I’ve always loved babies and been interested in supporting mothers through birth. I considered midwifery as a teenager, but ended up in bookkeeping and reception before pursuing my interest in languages at university. Majoring in Italian, I spent the final year of my course in Italy, planning to return to Australia when I finished my course. But God had other plans. As I was staying with my pastor and his wife one weekend in between classes, helping them move house, Italy went into COVID lockdown. By the end of the 3-month lockdown I was engaged to be married to their son! We definitely didn’t see that coming! We got married later in 2020, and welcomed our first baby about 18 months later.

It wasn’t until after I first gave birth (just hours before this photo was taken), for which I was well prepared and beautifully supported, with amazing guidance throughout pregnancy from my private midwife, that I decided to revive my dream and pursue training which would help me to support other mums through their pregnancies and births.

This decision was spurred on by the fact that just around this time, the NSW Parliament’s inquiry into birth trauma was taking place. So many stories were coming out about women who’d experienced birth trauma. A large proportion were first-time mums. The stories were so horrible to read, especially after I’d just had such a fantastic experience, despite being a first-time mum in a foreign country. This gave me a burning desire to train and prepare to help women to have the resources they need to be able to have positive births, eliminating all avoidable birth trauma.

So many mums experience unnecessarily traumatic first births! They then need to work through their trauma, with therapy, counselling or whatever it takes, and try and turn things around for the better if they give birth again. It’s so sad to see this happening, but I am convinced we can change things!

Sure, there are things in birth we can’t control, but I am absolutely convinced that having the time and support you need to consider what your options are and make your own informed decisions, based on the evidence available and on your values, leads to a more positive birth experience.

After we moved back to Australia in 2023 I trained as a doula and childbirth educator. I started Birth Tenderly, and worked as a doula in between my own births. But I knew I wanted to be able to help more people. This lead to developing an online birth education and preparation programme.

During the later stages of development, while praying for guidance on how to reach the people I could best support, I had the thought: why not offer a programme especially for Christian parents? While the main content is the same either way, the deepest support I can give is to the people whose values align most closely with mine. After all, birth preparation is body, mind and spirit. In an “open-to-all” programme I wouldn’t be able to give the full picture of how I believe our faith in God affects birth. Pursuing this idea, I did an Internet search to see what options there were for Christian birth education in Australia and found…almost nothing. A couple of in-person classes, but nothing for the majority of Australian Christian parents. And so, Amazing Birth came to be!

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My husband and I have three precious children, all born at home, who we are raising bilingual. Since moving to Australia we have lived in Port Stephens in NSW, and are currently settled in Lemon Tree Passage. I love learning new things and challenging myself (I just took up taekwondo at 35!), playing the viola, going running, spending time with my family, church family and friends, playing board games, and eating gelato!