As a midwife, I feel both humbled and honored to take part in work that has been carried forward by generations of women before me.

I understand that I am standing in a stream that has been flowing for a very long time.

Long before certifications, licensing boards, hospitals, birth centers, fetal monitors, ultrasound machines, and continuing education conferences, women were helping women bring babies into the world.

Some of what they learned was written down.

Much of it wasn't.

It was carried through stories, observation, experience, prayer, curiosity, community, and hands-on care. Passed from woman to woman, generation to generation.

MATRIA was named in honor of that inheritance.

Not an inheritance of property or status, but an inheritance of knowledge.

Milk lines.

Bloodlines.

Stories told around kitchen tables.

Grandmothers sharing what they knew.

Mothers teaching daughters.

Midwives teaching apprentices.

Women comparing notes, noticing patterns, asking questions, refining what they knew, and passing it along.

Birth knowledge did not begin in a university, a hospital, or a certification program.

And yet I am deeply grateful for the knowledge, education, skills, and tools available to us today.

I don't believe wisdom belongs exclusively to the past, nor do I believe every new idea is automatically progress.

Midwives have always observed, adapted, questioned, learned from one another, and shared what they discovered.

Some of that learning now comes through research, technology, and formal education.

Some of it still comes through observation, experience, stories, relationships, and the accumulated wisdom of generations.

Rather than choosing between them, I find myself drawn to the places where those threads meet.

Between clinical skill and traditional wisdom.

Between bodywork and midwifery.

Between what has been carefully studied and what women have carefully observed.

Between mothers and daughters.

Between the women who came before us and the women who will come after us.

My own work is rooted most deeply in the traditional and physiological understanding of birth, one that values relationship, observation, hands-on wisdom, continuity of care, and trust in the body's design.

I am most at home in approaches that begin with observation, relationship, curiosity, and respect for physiology before assuming intervention is necessary.

The history of midwifery is not a single story.

It is a tapestry woven from many traditions, cultures, lineages, perspectives, discoveries, and ways of understanding birth.

Some knowledge was passed through families and communities.

Some was preserved through apprenticeship.

Some was documented and studied.

Some emerged through careful observation.

Some through curiosity.

Some through necessity.

Some through generations of women asking questions and sharing what they learned.

I have deep respect for the many people who have devoted their lives to preserving, teaching, studying, documenting, and advancing this work.

For the traditional midwives who carried knowledge through changing times.

For the educators and teachers who gathered wisdom from many sources and shared it freely.

For those who worked to ensure that midwifery knowledge would continue to be available to future generations.

And for the countless mothers, babies, families, and birth workers whose experiences continue to shape what we know.

As a believer, I see pregnancy, birth, and motherhood as sacred work.

I also believe wisdom can be found in many places.

While I filter everything through my own faith, values, training, and understanding, I have deep respect for the women who carried this work before me and for the knowledge that survived because they were willing to preserve it, question it, refine it, and pass it forward.

Women have been studying birth for far longer than any profession, institution, or credentialing body has existed.

I am grateful to be part of that ongoing conversation.

To learn from those who came before me.

To share what I've been given.

And to perhaps add a few threads of my own to the tapestry along the way.