Latest / MyMaine Birth / 14. Mid-week midwife edition, Gayle Eckey of Stone Mountain Midwife in Brownfield, Maine

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14. Mid-week midwife edition, Gayle Eckey of Stone Mountain Midwife in Brownfield, Maine · MyMaine Birth

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: I'm Angela, and I'm a certified birth photographer, experienced doula, childbirth educator and your host here on the my Maine Birth podcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: This is a space where we share the real-life stories of families and their unique birth experiences in the beautiful state of Maine, from our state's biggest hospitals to birth center births and home births.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Every birth story deserves to be heard and celebrated.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Whether you're a soon-to-be mom, a seasoned mother or simply interested in the world of birth, these episodes are for you.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 14 of the my Maine Birth podcast.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: This is a midweek midwife edition of the show, and today's midwife guest is Gail Ecke of Stone Mountain Midwifery in Brownfield, maine.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Gail is a home birth midwife who's licensed in both Maine and New Hampshire, and she's currently welcoming families that live within an hour and a half of her home in Brownfield, maine.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Gail loves walking with families who are seeking something different than what has become the mainstream experience through the childbearing years.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: She practices from a place of common sense, trust and love.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Gail is also adept in body work for the mother-baby dyad, as well as breastfeeding support.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: You can find her online at stonemountainmidwifecom, and also on Facebook and Instagram at stonemountainmidwife.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Hi Gail, welcome to my Maine Birth.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: I feel like it's kind of like my first little trip into being like a Maine midwife, yeah.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: I'm so excited.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: So you recently moved to Maine from Long Island.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I grew up here.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: I'm like living directly under the farm that I grew up in.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: I moved to Long Island after I graduated high school and met my husband and like for 25 years we were like, oh, we're going to move to Maine, we're going to move to Maine, and it just wasn't happening.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: And so eventually we were just like we gotta go, we just have to do it.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: And so we did.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: We packed up our two kids that were still living at home, sold a lot of our stuff and just came.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: So we've been here for it'll be a year in June.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm, I'm a mom of three.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: I have one that is grown and flown.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: He's he's in the military, and so he's been in the military since he was 17 and is 21 now.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: So he's often gone.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: And then I have a 15 year old and an 11 year old and we recently just packed up and moved to Maine after 25 ish years of living on Long Island.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: So we just have been spending this past year kind of like I don't know myself, just healing from what life in New York has been like, which I didn't even realize how intense that actually was until I left it and started kind of like reacclimating to the world a little bit.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: My kids are all homeschooled.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: They haven't always been homeschooled.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: My first went through public school but my second two have been homeschooled for the past four-ish years and probably more like life schooling.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: I'm not really great at curriculums and setting boundaries and making rules.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: I think they seem to navigate life pretty well.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: So I just do my best to support that.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: I started midwifery school when my youngest was two, which was a really interesting experience for our family and I think really bonded my kids to my husband in a way that not all kids get to be bonded to their dads, because he really was.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: You know, midwifery school for me was leaving my family every five weeks for a two week period of time and I did that for two years and so he really was like the sole parent in a lot of ways, definitely when I was gone but also when I was home, because I was like doing the clinical work and the didactic work and that is just intense.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: You kind of have to check out of life in general and just be a student midwife and so we're a pretty tight family unit and yeah.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: All right, so you're going to be sharing your three birth stories today.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Go ahead and start where it feels right to you, yeah.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: All three of my birth experiences were different and came with their own gifts and lessons.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: My first I was 21 when I found out I was pregnant and he was a welcome surprise, but I also was 21.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: And I just kind of like stepped into the system of like well, this is what I guess I'm supposed to do.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: I didn't really question anything and in retrospect I was reading one of my little journal prompts that I had kept and it was like my husband had asked if I wanted to have this baby at home and my response was no, I think I want to be in the hospital for this birth.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: And so he was a hospital birth and really fast.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: Six hours for a first time birthing person is pretty quick, normal vaginal birth.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: But in the hospital you can't really say I don't think I can say that it was a natural birth.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: Even though I had no medications, it still was an intense experience.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: So how was your labor with him?
