What Makes Birth Sacred? with Tema Mercado

Introduction and Welcome

Britta Bushnell: Hello, folks, and welcome to Transformed by Birth, a podcast about the rite of passage of pregnancy, birth, and new parenthood. I'm your host, Britta Bushnell, author, mythologist, childbirth educator, and an all-around deep diver with a side of goofball, I'm so glad you're here. Today we're talking about the art of midwifery and the sacred in birth and birth work. So grab your comfy beverage of choice, or take us along for a walk as we connect with licensed midwife and perinatal professional. Oh, I'm going to need help saying this? Okay, my Spanish is so bad. I'm going to try it again. Partera Profesional Certificada.

Tema Mercado: Correct.

Candle Lighting: Honoring What's Sacred in Birth

Britta Bushnell: Yay. Okay. Thank you for correcting me and giving me support there with Tema Mercado. Before we begin, we start the way we always do by lighting a candle. If you want to join me, please do, or just take a breath as I light mine. Today's candle is an honor of what is sacred in birth giving. Some people give birth in hospitals. Some birth surgically, while others give birth at home or in water or in the wilderness or in their grandmother's kitchen. So, what makes a birth transformative? What makes it sacred? Is it the location? Is it the care they receive, or how the birth unfolds? Many say what really matters is how you are treated in birth.

Meet Tema Mercado: Licensed Midwife and Partera Profesional Certificada

Britta Bushnell: My guest today had a realization about birth that became the catalyst for everything that followed. In her late 20s, after already having given birth herself, she visited a friend who had just had a baby. Hearing her friend describe a magical natural birth with doula support, with reverence, flooded Tema with emotion and a question: Why hadn't her births been like that? She hadn't even known those kinds of births were possible. Tema Mercado is a licensed midwife in California and a partera profesional certificada in Mexico, she's the founder of La Matriz Birth Services, San Diego's first fully bilingual midwifery practice, and Monarch Midwives, a nonprofit supporting student midwives of color, and currently building a birth center in historic Barrio Logan,

Tema Mercado: Logan,

Britta Bushnell: Logan. Thank you. She is also one of only a handful of spinning babies trainers. Tema became a mother at 15. Her first babies were born in highly medicalized hospital settings when she was young and had few options. After discovering midwifery, she had three more children, all born outside the hospital. That lived experience, both the trauma and the transformation, grounds her practice in deep compassion and non-judgment. Tema believes that birth work is the foundation of humanity, and she's committed to protecting the sacred and restoring trust in the body, welcome Tema. Thank you for being here. I'm really honored to have you here.

Tema Mercado: Thank you for having me,

Britta Bushnell: and thank you for your help with language. Language outside of English has been really challenging for me. It's a place of shame, and I wish I could do languages better. And I really appreciate corrections. So thank you for your willingness to help me along that. So no

Tema Mercado: problem. I—

Britta Bushnell: kind of want to start with what is midwifery? What is your practice? Can you tell us a little bit about — you know, I shared a little bit of the journey that you share on your website and in your bio, but personalize it for us. Who are you when you are working, and what feeds that?

What Is Midwifery? More Than a Healthcare Provider

Tema Mercado: Who am I when I'm working? Yeah, like

Britta Bushnell: such a

Tema Mercado: good. I feel like for me, midwifery is so special because it allows us to really be more than just kind of one person, more than a healthcare provider. Although, as a midwife, I am a healthcare provider, but sometimes I'm a therapist, and other times I'm a social worker. Sometimes I get to be a mother and a grandmother or an auntie. Other times I get to just be a witness, and other times I'm a protector, and other times I'm all of the above. Yeah. So for me, midwifery is really beautiful because, you know, at least in my home birth practice, we have this opportunity to have a continuity of care that allows us to really build such a solid relationship. Most of the time, that doesn't always happen, right? That doesn't always happen. But I would say a good 90-95% of the time, you get to build a really strong relationship with the client, the family, and this really allows us to navigate more than vitals and childbirth education. It allows us to navigate more than contractions and, you know, remedies. It allows us to really get to see one another. It allows us to just really give people our presence, and to really accept, you know, that birth giver that is in front of you, and I think that's really special. It's really beautiful.

Britta Bushnell: It also, I mean, it takes time to develop that. Like there's a — it's almost like, forgive me for this analogy, but it sounds more like relationship in a slow cooker, rather than a microwave, like the slow simmer of connection across time.

