Meet Alisha

Although Los Angeles is my home and my soul craves the coastal landscape, Washington, DC has become the place I call home, and is the place where I grew up, and have decided to raise my family. George Mason University is where I chose to go to undergrad, as an English major studying medieval literature (yes, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and all that old good stuff), and where I met my husband, who also happens to be a southern Californian. We fell in love, got married not too long after college, and settled into work in Northern VA, me as a middle school English teacher, and he as an independent contractor.

I loved teaching, and I loved the energy of middle schoolers, but knew that if we had kids, I would want to pause teaching to spend my days with them. Not too much later, our first born daughter joined our family, and changed our lives forever. Teaching took a backseat, and motherhood took over. We had our second born, a boy, a year and a half later, I finished my Masters Degree in Education – with incredible support from my guy – and we decided that we had outgrown our basement apartment. While looking for a place to call home, we helped plant a church in SE DC, made a ton of wonderful friends that are basically family, and decided to move into the city, and make Anacostia our home! Our last kiddo joined us a couple years later, and our family became a small crowd. We spend our time hanging with our neighbors, engaging our community and having neighbor kids drop by all the time, running and hiking in the area, wine-tasting in Northern Virginia, reading by the fire, cleaning up all the messes, cooking lots of mac and cheese and carnitas, playing lots of UNO, and sight-seeing and trying new foodie joints in our own city, with occasional trips back to the west coast to see all our family.

The idea of becoming a doula hit me after the birth of our first son. One of my dearest friends had asked me to be present with her at her first born son’s birth, at their home. I was eight months pregnant with my second, and felt intimidated by the offer, but accepted. And how happy I am that I did! Being apart of this little one’s birth, and watching and encouraging his amazing mama through it all was a game-changer. Having had three cesareans myself, I have had to meander through the past of how my birth stories came about, accepting that they are wonderful in their own way, and also yearning for other women to feel more ownership and empowerment than I did through the birth process. In my searching, a couple years later, I found a doula training through DONA International, and decided to make serving women and their families through labor and birth my hobby and my job. Joining women on the adventure that is pregnancy, labor, birth, and parenthood is one of the greatest honors of my life and I still can’t believe I get to do this regularly! I became a doula because I believe that a woman empowered through pregnancy and birth is a woman empowered for motherhood. Women are incredible, and it is my joy and privilege to serve and help so many women and their partners and families through the miracle that is birth. I have been apart of cesarean births, natural hospital births, home births, and births aided by medicine. As your doula, I strive to be the friend that you would want by your side in your most trying and joyful times, making you laugh, holding your hand, comforting you with words of encouragement and affirmation. Women supporting women is a beautiful thing.