by Ashli Crew Rodriguez | Jun 10, 2026 | Labor, Parenting, Personal Stories, Postpartum, Pregnancy
You are not the same person you were before you became pregnant. That’s not a metaphor. Your brain is rewiring. Your body is reorganizing itself at the cellular level. Your nervous system is recalibrating, preparing for a profound shift in identity, in time, in...
by Ashli Crew Rodriguez | May 29, 2026 | Labor, Parenting, Personal Stories, Postpartum, Pregnancy
Birth doesn’t always end when the baby is born. For many people, there’s a period afterward where the mind keeps returning to moments from labor and delivery—replaying conversations, sensations, decisions, or emotions while trying to make sense of the experience as a...
by Ashli Crew Rodriguez | Apr 27, 2026 | Labor, Personal Stories, Postpartum, Pregnancy
There is a stretch of time in a person’s life that doesn’t always get named for what it truly is. It begins, for some, with the thought of becoming—with fertility, with trying, with waiting, with wondering, with questions that don’t always have immediate answers. And...
by Ashli Crew Rodriguez | Apr 10, 2026 | Labor, Personal Stories
There are moments in birth where things don’t unfold the way someone imagined. Not all at once, and not always in a way that’s easy to name in the moment. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s after hours of labor, or quiet conversations, or a growing awareness that...
by Ashli Crew Rodriguez | Feb 20, 2026 | Labor, Postpartum, Pregnancy
In my last pregnancy, there was a clear moment when I realized my body was asking for something different. What I could do easily in the second trimester—the movement, the pace, the keeping up—I simply couldn’t sustain in the later weeks. And instead of pushing...
by Ashli Crew Rodriguez | Feb 13, 2026 | Labor, Pregnancy
We never stop learning in birth work. Every family, every labor, every conversation teaches us something new. Research evolves. Language shifts. Our understanding deepens. And still, in the middle of all that learning, there are moments when it’s comforting to fall...