Tema Mercado: Yeah, and I also want to say that it can also happen really quickly. I have had opportunities to meet with somebody, and for whatever reason, they feel very seen or contained, and they feel very connected right away. And me too, you know, because I often — people sometimes kind of give me the side eye or kind of nod their head to the side when I say that I don't actually believe in the patient-centered model of care. I believe it's quite dehumanizing to providers. I believe in a more relationship-based model of care, where the midwife — in this case, the partera — is also seen as human and who can create, you know, scheduling mistakes, and who might need to reschedule you because she came down with the flu, or she forgot it was her kindergartener's zoo field trip, and she promised to take him to the zoo. You know, like that is the kind of relationship I want to enter with people, where I am not being held to this like crazy standard, and then have unrealistic goals in front of them, right? Like, "Oh, Tema is amazing, and because I hired her, my birth is going to be majestic." Like that is the last thing I want people to think.

Relationship-Based Care vs. the Capitalist Model

Britta Bushnell: Yes. Oh, I love that you're saying that because there is a — I mean, I think it comes from a really understandable place, the place of being tender and concerned and unfamiliar heading into birth, to want help with that and looking for people who can support us with that, but giving over to it in a way that is more like, "If I pick the right person or if I have the right team, then I've controlled all the factors, and I will have the outcome I'm looking for." One, it's too much pressure on providers, and two, it's unrealistic.

Tema Mercado: Yes, and that kind of thinking can really put the blinders on for you, even though you don't realize that that is what is happening. But also, like, if we unpack the layers, you see that it's actually a very capitalistic model. If I invest in the right product or in the right service or the right provider, then I expect to have this type of customer service or this type of item in return — it's very transactional, and that dehumanizes yes, the midwife, but it also dehumanizes the birth giver.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah,

Tema Mercado: because it's not about how much you can give or who you even have access to. There's so many things that are out of our control, and you know, sometimes when I get really frustrated, I'll sometimes come home and I'll tell my husband, like, "Man, I'm not a magician and I'm not God. What do people want from me?" You know, and it's a real point of frustration that — yes, I look at it very, very tenderly, but I also understand this is this overarching culture of capitalism that makes us believe that you can exchange one thing for the other, and

Artemis and Apollo: The Body as Animal, Not Machine

Britta Bushnell: yeah, and in a human animal experience, that's a fallacy. It doesn't belong there. Yeah, but it's so woven into sort of the over culture messaging that it can be unconscious,

Tema Mercado: right?

Britta Bushnell: And then needing to consciously unpack that. I really appreciate you bringing that lens to it because there is that feeling of transaction. I am giving you this, therefore you give me this back, and birth doesn't work like that.

Tema Mercado: No, and relationships

Britta Bushnell: don't work that way.

Tema Mercado: Yeah, nature as it is does not work that way, and nature is really beautiful, and we depend on it, and it's pretty reliable, but it can also be very chaotic, and it has an entire cycle, you know, where it's not just birth, birth, birth.

Britta Bushnell: Yes, yeah. I mean, I use Greek mythology a lot in my work, and I talk about the twins Artemis and Apollo as representing some of these energies, and Apollo is a sun god, and he likes things ordered, and he's associated with laws and medicine and poetry and music and things that elevate the human condition, and then Artemis, who is the wilderness — and in the overculture here, we put a lot of focus and energy on that Apollonian side of things as being primary, and then Artemis, who is very closely connected with birth, is kind of like, "How do we make this ordered and structured and fit into this context over here?" But we are, as human bodies — I mentioned to you when we got on before we started recording that I'm not feeling 100% in my body today, and I'm feeling physically depleted, and I'm not a faulty machine — that's not — I'm a body, I'm an animal, and I've got a cyclical process, and one of my cycles was sleep last night, which did not happen well.

Tema Mercado: Yeah, yes,

Britta Bushnell: yeah. So we have these things, and birth really brings those to the forefront for us to look at and see. Yeah. So you work as a midwife, and there's a lot of different types of midwifery that people may be familiar with. How do you describe — are you a traditional midwife? Are you a licensed midwife? Are you a certified nurse midwife? There's different ways of practicing. Can you share a little bit about how you hold the art of midwifery in your way of being?

