MaTerra Midwifery

08/13/2025

A female Greenland shark was found to be around 400 years old. She’s been swimming through the cold ocean depths since the 1600s, long before cars, phones, electricity, or even the idea of modern life existed. While empires rose and fell, wars came and went, and technology reshaped the world above, she just kept gliding through the silence of the deep. Four centuries later, she’s still here. Still moving. Still surviving.

01/07/2023

Superhuman. Super Mamas. 💪🏾❤️🦸🏾‍♀️

Quote from

12/31/2022

100% accurate 😳

12/30/2022

Repost .ly

"Is it mental health or is it motherhood?
Are they one in the same?
where we feel completely overwhelmed
and overwhelmingly complete.
where we are both irritated and grateful
where we feel both lost in our identity
and found in their eyes where we yearn for freedom and yet are filled to the brim with fulfillment we may look to medications and remedies to fix us, only to ride the same wave and meet the same reality in a different light.
We don’t need be fixed, though it helps sometimes to feel less, or more.
What we do need is to hold out a hand and be heard.
We need support and we need breaks.
We need community to share motherhood truths in unapologetic solidarity.
To share that it’s all too much sometimes.
That we feel expected to do it all, forget about ourselves and with a smile too.
That the guilt eats away when we aren’t managing well and that our head spins with a daily dance
of joy and exhaustion
Maybe it just is what it is.
Maybe it’s time the world understands that motherhood is synonymous
with both good and poor mental health.
It’s the most important and turmoil role of our lifetimes to raise children, and naturally, our emotional and psychological well-being should fluctuate with the evolution of it all too.

Photo taken by my 6-year-old son the other night, playing around on my phone when I was feeling extremely overwhelmed by the same four walls."

📸:

12/30/2022

12/30/2022

No, 2023 won’t be the best year yet.
Nor will it be the worst.
You see, a year is a mosaic of absolutely everything.
Joy, fear, heartache, loss, beauty, pain, love.
Failure, learning, friendship, misery, exhilaration.
Each day, each moment even, is a tiny shard of glass in this beautiful, confusing creation.
2023 will be another mosaic to add to your wall of art.
A wall that shows the life, you are continuously gifted.
A wall that shows you are human.
A wall of survival.
I wish you many broken pieces of glass this year, my friends.
Because this is living.
And before you march on in to another year of ‘everything’, pause to look back, at the work you have created thus far.
It is quite something.
You are quite something.
Now onwards we go, my friends.
Onwards we go.

Donna Ashworth
‘Life’

https://amzn.eu/d/9Y6E6kz

Art by the amazing Eduardo Rodriguez Calzado

#2023

12/29/2022

• I don’t love breastfeeding.

I don’t hate it (this time around) either.

I’m kind of just neutral about it.

I couldn’t breastfeed my first due to PPD/PPA. And I grieved for weeks over not being able to.

I was furious that I had prepared so much for it. Read all the books. Took all the classes. Had all the tools and the supplies and the tips and the advice and the supports.

And I failed.
My mind failed me.
And in turn, my body failed me.
I failed me.
And I failed my son.
(And more lies my brain told me)

I was able to stay home with my son for his first 18 months of life while I worked towards my graduate degree. I had every intention of exclusively breastfeeding him for this entire duration. But we were exclusively on formula by week 10.

And in the sick and twisted way life works, I am able to breastfeed my daughter with ease… AND here I am having to go to work full time at 15 weeks postpartum.

Starting a new career.
Having my daughter be raised by strangers.
My breasts engorged and painful and leaking.
Me sheepishly asking for pumping accommodations at a new job.

Pumping, thawing milk, washing bottles, washing pump parts, charging pumps, storing milk, freeze freeze thaw pump work work work.

I’m furious my country doesn’t support parents better.

I’m pi**ed off society lets us treat mothers like reproductive machines expected to get back to productivity standards while still bleeding from childbirth.

And I’m annoyed that we’ve written this narrative as breastmilk vs. formula when really it’s mothers vs. society and mothers vs. lawmakers and mothers vs. capitalism and mothers vs…well… everything? Everyone?

So regarding this breastfeeding thing;

I don’t love it.
I don’t even *like* it some days.
I use formula when I want.
I breastfeed when I want.
I pump when I can manage.

And that’s enough.

And I’m proud of my body.
And I’m proud of you.

However you feed your baby.

12/19/2022

12/16/2022

• Maybe we're preparing for birth all wrong.
We draw up beautiful birth plans
We frame it as a "choose your own adventure"
when really
the adventure chooses you, right?

Birth will pull you in
She will unearth the deepest fears you've buried
Tumbling you over with her waves
Hurtling you through space
Humbling you with her power, before she releases you,
changed

No matter how clear your birth plan is
No matter how many twinkly lights surround the tub
There will be times where she crushes you
When you curse that birth plan and all your hypnobirthing meditations
and your doula and your mother and your partner and every love and light
affirmation you memorized, as you projectile vomit into a kitchen bowl
Sweating and shaking your way through

Birth will ask you to release control
No-- she will demand it
The tighter you cling to your carefully crafted plans
The longer you try to stay in the driver seat
The louder she will roar

Until, at some point, you remember that it is safe to let go
At some point, you sense the softness beneath the waves
You realize that this intensity
These sensations rocking you so fiercely
Are your own power
You remember that *you are birth*
And birth is life
Wild, holy, unscripted, uncontrollable
Sacred, gorgeous, messy, unstoppable

And then you'll surrender
And it will all soften
And you will emerge,
a mama.
Humbled, powerful, grateful
Transformed.

“Sacred Path” 16” x 20”
Acrylic on canvas
Link in bio

11/21/2022

11/14/2022

Here’s what breastfeeding has taught me,

To have a patience like no other. It is hard but worth it..

To have trust, there were no measurements or taking notes, I went by her cues and she didn’t let me down.

I was forced to sit down and just stop, yes I noticed the dust on the TV cabinet, but I took a deep breath and took her in too.

It was a great aid to get her to sleep, it worked bloody wonders! No rods over here as she doesn’t need it now, nothing is forever..

That just because it didn’t happen the first time it doesn’t mean it won’t with subsequent babies.

The word “natural” is misleading, it’s a learned skill.

Being told to push through pain might be seen as encouraging, it can also be very damaging.

That being a part of the itty bitty t***y committee doesn’t mean that your feeding facilities aren’t 5 star.

That it’s perfectly acceptable to cry over spilt milk when that milk is breastmilk.

There is no time limit on how long or often you feed, those books will never translate the language you and your baby will develop together on this journey. So listen to eachother.

That if you can’t breastfeed you haven’t “failed” we need to talk about the real stuff. The more we do we’ll see these expectations only derived from not being open in the first place.

We need support for mothers who have tried to breastfeed but are unable to, there is a great wound there mentally.

That a good feeding chair is essential, you’ll be there a lot.

That exclusive breastfeeding is one heck of a commitment & one heck of an achievement.

That support, no matter how you feed your child, can shape your whole journey.

That anyone who has an issue with breastfeeding in public should be the one who gets up to leave.

That grabbing each b**b to work out which one was fed off last is accurate.

Catching her eye in these moments is something no photo would ever capture.

I cried when our journey ended, but I’ll never be sad that I have the privilege of watching her grow through each milestone. Whatever she leaves behind means I’ve done my job in helping her reach where she’s going to next.

My greatest learning of all.

Words: