How To Grow A Mother
Interview with Rachael Hollinger
I chat with postpartum doula, chef and Newborn Mothers graduate, Rachael Hollinger. Together we discuss overcoming the fear of working as a postpartum professional and the gift of vulnerability. At the core of this conversation is the significance of this work and the impact it has on women, communities and generations.
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We explore the following questions:
How did you come to postpartum work from being a chef? What woke you up to that as a vocation?
How did you navigate your fear that no one wants this work in your first year of business?
How has embracing your fears and vulnerability played a role in connecting with women?
Are there any other fears and challenges that you've had to overcome along this journey?
How do you work with clients and what do you do?
What is the focus of your cookbook?
What has your experience been with starting mothers circles?
What would you tell other women who are thinking about working with Newborn Mothers?
Why is it important to support mothers who are adopted mothers or have suffered a loss, miscarriage or stillbirth?
About our guest:
Rachael is a Postpartum Doula and Chef at NOURIS(her). She has self-studied nutrition and Ayurveda medicine giving her a full picture of food as medicine. Rachael works with all kinds of mothers and birthing people to achieve a more peaceful postpartum through food, breast/bottle feeding support, sleep solutions, massage, herbal care, and birth processing.
Rachael teaches online, and in-person workshops write and speaks about mother care, facilitates mothers’ support groups and gatherings, and is the author of the E-Cookbook NOURIS(her): using food to heal the new mother.
For more information visit https://www.nourisherdoula.com or via Instagram @nourisherdoula
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Transcript
Julia Jones:
Hello and welcome. We are interviewing Rachael today, and we've had a few tech troubles. My internet's not good, and we've had the power out this morning, and the school's been cancelled and all that kind of stuff. But we are here, and hopefully, we've got a good internet connection. We'll have to see how it goes. But I'm really, really happy to have you here Rachael, and I know you've stayed up late at night, so I really appreciate that. Rachael is a doula and a chef in Pennsylvania in the US, and yeah, she'll tell you all about her special sauce, which is food. And yeah, I might just let you introduce yourself. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do?
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah, sure. So yeah, I'm a doula and chef. I work with women in the same ways you would expect a postpartum doula in this particular collective to work with a mother. Verbal processing, massage, lactation, sleep solutions, all of that. But then my original background is in culinary arts. So I have a culinary arts degree before I even started this, so it's been a really great marriage for me of learning to use food as medicine, which was something that I was already interested in, and so I'm really cooking for very specific, what I would say would be like postpartum symptoms. So all of those things like insomnia, water retention, and all of these things, and helping women to overcome those struggles through food. Yeah.
Julia Jones:
I love it.
Rachael Hollinger:
I also just recently started a mother's circle, and I started working with adoptive clients as well, which has been a really rewarding and really interesting process.
Julia Jones:
I love the range of people we have in the collective. I always learn so much from you. Yeah, that's brilliant. And that makes sense when you say culinary arts, why your website and your food always look so amazing. What you do is so beautiful, and I feel like even just looking at it is nourishing.
Rachael Hollinger:
Oh, well that's the goal, and I've tried to be so specific about what I present, that it's always a really warm colour palette, and there are lots of dishes with steam coming out, and that it just makes you feel nourished even from a distance is my goal, so that's lovely to hear.
How did you come to postpartum work from being a chef? What woke you up to that as a vocation? (03:30)
Julia Jones:
That's perfect, you definitely achieved that goal. But then how did you come to postpartum work from being a chef? What kind of woke you up to that as a vocation?
Rachael Hollinger:
Oh my goodness. Well, I think probably as is the case for lots of women doing this work, it was really born out of my own pain and my own suffering. So I was pregnant, I got pregnant with my daughter. She was a surprise. We had only been married like seven months, so that's a challenge within itself. But I was diagnosed right off the bat, before I'd even gotten a positive test I was in the hospital because I was just so, so sick and we couldn't figure out what was going on. I was losing a lot of weight. So I was diagnosed with HG, hyperemesis. And so my pregnancy was just …] and very long, in and out of the hospital for IVs and I was on bedrest for the nine months, and it was just, it was really hard.