Licensed Midwife, Partera, and the Question of Tradition

Tema Mercado: Well, I am technically a licensed midwife, and I hold a license here in the state of California. I went the direct entry route, so I skipped nursing school and I went straight into the degree of midwifery, and I received my license through the California Medical Board. But I actually refer to myself as a partera, which is just the word for midwife in Spanish, and that's very intentional, because that is my way of stating out loud that the work that I do innately has cultural value and significance, but also because I want Spanish speakers to identify me really fast. That's why my business name is La Matriz, which means the uterus, but it also means the center of everything — which is the uterus — and it's interesting because even though you won't find this anywhere on my website or on my socials, you'll never hear me say it out loud: many people conclude or assume that I am a traditional midwife, and I don't actually consider myself a traditional midwife, even though there are certain things that I practice traditionally, not only in midwifery but also in my personal life. I wasn't trained traditionally, and also, I don't serve a traditional community, so the math wouldn't math, right? Because in order for me to be a traditional midwife, I would be learning within my community, which — I am very removed from my ancestral homelands — and I would be training with my community and within those traditional values. That's not the experience I had, even though I do have midwives in my lineage, I did not get to learn from them because they had all passed by the time I was born. So I like to differentiate that, and also just remind folks: if I were a traditional midwife, I don't know how that would translate into my actual setting and my environment. It is hard enough to ask my clients to lay in for 40 days. I am lucky if they do it for two weeks, and so if I were to get real traditional on them, I don't think people would — it would be too much of a shock, because traditions are patterns that have been established very early on,

Britta Bushnell: and they're held by community.

Postpartum Traditions and the Overculture Gap

Tema Mercado: Yes, they're held by community and the family, the lifestyle — everything is already set up to hold these patterns and these traditions.

Britta Bushnell: And when we take it outside of that, it's sometimes like — I think about lying in 40 days, or even the five days in the bed, five days on the bed, five days around the bed. Those kinds of postpartum messaging — sometimes those can be really hard for families in the Western U.S. kind of bland culture, the overculture place, in part because it's not held by tradition, even if those parents deeply want

Britta Bushnell (cont.): it,

Britta Bushnell: like they don't know how to do that. It's — they're like, "Why is this failing me? Why am I not able to do 40 days?" Well, part of it is it's not — it's not held. It's not honored, even if they are trying to honor it.

Tema Mercado: Yeah,

Britta Bushnell: yeah, yeah, and then they can feel like they're the one failing when actually it's the system and the structure around them that is probably creating a gap.

Tema Mercado: Absolutely,

Britta Bushnell: yeah,

Tema Mercado: yeah.

Britta Bushnell: Okay, so I jumped in on that, but what else were you gonna say about working within your community — so who are you working with?

Serving San Diego's Mexican and Latino Families

Tema Mercado: Here in San Diego County, I would say maybe the bulk of the clients that I serve are families that identify as Mexicano or Mexican, or who identify as some sort of Latin American, but maybe they've been here for a couple of generations, and many times these families are wanting to have midwifery care, but they also want cultural elements to their prenatal and postpartum care. I've had people literally say, "I want to hire your team because my mother and my mother-in-law are going to be there, and we want somebody to be able to speak in Spanish with them," or they want to work with us because they want somebody who has a shared living experience, and I also get clients who are wanting somebody who is very trauma informed. They do some trauma informed work, and yeah, that's why I see —

Britta Bushnell: And how important do you think culturally connected care is in the perinatal period?

Tema Mercado: I mean, I think it's very connected, and oftentimes for first — especially first gen people who are the children of migrants — there's often this longing, and there's grief, and there's also the struggles of shame, of maybe struggling a little bit more because your parents were migrants or couldn't guide you through school, couldn't understand the teacher at the parent-teacher conference meetings. So oftentimes there is a feeling of security and safety when they're working with somebody who understands that experience and who you don't have to explain that experience to. So for me, midwifery care — I have a really good friend, her name is Anna Ruth, and she's a therapist. And one time I was talking to her, explaining that maybe I needed to take a couple of classes on therapy because so much of the prenatal visits that we do — we do one-hour prenatal visits — they turn into almost what feel like therapy sessions, except I'm not a therapist and I didn't study for that. And she's listening to me, and at the end of what I explained to her, she looks at me and goes, "Tema, midwifery is therapy. What you are doing is mental health care. Just spending an hour listening to somebody, hearing somebody, even if you don't have therapist skills — what you are doing, that is mental health care."

