My Story…
I was born at the Bowie Memorial Hospital in the late 1970s and grew up in the house in the nearby neighborhood-the same house my parents still live in today. I attended Bowie schools, class of 1994. My husband and I married in 1995 and our first baby was born two years later, in the middle of my junior year at Texas Woman’s University.
I planned to be a marriage and family therapist but it never felt like the right time to get my Master’s degree, so we raised a family instead. In time we’d have a total of five daughters and start Wise Choices, the pregnancy resource center in Decatur.
By the time we had our third baby, I started questioning the cookie cutter treatment in maternity care. Wise Regional didn’t know what to do with that back in 2003 so some harsh words were spoken by a nurse when I refused unnecessary interventions for my baby. That started my passion to educate women on their options.
When our last baby was a year old I became a doula so I could help women navigate their pregnancies and births. I assumed I’d serve mainly in Decatur since I knew many of the nurses and it was close to home. Providence would have it that I ended up in Wichita Falls instead, serving around 200 families as a doula and many more as a childbirth educator during my ten year doula career.
As a doula, I had encountered many families in the Wichita Falls are who wanted a community based birth. I was honored to be part of a team of business owners and mothers that came together to open Wichita Falls Birth & Wellness Center in 2017. I helped in the office but longed to be equipping and educating the women in prenatal care visits.
I decided midwifery was where I belonged. I sat for national boards (called the NARM) in February of 2020, passed and became a Certified Professional Midwife and then was granted my Texas license in April of 2020.
I worked part time as a staff midwife at the Wichita Falls Birth and Wellness Center until April 2021, when I decided to focus on getting involved back in my own community. I spent some time seeing clients and assisting midwives in a local birth center, attended a handful of home births, and now have an office inside of True Health & Fitness in Bowie, TX seeing home birth clients and clients for prenatal care through my Providence Prenatal Care Program.
Shane and I are still involved in Wise Choices where he is President of the Board of Directors. We attend Community Church in Decatur. Shane works for Wise County. Currently, our oldest two daughters and sons-in-law live nearby, one daughter lives in Arizona, the youngest two are teenagers who are home schooled. We are Papa-boo and Wendybird to one granddaughter named Scarlett. We live on 15 acres in the country with our daughter’s cows and 11 chickens.