So I was already struggling with depression in pregnancy, so I was really not set up for success in any way, shape, or form. And then I had a pretty difficult labor. I had a lot of stuff going in labor, like broke my tailbone, and all of these crazy things, and so had an additional, I want to say it was three or four months of continued bedrest after I had my daughter. So it was just really dark, and I was experiencing that hole in healthcare so vividly, because I was going to doctors and trying to explain to them what was going on and how I wasn't okay, but at the same time sort of worried about really voicing how not okay I was.
And it was, "You are being hormonal. You are being emotional. Every woman experiences this, you are not special. This is what new motherhood looks like." That sort of thing. So I just started doing my own research while I had all of that time in bed, and I started reading and Googling. Thank God for Google sometimes. And I stumbled across other women doing this work. You were one of them, Julia.
Because I looked around in the US, and I couldn't find anything the way that I wanted to address women and not just newborn care, or babysitting, or housework, I wanted to work with the whole woman. I wanted no woman to have to go through what I went through. So I looked around in the US, and there just wasn't hardly anything. And then ended up finding your program, and it all kind of snowballed from there rather fast, actually. It's really taken off for me pretty fast, which is great. But yeah, it was like the perfect marriage of food from what I was already doing before I had my daughter.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, that's awesome. And from memory, you did only join the collective a year or so ago. It hasn't been that long, has it?
Rachael Hollinger:
It hasn't been that long. And before that, so my daughter is nearly four, and before that I was dabbling in this. I couldn't, like I said I couldn't find really anyone to train me the way I wanted to be trained, so I was kind of just doing it on the side and feeling like I was floundering and very much swimming upstream. When I joined the collective, I felt like no one is going to hire me for this. No one is interested in this kind of work, people just want me to come take care of their baby. Which of course is a small portion of it, but it wasn't all that I wanted to do. So yeah, the collective was huge for me in just being a real launching point for me feeling empowered I think, yeah.
How did you navigate your fear that no one wants this work in your first year of business? (07:35)
Julia Jones:
And has that been your experience, that no one wants to hire you and no one wants this work?
Rachael Hollinger:
Oh my gosh, not at all. I mean, I wouldn't be here if that was not the case. It has been just a wild first year. I cannot believe this is my first year of business. I started getting clients pretty much right away when I started adapting some of the things, some of the business models that you were talking about, and a sales funnel. Or I don't know, what did we... I feel like you've changed that terminology and I can't remember what you call it now.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, we stopped calling it sales funnels because I think people were finding it too overwhelming, and we're starting to call them customer journey maps, but it's the same.
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah, customer journey maps, yeah. So yeah, I started putting some of those things into practice. My personality is to go really hard after something. I just go all in, and I might fall flat on my face, but I just do it anyway. This time thankfully I did not fall flat on my face. But yeah, I just started doing that and started getting clients, and now I'm booked almost an entire year out. I'm turning clients away, because I'm a mom too. I stay home with my daughter, so I can only do two or three women a month and that's kind of like, cap for me. So I've started this mother's circle, and I've been networking, and my cookbook is coming out October 5th, and things just really, really just exploded. So it's been really beautiful, yeah.
How has embracing your fears and vulnerability played a role in connecting with women? (09:28)
Julia Jones:
Yeah, there's so much I want to ask you about. That's such an amazing story. And you really can't say there's a normal experience with people starting a business. For some people it's very quick. For you it obviously was. For me it was too. As soon as I applied the marketing techniques that I now teach, I think I got my first client within two weeks or something. It was so fast for me. But definitely for other people it takes a lot longer, and this can depend on how much time they've got, and where they live, and even just how quickly they are prepared to fail. Because a lot of people who are more afraid of falling flat on their face, they won't even try things out, I think that's probably the biggest barrier that holds people back. Because you will fall flat on your face. There's always going to be something isn't there, that doesn't go to plan.
Rachael Hollinger:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've definitely had a few, I don't know if you would call it duds, but just interactions with women where I thought, "Well this is going great," and it didn't end up going great at all. Or just feeling, I started teaching workshops, and my first workshop of course I felt like, oh that was terrible, and I'm no good at public speaking, and no one's going to book with me. And then of course three women booked with me afterwards. So it's more about, I have felt like it's more about overcoming my own self-talk and my doubts about myself, because they're often just not true.
And what I tell myself other women want, I live in an area... so Lancaster County Pennsylvania is highly populated by Amish and Mennonite communities. So I had started doing this work in Denver Colorado, which is much more progressive in a sense, and holistically minded. So then we moved here and I just thought, oh my goodness. I cannot sell this here. Women are really and truly oppressed in a lot of ways here, and they don't invest in themselves and they don't see their work as mothers as anything that's valuable or equal.