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: So I was like 41 weeks in a couple of days, which is the normal, and I had gone to the OBGYN that day and they of course stripped my membranes without consent and so I kind of after that visit, had a couple contractions, but nothing that was like too crazy Went on, had like a normal day, went to bed, slept for a couple hours and woke up in labor Like there was no denying, no being like oh, I wonder if this is it.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: It was, that was it.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: And so we kind of right away just like packed up and went to the hospital because I was in it.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: And I got to the hospital and I can just remember them like trying to like ask me all these questions and you know, like triaging you, and I was like this can't be happening right now, I can't this, we can't be doing this right now.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: And then they were like trying to put me in a wheelchair to wheel me up to labor and delivery and I was like I'm not sitting in that chair, no way.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: And by the time we got up into labor and delivery, I was like definitely active and moving through labor pretty quickly.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: I don't think I was in the hospital more than four hours before he was born.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: I had to ask my husband to tell me his birth story, like four years after he was born, because I was super proud of the fact that I had like labored and birthed this baby like naturally.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: But there were parts of that experience that were really difficult for me to wrap my brain around.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: Like naturally I had an obstetrician who had been practicing for like super long time and it was like her normal standard to give every one of her patients an episiotomy.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: And so I was doing well, laboring, and I wanted to be laboring on my side and she kind of like forcefully flipped me over and then gave me an episiotomy and he was born within 15 minutes, and so part of me kind of like always goes back to that piece of like if I had just stayed home, that would have been a totally different experience, you know.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: But there's always retrospect in every birth.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: You always have those little pieces of like oh, what if I had just?
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: Or oh, I wish that didn't happen.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: Like that Healing from that episiotomy was one of the worst things I've experienced like as a human being.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: I think actually it made my postpartum really difficult and as a 22 year old I didn't really I didn't know myself yet and so I didn't know that like what I was feeling or what I was like kind of navigating at that time probably was postpartum depression.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: You know, in retrospect we always can see things a little bit differently, but so that experience, that birth, what that provider did to me, really changed like the trajectory of how I knew that I would birth any other children that chose to come through me.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: And so he was my only child for seven years.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: I, like you know, I wanted my second child so badly, like I just called him in so strongly, um, but it took him seven years to decide that he was ready to come.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: And when, when he was ready, he was like the gentlest pregnancy and birth and postpartum experience.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Just you know, like what it felt like to be pregnant with him, how we birthed together and then like who he is as a human being then and now is like so interesting and different.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: And he was the child that I felt most connected to and not that I don't feel connected to all my kids, but there was something about him that really like there's just this like really strong connection.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: And he was my unassisted birth.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: And I I hired a midwife, you know, and I was like told her right from the beginning like I I'm pretty sure I'm going to have an unassisted birth, and she was kind of like, oh, okay, we'll see.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: Kind of the thing that I tell people now when they're talking about having unassisted births, which, like I obviously support, is it really has to be.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: I think an agreement that you make with this being that is coming through you right.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: Like, even though in my mind, in my heart space, I had said that I was going to have this unassisted birth, I didn't really know that he was going to be unassisted until I was laboring with him.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: Like there just wasn't this.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: I felt no need or desire to call in anybody to that space.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: Like the only reason I woke my husband up was because I wanted my pool filled and he also, interestingly, was like my longest labor I'd say he was like 13 ish hours, but it was only like intense for that last little bit of like him coming through.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: But his labor in general was like really enjoyable and actually felt really good and that, of course, kind of led to having like a really different postpartum experience.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: Different postpartum experience.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: I was much more able to ask for what I needed and to recognize that like it was okay for me to get in my bed at seven o'clock at night and not do anything except for be in my bed with my baby and sometimes just be in my bed and know that my baby was like safe out in the living room with my mother-in-law or my husband or you know, even my seven year old at that time could like make laps around the house with the baby.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: So that birth experience for me was healing in a lot of ways because of what I had experienced with my first baby and really set me up for owning how I wanted to parent and how I wanted to show up for my kids and how I wanted to show up for the world in general.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: Right Like, I think, those second babies for a lot of people they really like they push us into our you know, our, our true humanness and um, I'm our true humanness and um I'm.