Midwifery as Mental Health Care

Britta Bushnell: Deep listening and responding and connecting heart to heart. Yes, I mean, so many of us are starved for deep listening.

Tema Mercado: Yes, and so I feel like there's a lot of unpacking that happens during the pregnancy, and many times when we're having these conversations prenatally, it's not necessarily about "I'm scared of giving birth," or "I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this," or "I don't know if I'm ready to be a mom." People go so deep, they go into some of their core wounds.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah,

Tema Mercado: these core wounds begin to surface for them, and so we are helping hold these core wounds. One of the things — I offer a mentorship cohort for birth workers, and one of the ways I open up one of the first classes is I ask everybody, "What brought you to birth work?" And many times the response is like, "Oh, we're helpers. We want to help. We want to make birth better for people. We want to uplift mothers and babies." And I tell them, "Yeah, and also it's your wounds. Your wounds bring you to this work, and your wounds love you so much that they help you identify the means in which you can heal, even if those wounds are not birth related. It might be a mother-daughter wound. It might be an abandonment wound." But I find that birth work is so special because I tell my mentees, when we attend a birth, there's an imaginary altar that shows up at every single birth. It doesn't matter the circumstances or the environment. That imaginary birth altar is there, and if you show up to this birth with reverence, with love and respect, you too receive blessings from just being in the presence of this altar, and those blessings can bring you to a place of transformation and of healing. But it's not always going to feel that way at the beginning, because first the wounds will surface. First, the wounds will ache and say, "Look at me. I'm here. Tend to me. I want you to heal this part of you. You can do it. Look, you can see me now. You can see I'm still open." And yeah.

Wounds, the Birth Altar, and the Crying Bench

Britta Bushnell: You're bringing tears pricking into my eyes because I think — yes, this is therapeutic work whether you're a therapist or not, you're touching on such deep places, and I can feel it in myself as you're speaking about the wounds — I don't know if it's that they become unearthed, or there's a crack and a visibility of them in the work, and in being in a space where there is this birth altar you're speaking to, where birth itself is sacred. There is so much happening, regardless of where it's occurring or how it's occurring — there's an openness to other that touches the heart, and sometimes, as you were saying, it isn't necessarily in the way you imagine. It's like sometimes after a birth, I just want to cry. It's not — I mean, yes, there's — it's being moved, and I'm loving, you know, but sometimes it's truly that it's just raw and it's hard, and it's hitting something that is profound and deeply, deeply vulnerable.

Tema Mercado: Yeah, and this happens too for people when they're pregnant, because they're so close to that openness or to that otherworldly holiness, like great mystery that we cannot fully understand, as

Britta Bushnell: yes

Tema Mercado: humans on this earth quite yet. But I see that surfacing, and I don't actually see that as a bad thing, because in order for those wounds to surface, there has to be enough health for those to surface. Because if the body does not have enough health, the body is very, very wise and will not let you see it, or the brain. So there has to be enough health, and I believe that health can be built by providing safety in the container. And so in my office, I have a little bench, and that's where people sit when they come in for their visits, and I call it the crying bench. And most people will cry on that bench, and I tell them, when they start crying, I say, "It's okay. You're on the crying bench. That's what happens when you sit here." But I know it's not about the bench. It's about the little container that I get to build for them. It's a little mess where they get to feel safe, so that there's enough health for that to emerge, and that is a very positive thing, because that means they're not lost. That means we can take a good look at what needs to be tended to,

Britta Bushnell: and in that tending, you've created a container that can hold them in that tenderness — it's all connected. You're holding, and I love that you have a bench that is named for the tears, because there's the tears — I also find that when I'm teaching classes, the likelihood that tears will flow is pretty much — I don't think there's ever been a group class where there have been no tears. So at some point in the journey, there are tears, and I love how you describe that there's enough health to allow that. Yeah, that's

Tema Mercado: yeah, and I tell people that our wounds love us,

Tema Mercado (cont.): and when they poke their head out, it's not to re-injure us. It's to say, "Hey, let's work on this. Let's take care of this." And that happens when there's enough health.

Birth as Humanity's Shared Entryway

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, love that. Everything that you've been sharing already today really gives — the way you think about birth is far more than just clinical. It's spiritual, ancestral, relational. Can you talk a little bit about the different ways that you feel about birth and hold it in context for yourself and your clients?

