A Postpartum Doula offers a wide range of skills to her clients: guidance in newborn care, emotional support, breastfeeding assistance, looking after the baby while the parents sleep, running errands, cooking, and light housework. As a Doula, it was a delightful adventure not knowing how I would spend my time that day. I could find myself shopping at Trader Joe's and stocking my client's fridge for the week, holding her baby while she napped, doing laundry and washing dishes, giving a swaddling lesson or baby's first bath, or helping them to interpret baby's cues.

As I gained confidence in my own knowledge and skills over the years, I realized that my focus had been on developing my own abilities to step in and support my clients, and I had enjoyed being able to be the person that "got them through" that initial tough postpartum period. What I discovered was that if I only focused on my own skills, that didn't necessarily support them in finding their own identity and confidence as parents. I became less interested in taking their baby into my arms and doing it myself, and focused instead on encouraging them to learn the skills themselves. With this shift came a wonderful knowledge that when I left for the day, my clients felt stronger and more empowered as parents, and more confident in caring for and comforting their baby.

I spent less and less time in other aspects of Postpartum Doula care like housework and errands, and clients soon began requesting specific times for consultation around the issues that they found most helpful to process with me, often around sleep, or feeding challenges, or learning the nuances of their baby's communications.

So in January of 2008, I decided to honor the path that my work was taking, and to redefine who I was as a practitioner. Taking services like cleaning and shopping off the table meant that we could focus on that which they found most helpful, which allowed them to need fewer visits and to feel more empowered, because we were addressing the issues that created so much of the need for support in the first place. In acknowledgement of this transition, I began to call my work exactly what it is: Postpartum Consultation.