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: I just love him for that and I can see you know like who he was in pregnancy and his birth is like so much how he is as a human being, very like calm and quiet and gentle and just like able to be present without being like overpowering by any stretch, without being like overpowering by any stretch.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: My third baby she brought the fire to this family.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: We didn't know with any of our kids what the sex of you know.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: We didn't know if we were having boys or girls, um, but her pregnancy was a totally different experience.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: Like I knew that I was not done having babies after my second was born, but I didn't really know when she was coming through.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: You know, like I couldn't.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: I couldn't feel her in the same way that I could feel my second son, um, and then I was still nursing him when I got pregnant with her and knew very clearly by that time that I would probably have another unassisted pregnancy this time and birth.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: I was living on Long Island when I had my babies and so only nurse midwives are able to practice on Long Island and so that what I knew of that care at that time did not, it wasn't in alignment with like who I had become as a person and how I wanted to be cared for.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Or you know, have someone witness me.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: And I kind of went back to my, my midwife and I said I, I kind of want to do this, but I want to be able to be in contact with you.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: And she was like that's fine, but you still have to pay my full fee.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: And I just was like I, I can't, I can't do that, I'm not going to do that.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: And my sister, who still lived in Maine, was like, oh, this midwife just moved in like right under my house.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: You should reach out to them and just come here and have your baby.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: And so that is what we did.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: And so the Sokope Valley midwives were my midwives for my third baby and they really supported me.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: I felt like I was able to just say to them this is what I'm looking for, this is what I'm open to, and they really went out on a limb with me in a lot of ways and at the time that was Brenda and Lindsay, and Lindsay was really the midwife that I spent the most time talking with and she would be on the phone with me for hours before I came up to Maine to have the baby and I was just really open with them, that I felt like I wanted an unassisted birth and they were fully supportive of that and made room for me for that.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: And, of course, the second I had any kind of like oh, I think this is labor.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: I wanted them so badly.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: I can remember calling Lindsay and just being like I think I'm in labor and she was like uh-huh, I was like I think I need you to come and she just she didn't ask me any questions, she just heard me and she just came and I can remember her getting there and just like kind of like falling into her arms, like I I don't know to this day I don't know like what that was, like I, but you know, like I really feel like my daughter called her in, like we needed her to be in that space with us.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: I don't know why, but I felt completely loved and held and that really.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: Let me kind of just go through her birth experience and her birth was hard and fast and furious and noisy and beautiful and beautiful.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: Just, it was so much.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: But her pregnancy was also like that, like I, I was tired, I was gigantic, I didn't feel well, but I didn't feel horrible either.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: I just, you know it was like an extreme opposite of like what I had just come from in my last birth and so that was kind of hard for me to like wrap my brain around.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: But you know she she was born with the sunrise and no, it was.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: You know she was born into my hands.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: They really, you know, lindsay was present with me and at one point I remember like asking her to like put her hands down and help me and she very gently did, without being like intrusive and then kind of like backed away, but I was really grateful to have her just like be there.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: And I can remember her saying to me at like the perfect time which, as a midwife now, I'm like Ooh, how do I recreate that for other people having their babies?
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: Because she just said to me your baby is going to slide right into your hands, and it was like the only thing I heard.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: She was totally like behind me and not really in my space, but she said it at the exact perfect time.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: And then my daughter did.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: She just like slid into my hands and it was wonderful.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: And her postpartum was actually probably my hardest postpartum because we then had to travel back to Long Island.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: So I had this like young child right, three and a half, a newborn and a school age child that needed to be back on Long Island to start school, and so you know, there was kind of like this whole series of events that happened, like once we got back to Long Island, one of my, the baby got sick, the newborn got sick, so we had to go to the hospital with her and then, immediately upon getting out of the hospital with her, the toddler or not really toddler, you know like the young child fell and broke his arm, so that was like back to the emergency room with him and that really like tipped me over this edge that I knew that I was kind of like on this edge of like postpartum depression and anxiety.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: But so my postpartum with my third baby was actually very difficult and I wound up not really having the support that I needed other than my family.