Tema Mercado: Yeah. Well, first of all, birth is necessary. It's necessary, right? Without it, we literally wouldn't be here. So let's start there.

Britta Bushnell: Let's start with the basics.

Tema Mercado: Yes, and I say this because people talk about birth like it's taboo, and I'm like, it's kind of like everybody's entryway, one

Britta Bushnell: way or another.

Tema Mercado: Yes, yes, yes, because we're all born, you know. Everybody who has ever been on this planet, even if it's only been for a second, we're all born.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah.

Tema Mercado: So this is a shared living experience amongst humanity, and I don't think we can really say that about anything else.

Britta Bushnell: That almost needs like a breath after it, because what you just said sounds like a known thing that we all talk about, but it was actually really profound.

Tema Mercado: Yeah. Well, I guess the only other thing would be death.

Britta Bushnell: Would be death, but we don't get to have consciousness on — we don't know what's on the other side of that, in a way, and you don't get

Tema Mercado: death before birth,

Britta Bushnell: and we — right.

Tema Mercado: So, birth is necessary. That is a necessary part, because even babies, when they're born still or miscarried, they're still birthed, you know. So I like to bring it back to basics, right? Like that is how essential birth is. And even though I provide home birth services, I actually never had any inclination to becoming a medical provider. When I was in high school and you do all of those career tests, I would never score any points in anything that was medical. And when I started my very first college courses, I avoided all of the sciences, because — my whole — I wanted to help. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, or I thought I would go into political science. Maybe I would run for office because I wanted to help people out, and now I literally help people out, and not —

Britta Bushnell: I'm sorry, that's such a good play on words.

Witnessing Transformation, Whatever Form It Takes

Tema Mercado: Yes, but not in the way that I thought, right? And so even though I had to learn how to put an IV and how to interpret labs and how to do blood pressure, for me, that was never my passion. Medicine was never my passion. That was just the boring stuff I had to get through in order to witness people grow, in order to witness people be helped. But for me, the most important thing that I get to witness, that I get to be so lucky to see, is when people grow in a way that betters their life — not because they had a natural birth, not because they had the home birth they wanted, but because they learn something about themselves that they didn't know before, and that something is going to help carry them through the next chapter, or all of the other chapters. One of the things I get to witness that I think is really beautiful is when parents will tell me, "I will never accept anything less than the care you gave us,

Tema Mercado (cont.): the way that you asked before you touched our belly, the way that you explained everything, the type of education, the way you held my hand, the way you braided my hair in labor" — people always remember how you treat them in labor,

Britta Bushnell: yes,

Tema Mercado: and in those first moments postpartum. And sometimes what we get to do is re-imprint on them. We model to them how they deserved to be held, how they deserved to be treated, touched, looked at, spoken to, listened to, and that stays with people, and reminds them that as they walk in the world, they really shouldn't accept anything less. And so when I see that, I'm just like, "Ah, we did good work here" — and the natural physiological birth, great, but sometimes it's not a natural physiological birth. Sometimes we do an emergency transfer with a crash cesarean, with a NICU stay, and for some reason or whatever, their transformation comes through that path, and we don't get to choose.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, transformation doesn't come in one size. Not at all. Yeah.

Tema Mercado: No.

Britta Bushnell: We don't get to choose, but we can choose, hopefully — not everybody can, but hopefully — to work with people who can and do treat us with care and respect. Everybody deserves that.

Tema Mercado: Yeah,

Britta Bushnell: everybody deserves that. Yeah, but not always easy for everybody to access, unfortunately. Which also reminds me that you are in the process of building a birth center. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Building a Birth Center in Barrio Logan

Tema Mercado: Yes. It's so interesting, because I apprenticed at a birth center in South Bay. It was called Birth Roots Maternity and Women's Health Center, and I really felt after my experience working there that birth centers are valuable, but that I would never want to run a birth center, because I understand how much work it is, and also in our current climate and insurance reimbursement, just how unsustainable it is. So that was not something that I was interested in doing, although everybody would ask me about it, particularly because I work with a population that oftentimes can really benefit from having birth center access, and often we're resorting to Airbnbs, or "can you stay with a relative," or even hotel births — I've set up birth pools and tiny homes and in RVs. It's not ideal, but every birth is sacred, no matter what the container is. So what ended up happening, maybe about a year and a half ago, I was asked to present to a community land trust about midwifery care and the work that I do and what midwifery is. I didn't really understand at the time why they wanted this presentation, and the day that I had to present, I just happened to be coming home from a really beautiful birth, so I was full of oxytocin.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, you were juiced up.

