“Help me,” I whisper, eyes squeezed shut. Marisa Wright is at my shoulder, repeating my name, and she breathes slowly with me, supporting my efforts to relax as much as possible before the next contraction comes. The lit-up windows of Community Medical Center illuminate the falling snow outside, and at 1:35 a.m. on election night in 2022, my baby is born.
It’s a typical day—or, really, night—for Marisa, who has been a birth doula since 2012. In fact, another client of hers arrived at the hospital while I labored, so she splits her time between both our rooms for the next hour.
“It’s amazing absolutely every time,” Marisa said. “I learn from every single birth and every single person.”
Marisa, a native Missoulian and mother of two, was drawn to birth work because of her own first birth experience.
“I was always that person who people felt comfortable sharing the hard things with,” she said. “My birth didn’t go as planned, and I really wished in that moment that I had someone to hold space for me, guide my nervous system and heart through that.”
Now a Certified Birth and Postpartum Doula through DONA International, she did her first doula training with her 5-month-old in tow. She is also a lactation consultant and a Certified Spinning Babies Parent Educator.
“A lot of what I do for people is normalizing and tending the worries of labor that our culture is so good at instilling,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what my philosophy on birth is, it’s what’s your philosophy and how can I support that.”
Marisa often partners with fellow doula Kendra Potter, who steps in if Marisa is attending another birth or otherwise unable to support a client as planned. The two have worked together for over five years, and they first met because Marisa was Kendra’s doula for the birth of her second child.
“She’s deeply trusting of bodies,” Kendra said. “I really appreciate that she has education around the shape of the pregnant body and how the position of the pregnant body can inform the baby’s presentation as they make their way down.”
Marisa’s non-profit, Mother Moon Project, uses fundraising and sponsorship to make holistic prenatal and postpartum care more financially accessible, meshing perfectly with her view that doulas help connect pregnant families with other helpful resources in the community, such as pelvic floor physical therapy and chiropractic care. Kendra emphasized Marisa’s great relationships with healthcare providers in Missoula.
“That gives her access that not all doulas get,” she said. “There are a lot of choices that are available, even if you’re in a hospital scenario where your provider is making strong suggestions about the ways we might go about a baby coming into the world.”
Kendra compared giving birth with doula support to visiting Rome and staying with a local, not just reading the guidebook.
“That to me is what a doula can provide in the birth space—little tips and tricks from someone who knows their way around birth,” she said. “When we don’t feel like we have all the information, we don’t feel safe, and that’s when we don’t dilate, or when we resist and fight.”
Marisa said that transformations like pregnancy, birth, and postpartum can bring up a lot of feelings that our culture is not always good at honoring, or even recognizing.
“There’s a box of tissues in my office for a reason,” she said. “Any transitional phase is going to bring shedding of layers, bring up how you were raised, how you want to parent, which is really confronting for some people. More and more people are having babies later, so you’ve lived the majority of life an independent, autonomous being. Shifting into caretaking 24/7, we don’t talk about the transition, and the amount of grief that can come in. Holding opposites—extreme joy and hard grief—is a really human, normal experience.”
Opposites, and the continuum between, recently drew Marisa to death doula work.
“That thought of birth and death are on the same threshold and you’re either coming or going,” she said. “Why can’t we bring the same beauty into death, as birth, at that threshold?”
Marisa’s business is called Sacred Roots to capture these themes. “There’s a sacred edge in beautiful things, but there’s also a sacred edge in the really hard,” she said.
Her words resonate with me, pregnant again.
“You have to let go and let the current take you,” said Marisa, who enjoys river rafting. “There’s that moment when you want to get away from the sensations—the pitch gets higher, breathing gets faster, now fear has taken over. We’re your banks. We can’t do the work for you, but we’ve got you.”
Make a Sitz Bath!
1 part of each dried Calendula, lavender, witch hazel and plantain. For each bath use a combined cup or half cup (depending on preference), steep at least an hour in 32oz freshly boiled water, overnight preferred. Add a half cup or full cup (again, depending on preference) of sea salt to a bath with the herbal mix. Bathe up to 2-3 times/day for up to 20 minutes. Make sure not to have the bath too hot, or sit for more than 20 minutes, to avoid dissolving stitches.
“There’s a sacred edge in beautiful things, but there’s also a sacred edge in the really hard." - Marisa Wright