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: You know like by the time I realized that I was not doing okay, it made it even harder to like find the help I needed because I was like so far into my own headspace of like not really being okay.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: My husband would stay home from work some days to make sure that I was okay and that the kids were taken care of.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: And definitely my my in-laws like my mother-in-law and both of my sisters-in-law really stepped up and held me like in a time that I really needed to be held and eventually, after kind of going through a handful of providers that were like well, you didn't have your baby with us, so we can't help you, and the pediatrician says you can't take anti-anxiety medication because you're breastfeeding, and the therapist says, well, stop sleeping with your baby and give your baby a bottle so that you can take this.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: It was like, and I knew in my heart that all of that was not going to actually serve me.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: So I wound up calling the midwife who had been with me for my second baby and she was like, oh yes, come and see me and she put me on anti-anxiety medication, which, like as a human, I don't generally like.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: I feel like there are a lot of other things that we can utilize before we get to that point.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: But I honestly feel like her putting me on anti-anxiety medication at that time in my life possibly saved me, definitely saved my relationship with my children and my husband, and it was like 100% what I needed in that time.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: And so, like that experience for me was humbling in a way that, like man, it was humbling like because I definitely had judgment around people that needed to use, like anxiety medication or depression you know, medication for depression and I can admit that openly.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: It doesn't.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: It makes me feel bad that I you know that, I know that I held that judgment, but then, like, when I really needed it and kind of had that experience with it, it's like, oh, okay, I like I understand this differently now and so, ultimately, that experience like really helped me step further into my parenting, step further into being able to help people in a different capacity and sit with people in a different capacity.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: So those were my birth experiences three very different experiences and three very different humans that I just am.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: I I can't believe how much I like look at them and I'm like, oh yes, this is who you are and I knew you before you came.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: Like this is not surprising at all.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: Like this is absolutely who you are as a human.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: So I, if I'm going to kind of like roll over into like becoming a midwife I think it's interesting because people always ask, you know, it's like always the question like how did you know you were going to become a midwife?
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Like what was the catalyst?
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: And I think for so many people the catalyst is their birth experiences, right?
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: Like they either had these like amazing experiences and they want to like share that, or they had horrible experiences and they they want to, you know, shift the paradigm of what birth is.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: And so they're like I'm going to do this and I'm going to come in and I'm going to make the change, and for me I still don't know the answer to that question.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: It's so interesting because I don't think that my births or my children were my catalyst into midwifery.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: I've always had this kind of reverence for pregnant people and babies and I spent a lot of time as a doula and I did like lactation consulting and placenta encapsulating and I it just kind of like became this natural progression of like well, this is like the thing I do next and it was really a stretch for me because as a human, I hate certifications.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: I hate like all of the the, like the things that we have to go through to be able to say like I am a CPM, like I really like push back against those.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: So like I, the only certification that I actually hold is my CPM, but I worked at.
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: You know, like I, I don't like being put in boxes and I feel like a lot of the times when you have those certifications it puts you in a box, like there are certain things that you have to like.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: You're like beholden to the system, right, and the system is like I don't want to be in that system and that's kind of how I practice midwifery now.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: It's like I'm really struggling with being licensed because I have not been a licensed midwife for the past five years living in New York.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: It was illegal for me to be a midwife, and so, while I was like so excited to come here and be a licensed midwife in Maine and New Hampshire, I'm really struggling with, like what that actually feels like and the rules around like what I can and can't do as a midwife is making me crazy, if I'm being completely honest here.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, so I graduated from midwifery school in the summer of 2017.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: And then I got my CPM in January of 2018 and was kind of up in the air about how I wanted to.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: You know like what I was going to work with the nurse midwife who I had done all of my clinical skills with.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: She brought me on as like her assistant and I'm using air quotes here and we really just continued on the way that I had worked with her as like a senior student, in that I started.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: I continued to just see her, her clientele that were coming into her practice and the people that were coming into her practice like they know that I'm a part of that and they kind of knew what to expect, and so for about two years, I continued to work for her Um, the majority of births we did together, always, of course, like you know, there are those rare occasions where you have two people laboring at the same time and we would split and eventually I just got to the place where I felt like I really needed to.
