Previously by Carly Lane.

Growing up, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by birth.

I’m rarely a latchkey kid who frequently comes home to an empty house at the end of a school day. My little sister and I make the trek home from the bus stop, let ourselves in, and ease our backpacks from our aching shoulders. Our mother greets us from wherever she was in the house, asks us about our day, fixes us a snack while we start in on our homework. But there are times when the house is empty, when the front door is locked and I have to make the unfamiliar grab for my keys. There’s the note left on the table in my mom’s looping handwriting: With a client, be back late. Love, Mom.

She isn’t working late in an office, though, or sitting through a dragging conference call. When my mom says “client,” what she means is “mom in labor.”

My mom has interchangeable words for the women she supports in her profession — her clients, or more frequently, her moms. The fact that any one of them can go into labor at any moment means that her hours are decidedly not the traditional 9 to 5. Time waits for no one, and it certainly never waits for a baby.

It never strikes me as odd, trying to explain what my mother does for a living. I often have to repeat myself when someone poses the question. “Doula” is a foreign word to many ears —  it comes from the Greek doulē, meaning “woman who serves.” I repeat the word when looks of confusion persist, and offer a helpful definition where needed. But I have never thought of the job as anything out of the ordinary. My mom is a doula, and that’s that.

“Local Mom Says ‘Try Apples Instead’”
—The Dawson Dispatch on Dolores Huerta’s leadership of the Delano Grape Strike, September 8, 1965

“Local Mom has a Passion for Acting”
—The Summit Record on Meryl Streep’s 18th Oscar nomination, January 19, 2011

“Local Mom Voted National Mom.”
—The South Chicago Bulletin on Michelle Obama becoming the first African-American First Lady, November 10, 2008

Previously: The Ur-Dad story.

I do not often find myself swarming with conflicted emotions; like Tinkerbell I feel things so intensely I am capable of holding no more than one emotion at a time. One and a half puts me at capacity, and I am liable to begin leaking transmission fluid.