Tema Mercado: Yeah, I bet. And so I was talking about midwifery and trauma informed care and why this is so important for our people and community. I had just supported a queer and trans family unit. I was feeling really just juiced up about how everybody deserves to have respectable care. And after the presentation, I didn't really think too much about it. But a couple of weeks later, I receive a call from one of the board members, and she says, "We want you to inhabit — we want your nonprofit to be one of the tenants at the building that we're buying, and we want you to have a birth center or midwifery clinic there." And I was like, "What? What is this about?" And so, this land trust — it's called Tierras Indígenas Community Land Trust, Indigenous Lands Community Land Trust — and they applied for a multi-million dollar grant to be able to purchase land and housing in the Logan Heights area, which is a historical barrio. It was one of the last Kumeyaay villages, and it has a strong history of activism there. It's home to Chicano Park, and this community has been struck with a lot of adversity over the last decades. And so, with the money that they received, they purchased a building that had been abandoned in the community, and they had two spaces. And one of the spaces they wanted there to be something for the community to help promote health with cultural sensitivity, and they asked for midwives to take over that. So my mind was just kind of blown away, because the idea of having to look for a building and rehab it felt very overwhelming, but I would always tell myself, if I ever did something like that, it would be in Barrio Logan,

Britta Bushnell: and here this is locked into your life.

Tema Mercado: Yes, so we're at the place right now where we're working with the architects to build out the plans. There has to be some demolition coming. Building probably won't even begin until '27, and we wouldn't even open our doors until sometime in '28. But that's where I'm putting in pretty much all of my effort, all of my time right now, to help make that a reality for this particular neighborhood, to build something that is going to give the community health.

Britta Bushnell: Wow, sounds really important work, and it connects with what we've been talking about around containers and containers of safety, as well as community-competent, centered care. And yet — it's also making me giggle a little bit. You started telling this story saying, "I was never going to do a birth center," and then you proceeded to tell us how you're basically doing a birth center.

Tema Mercado: Yes, I was never going to be in the medical field or birth center. So I guess the others

Britta Bushnell: had other ideas for you, Tema.

Tema Mercado: I was also never going to have children, and now I have more children than all of my siblings combined. So,

Britta Bushnell: so best laid plans.

Tema Mercado: Yeah, I'm never going to be an author. I'm never going to be a millionaire. Just — oh, they're going to put those out there. Just, you

Britta Bushnell: know, feed the universe coming to — I love that. I'm going to —

Tema Mercado: reverse psychology the universe. Yeah,

Britta Bushnell: right. Whatever works. It's so far — it's looking like you say, "I never," and it shows up. So, well, before we start our wrap-up, I was hoping to talk just a little bit about — there's a term on your website about protecting the sacred, and I want to know what is that — what is the sacred, what is protecting it, and what are the threats to the sacred in birth? So if sacred can happen anywhere, then what threatens it?

Protecting the Sacred: Blueprints and Imprints

Tema Mercado: Well, every birth is sacred. Even when there's violence, even when it's not consented to, even when there are providers who were not there with the best versions of themselves at the moment. For me, protecting the sacred is more about — I'm not sure how familiar you are with pre- and perinatal psychology, but in pre- and perinatal psychology, we talk about something that's called a blueprint, and this blueprint is kind of like the essence of who we are. It's kind of like the tapestry that makes us, right? It's our spark. Have you seen that little cartoon movie? I can't remember what it's called — it's about the jazz piano guy who

Britta Bushnell: died. Yes. Oh, I love that.

Tema Mercado: Yes, and before you can go to Earth, you have to find your spark, right? So there's a spark, and then all of your talents — that little badge is kind of like the blueprint, and our blueprint, we're born with it, and we're born with it pretty intact. Although, if you have a violent pregnancy, that blueprint can have negative imprints posed onto it. So I want you to imagine this blueprint, like it's an actual tapestry, and it can be imprinted with positive experiences, and it could also be imprinted with negative experiences. So when we protect the sacred, we're protecting that blueprint — both the mothers, the babies, and their family, even the father, the grandparents, the siblings. We want to protect everybody's blueprint, and we do that by minimizing the negative imprints and enhancing the positive imprints. And this can be done through affirmations. This could be done through holding somebody's hand. This could be done — for example, if I ever hear a nurse say, "Oh, your baby's so stubborn, just giving you a hard time already," that is a negative imprint. I might say something like, "Oh, your baby is not stubborn. Your baby is working so hard, and we are so appreciative of the work your baby is doing on the inside. They must be working so hard to come through, and they're working so well with you and your body." So for me, that is part of protecting the sacred — ensuring that we are providing more positive imprints and minimizing the negative ones, so that our new little humans can have a start at life with their blueprint as intact as possible, and hopefully that modeling that we have provided to the parents through pregnancy helps carry through.

