About Me

My name is Tracy Good, and my first child was born in 1998 by cesarean.

That was not the way I ever, in my wildest dreams (or nightmares) imagined he would arrive.

I was healthy and intelligent, my mother and grandmother had each given birth to four children, and I was educated and well-informed – or so I thought. I mean, I read every word of that book that told me what I should expect and, when we had an odd test result, I went straight to the Mayo Clinic book to learn all of the horrible possibilities (it turned out to be a false positive – he’s a perfectly healthy child!) I even signed up for the hospital childbirth classes and thought natural childbirth might be something I could do. As far as I knew, I had done everything right – right? So what went wrong???

When I became pregnant with my second child in 2000, I had already heard about VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) and assumed that, of course, that’s what I would have this time – that first c-section was just a fluke, right? So, my jaw dropped to the floor when, at my very first prenatal visit, the doc walks in, not even a “Hello, how ya doin?” and just jumps right in with, “So, we’re scheduling a repeat c-section, right?” (visualize her grinning ear-to-ear and her head bobbing up and down the whole time).

Well, to make a long story short, I’m a slow learner! I timidly told the doctor that I was hoping for a VBAC, she said that we’d just wait and see how things went, she scheduled the surgery when I was 34 weeks pregnant, at 36 week I said (again, timidly) I wanted to cancel and try a VBAC, she told me that was fine but “it’s not going to work” (love that positive attitude), and when my water broke at 39 weeks and my labor didn’t progress according to her time table I was in the operating room about 8 hours later. Like I said, I’m a slow learner!

Now fast forward to late 2001, when I came across an article about doulas on the internet – I immediately called my husband at work and told him, “I know what I want to be when I grow up!!!” I scheduled my doula training, began reading and studying, very fortunately met another wonderful doula who mentored me, began attending births, and became a DONA-Certified Doula in 2003.

During that process, I also realized that there was something really, really important missing during my first two pregnancies – unbiased, evidence-based information about pregnancy and birth. Everything I knew came from one or two books or from my doctor or the hospital where she practiced. What if there were different ways to do things? What if there was more than one right answer to my questions? How was I supposed to get that information?

I soon became very passionate about making sure other families had access to that information. And the only way I knew how to make sure they had that access was to offer to teach them – teach them the things most of us don’t think about or even realize we need to know until we’re pregnant or giving birth.

So, in 2004 I became a Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator, and now I help families get the information they need to make their own decisions and not walk blindly or naively through their pregnancies and births!

I’ve also become a Happiest Baby on the Block Educator and am working toward becoming a Certified Lactation Educator so that I can help parents continue to care for their children after their births!

And, in case you’re wondering, yes, I have given birth to two more children since becoming a doula and Lamaze educator and, no, those births didn’t go the way I had hoped and expected, either. But, in both of those births, my husband and I sought out the information we needed and made the decisions that we felt were best for our family – and there was nothing timid about it!!!