Joanne and Sarah lost their beloved daughter and sister, Shelane, in 2015. After suffering the miscarriage of her fourth child, Shelane’s died by suicide. To honor her memory and her life, her family founded Shelane’s Run an event dedicated to spreading awareness of postpartum depression disorders and helping families find the support they need.

They partnered with Postpartum Support Virginia to encourage postpartum people to reach out and ask for help.

In this episode, Ariane and Mara Watts, therapist and outreach director for Postpartum Support Virginia, sat down with both Shelane’s mother and sister. Together they talked about Shelane’s bright life and how it abruptly came to an end. They discuss grief as a family, surviving the unimaginable, and finding meaning.

For this last (!!) episode of the season, I sit with Tiffany and Candy, the two sisters behind Like a Sister, a postpartum care and doula service based in the DMV area.

As parents, trained postpartum doula, certified lactation counselors and new parent educators, they share their knowledge and wisdom on how to prepare for this transition.

We also discuss politics, trauma-informed, support, and individualized care in the US, as well as social media, privilege, whiteness, and how to change the world — by caring for one postpartum human at a time.

For this week's episode, I've had the chance to sit down and speak with two amazing humans and activists to discuss trans & queer-centered care: Moss, who's a doula and educator, and provides trainings in gender-affirming care for other birth-workers and service providers. ⁠And Hez, who is a clinical social worker practicing in the SF Bay area and works with LGBTQ+ communities and immigrant/refugee communities. Hez is also the parent of a new babe who makes a vocal appearance once or twice in the podcast :)⁠

Together they built a workshop for trans/postpartum people that will go live on August 22d.⁠

Aside from their work together, we discuss the universal and unique challenges and joys of gestating, birthing, and being postpartum.⁠

I am extremely grateful these two humans have agreed to share their knowledge, humor, and kindness with us and I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. ⁠

In this episode, Mara Watts, LPC, and our founder, Ariane Audet, discuss partnerships, sleep planning, postpartum plans and how to focus on postpartum care and support instead of baby registries (!) 

They talk about women in the workforce and how we fail our parents by not providing them true parental leave. 

They go over the fragile balancing parents perform during the newborn phase, taking time for ourselves, true self-care, and being present in our relationships. 

Finally, they discuss the everlasting effects and lessons of COVID on postpartum and parenting.

In this episode, Kelsey Myers, LMFT and Faces of Postpartum's founder, Ariane Audet, talk about marriage and partnership during the postpartum period. Through the lenses of her three postpartum periods, Kelsey reflects on her professional and personal life, as well as on how our neurobiology changes during this very intense and often challenging time. Kelsey and Ariane also discuss the various emotions that accompany not only this particular transition, but all big life changes - longing, desire, and grief - and the level of associations the embodied experience of our own childhood resurfaces after we give birth to our own children. 

In 2018, Erin became a mother and started filming her new documentary, Year One. The film is an intimate look at the first year of motherhood through Erin's eyes. It addresses the identity shifts, the challenges of experiencing postpartum depression, and the everyday extraordinary moments of being a new mom.

In this episode, Erin and I share our thoughts on honest representations of the postpartum period, what it means to be a creator and a mother, owning the SAHM (stay-at-home mom) title, and how to dream big and celebrate our journey, whatever it might be.

This is the second part of my interview with the executive director of Motherhood Beyond Bars, Amy Ard. In this episode, Amy talks about what it means to give birth to a child when incarcerated, how she and her team care for the babies once they are out of the hospital and their, mothers back in prison, and what it means to care for families in precarious situations.

We talk about comfort measures during birth, shackling, and postpartum support for caregivers. We discuss mental health and survival, and small gestures of kindness that make a world of differences.

This is the first part of my interview with Amy Ard, executive director of Motherhood Beyond Bars, an organism that provides support for infants born to incarcerated women and works to reunify families. In this episode, we go over Amy's background as a doula and mom of three, her own postpartum period, and how it shaped her as a parent, activist and advocate. 

In this week’s episode, our founder, Ariane Audet, sits down with Katie DePalma, certified nurse midwife (CNM) and professor at Georgetown and GW University. They discuss ending weight-based stigma in reproductive healthcare, obstetric and GYN care for all genders, trauma-informed, and individualized care, as well as keeping the advocacy spark going when facing systemic challenges

In this week’s episode, our founder, Ariane Audet and her dear friend, Bianca Moskaitis, talk about the various definitions and implications of the word “postpartum”, and what it meant to them before, during, and after going through their own postpartum periods.