Growth Acceleration and Career Transformation Through Birth

Britta Bushnell: Yeah. I love that, and I think that a lot carries through. We learn — in pregnancy and birth and early parenthood and postpartum, I think there's — I don't know if it's the veil that is really thin, or the sense of great change that is occurring, but there's a real openness to growth acceleration, like it's a fast track of growth during that time. So things that can be seemingly simple and small can have a ripple effect that goes long term.

Tema Mercado: Yeah, and this is why you see so many mothers who change careers. They will make a U-turn or a left turn or a right turn, or they'll completely stall, because hopefully they have come back into their blueprint, back into their essence, and they have realized, "You know what? That job in aerospace, it's really cool and all, but I want to become a doula." We've seen that,

Britta Bushnell: right? We've definitely seen that. The number of people that have come into birth work because they were transformed in some way is not a small percentage of how people get into birth work.

Tema Mercado: Yes,

Britta Bushnell: yes, it's a pretty big one. So, if people want to connect with you more, learn more about what you do, or connect with some of the offerings you've mentioned, where are the best places for people to do that with you?

Connecting with Tema Mercado

Tema Mercado: Well, the best way to connect with me is by getting pregnant, having a home birth in San Diego. Kidding. That's probably the deep way, for sure. I mean, I joke around, but I'm kind of a hermit, so that's how you can get someone on one time with me. But I do try to share generously online on Instagram — I guess that's the best way to get a feel for who I am. I have a list of all the podcasts that I've been featured on on my website, and then I do have some public-facing offerings, like midwifery consultations that you can do virtually with me, and I also have an online learning platform. It's at learn.lamatrisbirth.com, and I have a few pre-recorded offerings there. And then you can get on my newsletter. That's the most sure way of getting all of the offerings, all of my postpartum trainings and my spinning babies mentorship that I run once a year. The best bet is probably the newsletter, or just put an alert for my Instagram,

Britta Bushnell: and we'll make sure to link all of those in the show notes as well, for folks to be able to find them easily. So Tema, as we start to wrap up, I like to end with the same question I ask all my guests, and that is: what's one thing that you feel passionately about that you want new or expectant parents to see, hear, feel, or know during this profound period of their lives? And I know there's probably many, but if there's just one that's coming up today, what might that be?

Closing Reflection: Be Present, You Won't Get This Time Back

Tema Mercado: Yeah, I would like to say that it will all just be a memory one day, and I don't say that to be dismissive. I say that so that you could be more present, and so take the time off, call in sick when you're not feeling well. If you want to do the maternity shoot, do the maternity shoot. If you're only going to get paid 60% for the last four weeks of pregnancy or whatever, so be it. You'll never get this time back with your pregnancy and with your baby, and particularly in pregnancy, this is also time with your baby, even if your baby is on the inside. And for fathers, the same — fathers often just want to provide and protect, but those first two weeks of life will literally change your brain chemistry if you stay home and you hold that precious little being close to you and smell them. That is more important than providing the extra income. So, if at all possible, if you have enough resources, be as present as you can, because you're not going to get this time back.

Outro

Britta Bushnell: Thank you so much. I love that you brought in partners and dads, because we sometimes neglect talking about the transformation that they're going through, and it's so important. Thank you, Tema. Thank you for being here, and thank you, listeners, for sharing this time with us. If something shared today impacted, supported, or moved you, please share this episode with a friend. I produce the podcast myself, and your support makes it possible. To show a little love for this podcast and these conversations, please follow, rate, and review. If you'd like to continue the conversation, please join us on Instagram at Transformed by Birth. I look forward to being with you again on the next episode of Transformed by Birth. Now let's gather what we want to take away from this episode in an inhale, and with an exhale, I'm going to blow out the candle. Until next time, bye friends.