We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rebecca Belenky. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rebecca below.

Rebecca, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your professional career?

The things I’ve learned from my clients could fill a book. From incredible recipes to endless resources for where to shop and what to watch, my life is regularly changed for the better by the people I work with. One of the things I love most about this work is how deeply personal it is, and it goes both ways. I’m always thrilled to hear from past clients who text me months or years later with potty training questions or concerns about breastfeeding strikes. Similarly, my past client who is a vet is always happy to weigh in exactly how many chocolate brownies are lethal for my standard poodle. There are certain past clients I know I can always reach out to for last minute advice on where to eat when I’m stuck in Culver City traffic, and certain past clients I know can fit in a therapy session with a struggling dad. If I need a stylist or a math tutor (as my preteen daughter and I have in the past year!) I have people I can call for that too! This job has expanded my life in so many directions.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We are a collective of three experienced doulas (Brana Ninkov, Dawn Batson and Rebecca Belenky) who have teamed up as a way of working around some systemic problems that make doula work unsustainable. As single doulas, it was challenging to offer the kind of extensive prenatal, labor and postpartum support our families tended to need. For example, simply showing up the day after a three day birth to check on lactation was a lot for us when we were working alone. In the collective model, we can hold our clients more fully through each need while also getting the time to recover from sleep deprivation and time away from our families. The average birth doula quits working as a doula within the first five years because this work requires constant sacrifice of physical and emotional needs. Working together allows us to continue to offer over a decade of experienced care while offering the level of support we think families deserve.

The three of us love delving into the psychological/spiritual aspects of what it means to have a “good” birth and expanding the expectations of pregnant parents who are often intimidated and feel confused by the mix of opinions and information they come across. We share a deeply held belief that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to any of the decisions that come up during birth or parenthood. We believe that when people take the time to pause to tap into their own specific needs and values when decisions arise, it can make a world of difference in how they feel about their births afterward.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

For us, word of mouth helps us build our reputation far more than Google or Yelp ads. It’s important to each of us that all of our families feel well supported, and we’re regularly responding to texts from past clients months after their births when they have questions about sleep training, co-sleeping, night nannies or teething remedies. The more supported our families feel, the more likely they are to refer us to their friends.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In the early days of our careers, we each came into this work with our own biases and hopes for what our clients chose for themselves out of a mix of naivete, idealism, and our own birth traumas. It doesn’t take long for birth workers to come up against these sneaky projections and, at a certain point, to be repeatedly humbled by them. I can’t tell you how many times as a new doula entering this work during the peak of the “natural childbirth movement” I was surprised to find that an early epidural was exactly the thing to help a long labor progress or how many times the intervention I’d been vilifying was exactly the right answer. Through the last 20 years of working in this field, I’ve really unlearned so much dogma and come to the conclusion that the only thing that really matters is that the people I’m working with feel heard and that they feel they have the information they need to make whatever the right decision is for them. We no longer feel even the slightest desire for anyone to make any certain decision. We only hope that they pause, when appropriate, and actively decide what feels like the next best step for them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.birthalchemydoulacollective.com
• Instagram: @birthalchemydoulas
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/birth-alchemy-doula-collective-los-angeles-2

Image Credits

Photos by Walter Belenky and Rebecca Belenky