calendar closes I am thinking of all the ways and people who held me. My doula/birth worker community has held me through a year of long births and short births and tough situations and ridiculous scenarios. They’ve held me with outstretched, supporting arms of laughter 😂 and wisdom, backup and empathy. They have kept me hydrating and taking it easy on myself, position suggestions to relay and words of comfort I couldn’t gather. My community has held me through continued Covid uncertainty, vaccines 💉, Delta, boosters and Omicron. They have taught me to slow down and say no, p*e when I need to, take a rest in the bathtub 🛀 and that I couldn’t go one more day without an Apple watch ⌚️.

Grateful for this work I do, the power I witness not only in birthing people and families but also in my community that remains relentlessly devoted to connection and compassion and care 💕✨ 🥰.

11/15/2021

✨ Nourished Postpartum Challenge ✨
🍵🍓🫐🍌The Skilled Postpartum 💜💜💜

My mom makes the best oatmeal. She adds fruit (like whatever she can find) and cinnamon and Splenda (if you know Sue, you know her thing for sugar substitutes) and applesauce. It’s always perfectly hot and comforting and usually comes in a big bowl, served on a plate with a napkin and spoon on the side. It is served to you on the couch, while you hold a brand new baby. She probably showed up an hour before, letting herself into the apartment quietly around 7:30am (but like, not that quietly because she carries a big ass bag and her keys are like a school janitor’s and she’s also carrying a tray from Starbucks. She first washes the dishes in the sink and gets the big ones off to school (if there are big ones) and puts a load of laundry in and put the soup she made at home in the fridge. She brings the hot oatmeal to you and sets it at arm’s reach and gives you a kiss on the head and says “hi honey” and gives a kiss to the new baby and says “hi baby” and doesn’t ask to hold the baby, she just says, “when they’re done eating, tell me so you can eat.”
I make oatmeal for myself now, I’m usually eating it at my desk in between sessions or standing in the kitchen with kids asking “what are you having?” and it always brings me back to that tender immediate postpartum place for just a moment, on my couch, with my mom quietly (not so quietly) buzzing around my apartment making me feel safe.

10/31/2021

This is me on my first day back to work after having my second child. My oldest was 2.5, the baby was almost 3 months. I took the same amount of time off after my first and would do the same with my third, three years later.
I worked for a larger health and human service agency in New York City. I was given 5 days - 35 hours - of paid maternity leave. I could exhaust my accrued sick and vacation time and I would receive six weeks of disability pay at a fraction of my already dismal salary that would barely cover what I would pay for childcare. Go back and read the first sentence of this paragraph. A HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICE AGENCY.
Every morning I would strap Max into the carrier and walk with him and Zoey to the car down the block. Get them in, drive to my babysitter’s house and drop Max, then drive to daycare and drop Zoey. Then head to work. I’d work my day, pump my milk, pack it all in and pick them all up.
I never loved my job but I knew that I needed to return to work for both financial and personal reasons. None of my children slept well by 3 months, I was still nursing throughout the night. Luckily for me, I had a supervisor who herself raised her daughter as a single mom. She was supportive and encouraging and bent the rules for me when she could.
I am not a hero nor am I special. I am quite privileged as a white, cis woman. I had relatively easy births and recoveries, a supportive partner who actually received more time off than me. I had help from family and a stable job would be held for me should I choose to take more time, even unpaid.
It was still exceptionally hard. I felt lost and unsure, still learning who I was in this new body and new role, learning my babies and new family. I was tired and overwhelmed. So tired and so overwhelmed.

Continued in comments!

08/16/2021

🗣 Attention Parents Young and Old: Get this button ( 😘) and don’t look back.

Took a trip to the . Felt a visceral connection to this baboon parent who didn’t bat an eye when this baby baboon tumbled down the hill. We all need space. They were fine. Don’t judge us.

🙏🏻🥰🙄😎

04/23/2021

✨💫✨💫
It’s been a wild few weeks and I’m feeling very grateful. For families that welcome me into their physical and emotional spaces, for incredible doula community and friends who remind me how strong humans are every day, and for my own partner and family who let me leave at the drop of a hat, find me parking coupons and are okay with kisses in their sleep.
p.s. I made it home to tuck people in and Shabbat cooking is underway.
💕💜💕💜

03/25/2021

It’s World Doula Week🤗!
I’ve been doing this birthworker thing for a while now 😅 and I can attest (and so can the data, check out ) that doulas are necessary.

💫 Dear families that I have worked with, thank you for opening your lives and hearts, your homes and hospital rooms. Your strength never ceases to invigorate me, your resilience inspires me time and time again.

😍 To my doulas, I love you and thank you and will never stop being proud and thrilled that you were with me. Well, some of you *almost* made it. Twice.

🌟 Celebrate a doula, hire a doula, *support* a BIPOC doula. Please don’t forget that birthwork is political, birthworkers are advocates and we need to change the system. teaches us about the dented pan (go learn and donate to .birth.sanctuary, too.) Doulas are incredible but we need everyone to join the cause and make birth safe, especially for Black and Brown folks. (T-shirt in slide 3 by )

02/11/2021

👋🏻 friends!
You may not have seen if you’re not on my IG (, join me, what are you waiting for?) but I have challenged my community to donate $12 to Birth Sanctuary Gainesville, the very first Birth Center in the state of Alabama that is being built by none other than , a brilliant Black midwife I learn from every week. Once we reach $97k, there will be a scholarship opportunity for BIPOC midwifery students. There will be 3 of these once benchmarks are met.

‼️🗣 WE NEED BLACK BIRTHWORKERS, WE NEED BIPOC BIRTHWORKERS AND WE NEED MORE BIRTH CENTERS.

If you can donate $12 (that’s it! $12!) comment here and use the link and I will donate an additional $36 once I get three comments. But cmon, I want more than three. I’ve spent $12 on much sillier s**t 🤪.

I am a doctoral prepared, board-certified nurse midwife with a comprehensive backgr… Stephanie Mitchell needs your support for Birth Sanctuary of Gainesville

11/09/2020

🌪👟✨WHO AM I NOW? ..........

At maybe 3 days postpartum for the first time in 2012 my mom was over helping me adjust to being a parent. Baby Zoey was sleeping and mom suggested my husband and I go for a walk, just us. I opened my closet and as I stared at my sneakers burst into tears.

The last time I put them on, probably just a week ago, I didn’t yet have a baby in this world. I was a different person. They didn’t know. She had no clue. Oh my god. Life might have been better the last I wore those sneakers, I thought. Cue new mother/parent guilt and worry. It was easier and simpler and s**t! - she could sleep and p*e when she wanted wasn’t leaking and soft and anxious that she’d f**k it all up.

8.5 years postpartum I still look at pictures of me before kids or remember experiences I had before becoming a parent and it feels like a separate life. It certainly was easier in some respects and I yearn for uninterrupted bathroom trips. But was it better? I can’t compare. My heart has morphed and my brain is forever changed. Each child has taken what I was before they entered my life and molded it to the new me. So that’s who I am now. Chana, with these three children, postpartum 8.5 years, 6 years, 3 years, forever. So many new sneakers and shoes, organized and arranged neatly every night on the mat by the door. 💕💕💕

10/02/2020

This is the very first year we have a sukkah of our own. Growing up my family’s sukkah was made of wood boards and adorned with laminated posters and paper chains, stuffed cabbage and dump cake (if ya know, ya know.) Once I met Josh, I spent many years in NJ with our Diamond side, under leaves and hanging fruit eating the most delicious meals... almost exactly 3 years ago we sat in a Diamond sukkah during a wildly hot Sukkot and I thought I might give birth right then and there.
Building a sukkah is an important mitzvah (deed or commandment, way to connect to God) but as Jews we also do a great deal of Hiddur Mitzvah, or beautifying and enhancing the experience. The mitzvah alone just isn’t enough. There has to be a way to do more, improve, get closer. So today we hung Topek posters and lights and Diamond fruit and leaves, we adorned the walls with crafts my kids made years and years ago that I held onto, knowing one day we’d have a sukkah of our own.
I am hoping that during this complicated and overwhelming time I can enhance the person I am, sanctify the relationships I am a part of and work to beautify this very broken but giving world we have. That my family and I can do more, seek out justice and continue to find good and light. Wishing everyone a Chag Sameach and deep warmth for a special holiday.
💗🌿🌼🌱🌾🌺🍂💗