Public health professor by day, doula by night (and sometimes also by day). A secret identity, or are these roles really working toward the same goal?

Yeah, I wish that was me in the Wonder Woman photo! A few months ago, my husband and I watched one of the more recent Wonder Woman movies. Apparently he had a boyhood crush and poster of Lynda Carter in his bedroom. She made a cameo appearance at the end, as if to prove that we women can both remake ourselves and build on previous successes. I’ve always had conflicting feelings about the Wonder Woman image, the lady who can do everything and do it with poise. Sometimes I loved the image of female strength and felt a surge of pride when someone would see me juggling my roles as graduate student (and later professional) and mother of four small children and call me “Wonder Woman.” Other times, I hated it and wanted to scream that I didn’t want to have to be Wonder Woman, I just wanted a little help. If only I had known what a doula was back then!

Today, I am thinking about another aspect of the Wonder Woman story, how Diana was an admittedly gorgeous and talented, but basically normal, woman who occasionally donned a secret, superhero identity in order to go and fight evil. And I am thinking about how for many of us doulas who juggle this work with another job or role in life, being a doula can often feel like a secret, superhero identity. When a client in labor calls me in the middle of the night and I put on my doula uniform to head to the hospital, I can imagine Wonder Woman feeling a similar rush of excitement as she pulls on her “Golden Eagle Armor.”

I wonder why being a doula often feels like such a secret identity. After all, to succeed in this business we need clients, and that means we need people to know about us! Sometimes there may be a fear that one’s various roles don’t “gel,” or even that our other jobs will look unfavorably on “moonlighting” as a doula.

What’s my secret identity? I teach public health at Samford University and I provide doula support for clients giving birth. I came to this career combination by a winding pathway; I suppose many of us did. I started college as a pre-med but decided I didn’t want the lifestyle demanded of a physician. I fell in love with an elective course I took on “Anthropology and Public Health,” even though I hadn’t previously known about either of these fields. Learning about different cultures fascinated me, and applying that knowledge to improving health opportunities for the population gave me a sense of purpose for my academic studies. Then I got married, started having babies, and decided to start a graduate program in anthropology. I got to conduct research on parents’ vaccine decision-making. I was young then, so I had the energy to be a Wonder Woman (at least sometimes). Then life moved me and my family to Wales, I needed a job, and I eventually found myself working, not always comfortably, in a business school! I really wanted to get back into something related to health, and some kind of hands-on work with parents and young children. Several times I nearly quit to study midwifery, but I could never figure out how to make the required clinical shifts, at hospitals in three different cities, work with my responsibilities as a single mom. When an opportunity to apply for a public health professor job aligned with the need to bring my children back closer to our extended families in America, I jumped with both feet. Now I could work toward instilling a love of population health and cultural awareness in a new generation of health professionals. I could engage with my new community of Birmingham, Alabama. I could dive into topics like maternal-child health and the disparities surrounding it. But I still wished that I had a hands-on way to do something, not just talk about it.

When Covid hit us in 2020 we spent the spring and summer working from home, and I had some time to explore options I hadn’t been able to before. I signed up for a doula training with BirthWell Partners Community Doula Program. In my training, I saw how structural factors in our city were influencing birth outcomes and maternal-child health, and I met many wonderful people from my community who were working to support people giving birth and address these issues. Then I began serving clients and attending births myself. Wow. How different it felt providing hands-on care (literally, as in spending hours offering a hip squeeze or popping a new heat pack for each contraction), compared with the reading and talking that I was used to in my other job! I loved it, and decided to cross-certify with ProDoula so that I could build my professional identity as a doula and support even more people. I am proud to now be a ProDoula-certified labor doula, VBAC specialist, and postpartum & infant care doula.

And yet, as different and as powerful as it felt to be in the birthing room offering hands-on support, I realized that this work is another piece of the same work I had been doing all along. While no doula can claim credit or responsibility for the outcome of a birth – our job is to support the birthgiver through whatever circumstances might arise – doula support does make a difference in helping clients feel more empowered to identify their needs and speak up for them, in providing resources, in addressing fears, and in learning to care for a newborn. All of these things do make a difference, one client and one birth at a time, to those disparities we talked about in my doula training and in the public health classes I teach. I can’t claim direct credit for outcomes, but I do see my role as a doula and my role as a public health professor as contributing to the same goals. Maybe I don’t have such a secret identity, after all. Then again, Diana Prince didn’t become a different person when she donned her suit as Wonder Woman, she just took on a new set of abilities to face the problems she always cared about.