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: I needed to start learning who I was as a midwife as myself, and not who I was as a midwife under somebody else's practice and their practice philosophies.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: And I love her dearly.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: She gave me a great gift of being my preceptor, because it wasn't easy, because it wasn't legal and it was right around the time that COVID was starting, and so that was kind of like the thing that pushed me to say like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: And I had been doing birth work on Long Island for like over 10 years, maybe even closer to 15.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: And so people, people there knew me right and I had worked in the community for a long time, and so there were certain people that would come to me and say I really want you to be my midwife.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: And those are the people that, like I felt totally safe, being able to like I trusted them empirically to be able to sit with them and know that they had me just as much as I had them.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: And so, yeah, I practiced on Long Island, very quietly and with people that I really trusted, uh, right up until I moved to Maine.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: So we've been here for almost a year and, yeah, I've been working on building this practice and being present on Instagram, which is like one it has been one of.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: Honestly, one of the hardest parts of like starting a practice is like social media and like putting yourself on social media.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: Uh, so I'm I'm really I'm learning and I'm I'm trying so hard to be present and do that.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: It's like I feel like I'm just like a little bit too old, like the people that are that are having babies right now.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: They're, they are on social media right, like that's where they're getting so much of their information and where they're finding their people.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: But like, for me, like I'm like just past that and like I go on social media to like look at pretty pictures and find recipes, so like it just doesn't, it's not the same for me.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel the same way.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: Sometimes I think it's so cool, though, yeah, I agree.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: What?
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: Sometimes I think it's so cool, though, yeah, I agree.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: What's the biggest piece of advice you give to expecting parents?
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: I think the thing that comes up for me is, like what I recognize, that I say to expecting people, is that there are two people right that are that are going through this dance and and you only get to know your part Like you only get to know what, what your part of this dance is, but there's another person that's having their own experience.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: That's like coming through you and so that, coupled with the fact that, like we live in this world where we feel like we want to control everything and it feels stressful when we don't get to control everything, and it feels stressful when we don't get to control everything, like that's the thing you really have to start working on, because you don't get to control birth.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: You can control how you are responding to the experience, but you don't actually get to control the experience.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: And so like recognizing that a lot of your birth experience is like surrendering to however that's going to unfold and that you only get to do your part.
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: There's like a whole nother person that has to do their part, and so like letting go of our expectations and surrendering to the process and like, really, for me, when I was having my babies and they were pretty quick the thing that I came out of it being like was oh, you have to be committed to this experience.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: Because, even as someone that was like yeah, I am not having a needle put in my back like 100%, no way.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: I still had to be like, no, no, this is what we wanted, we're gonna, we're gonna stay home and we're gonna make it through this.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: Like that commitment is like serious.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: You got to be like no, no, this is what we wanted, we're going to, we're going to stay home and we're going to make it through this.
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: Like that commitment is like serious.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: You got to be like really committed.
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, taking your mind out of it is like you have to.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: If you can't, it's that's a lot of work.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: I could not agree more with all of that.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much, gail, for sharing your story today.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you for having me on.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: Before you go, I just want to remind you I have a ton of resources for pregnancy and birth If you're pregnant, whether you're a first time mom or if this is your fifth baby.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: I want you to check out the show notes, because I have some free trainings and free downloads that you can sign up for, as well as the link to access my labor of love, a comprehensive, self-paced online childbirth education course.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: I created this course specifically for moms who don't want to be told what to do, regardless of where you're birthing or who you're birthing with, and I'd honestly love to teach you everything that I know so that you can prepare for an autonomous birth experience and prepare to step into your role as the leader of your birth journey.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: So click to the show notes, check out all of those links and, if you ever have any questions, feel free to DM me at my main birth over on Instagram.