What Relationship-based, Whole-being Midwifery Care Means to me, by Nets Manela, midwife, Baltimore

I see you as your primary care provider. You are coming to me to play a role in your journey. As a human being, first and foremost, I am a peer and a community member with accumulated life-experience in this realm of growing, birthing, and raising children, navigating family life, health and healing, supporting and caring for people during the childbearing cycle. As a midwife, I play the roles of resource, guide, coach, therapeutic listening presence, administrative assistant, clean-up crew, liaison to the state (for birth certificates and the like) and the hospital if needed, and more. Professionalism means I have achieved and maintain certain standards and continue to pursue, develop and refine my knowledge, skills, and experience. It means you pay me, and I serve you by devoting time, energy, and applied expertise to you and your family within a defined but flexible structure.

There is nothing everybody in my care has to do because of numbers. Policies and limitations are often based on statistics. Statistics can provide useful information, but they do not determine the care you receive with me. Evidence-informed care means examining published accounts of collective experiences, which have been compiled, standardized and numerically expressed, and allowing the information gleaned to open our minds to possibilities, not to compete with our intuition and other ways of knowing.

You can really say no. I am truly comfortable with a range of choices regarding testing and treatments. We authentically explore resources, options and alternatives, together. I will be honest with you about what I might choose in your situation as well as my comfort level and limitations around other options. I have a lot of experience applying traditional nutritional wisdom, supplements, homeopathy, herbal medicines, Chinese medicine, craniosacral therapy, and transformational coaching with myself and my family, in addition to my client work.

I can also say no, admit when I don’t know, make referrals for situations outside my scope of practice, and maintain working relationships in different forms. I have attended and continue to attend births in both clinical and non-clinical roles, including as a doula, so that I get to enjoy and remember what it means to be a peer, a witness, and an authentic sister and supporter, with and without various levels of responsibility.

Your physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social experience are united in your being. All these aspects of you are relevant to me. Hearing and sharing about your moment and your story on all levels helps us develop trust and opens possibilities for insight, guidance, and transformation. All aspects come into play in birth. Our body symptoms, emotions, beliefs, and perceptions of patterns in our world give us literal, metaphorical, allegorical, and mystical information and meaning. This is the magic of life. This is what we work with together. Or not! Some of my clients prefer a matter-of-fact approach to care, and we can do that, too.

I see my midwifery work as an offering, a small role I play in co-creating a beautiful world in which each and every sovereign being and each and every sovereign collective, human and more than human, breathes fully in the journey of life, creating, learning, destroying, and choosing anew. The opportunity to give birth in one’s own space, on one’s own terms, is one way to participate in this magic. And serving as a midwife is one way to protect and collaborate in our sacred, shared, beautiful, co-creative world.

If you are based in the Baltimore area of Maryland or York County, Pennsylvania and are looking for a home birth midwife, please be in touch! My number for texts and calls is 240-997-5319. You can also email me at netsitsah@hotmail.com.