But then once I started doing this, it was almost like this underground work of women coming to me and telling me, "This is how I really feel," or wanting to process things with me, or, "Can you sell my husband on this? I really, really want this," and things like that. So I realized that women were really hungry for it. No matter where you are, I think women are really hungry for it.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I think that's really true, and sometimes it's a subconscious hunger. But I think often the world will reflect back to you what you're projecting, and if you're hiding your own truth then that will be what the world sends back to you as well. But if you really start opening up like you've just done today and really saying, "This was a really dark time for me," then you'll find that other women can come to you and feel safe to tell you about their dark times too, and the help that they really are craving.
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah. Vulnerability, I think just breeds that in other people, and the more that I can be super vulnerable with the women that I'm interacting with, the more they give back to me. I think it's proven that if you give or you pour into a woman she turns right around and pours right back into her community. I think women are just built that way.
Julia Jones:
I agree.
Rachael Hollinger:
I think I've definitely witnessed that just in the circles that I've been serving here, so it's been really beautiful.
Are there any other fears and challenges that you've had to overcome along this journey? (13:12)
Julia Jones:
So you've touched on this a little bit, but are there any other fears and challenges that you've had to overcome along this journey?
Rachael Hollinger:
I think as a chef, and having worked in... so up until I became a doula I was doing personal chef work, and catering private parties and things like that. And so the nature of being a chef is to be behind doors and to sort of be untouchable, and no one ever sees your face. So I think the twist for me was showing my face rather than my food, because I know I can produce a beautiful plate, but it's much more vulnerable to even just talking on my Instagram stories about things, or teaching workshops or things like that, and really getting out there. And again, vulnerability comes with that too.
…point for me, again, overcoming my own self-doubt. So you're going to see vulnerability is just how I roll. It's a huge theme in my life, so I'm going to get all kinds of vulnerable. So I grew up in a really damaged household, and as a child was just abused in a lot of different ways, and just told that I wasn't good enough, and my ideas would never work, and I was too fat, and I was too loud, and I was too emotional. All of these things. And so I've always carried all of those labels. But there's been something about this work that has been healing for me, just to realize that I have so much to offer, and it's just been really empowering.
So in some ways that were my biggest challenge, but it's also put all of those fears and doubts to rest for me, and just having other women affirm, "Oh, your presence is so calming, or I feel lighter when you leave." There was one mother that I worked with, it was her first child, and I was getting ready to leave. She was sitting down to nurse, and so I just had sat her up with a couple of my lactation cookies and some hot tea, and was getting ready to slip out the door. And I was out on the front walk, and she came to the door and called me back.
And I turned around and she was crying, and I was like, "Oh, what's going on?" And she was holding the cookie in her hand with like one bite out of it, and she was like, "I've never had a cookie that made me cry." It was just the sweetest. And so then of course I start crying, and she was like, "This is incredible. I just feel like I can taste your heart for me behind it." And it was so moving to me to see what food could do, what my food could do. So yeah, I think it's been really empowering for me at least.
Julia Jones:
That is a magic story. That is so amazing.
Rachael Hollinger:
I know, it's one of my favourites, and she was a sort of magical person.
Julia Jones:
That's incredible.
How do you work with clients and what do you do? (17:30)
Julia Jones:
So food is obviously your special sauce, but can you maybe tell us a little more, what does a client look like for you? How do you work with them, what do you do?
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah. So I usually work with them for six to eight weeks, and then we'll do a visit, two visits a week. Usually, they're about three hours long, and so the first sort of hour is just kind of what I call a download. And we'll usually make her a cup of tea, and really get a good feel for what's going on in your body, what's going on in your mind, what's going on in your spirit, and figuring out how I can serve her that day. And then I get in the kitchen after that once she's comfortable, and I usually spend about an hour cooking. I try to do big batches of whatever I'm making so that it's going to last her to my next visit. So I'll usually do one main dish, a snack and maybe a couple beverages like hot teas and maybe a smoothie or something like that, and pack it all up with Post-It notes, which was your trick that you taught me. I have so many Post-Its now. Pack it all up in her fridge. I usually serve the meal to her.
And then the last hour is whatever she needs. I might do a bit of massage, we might do a herbal bath. I grew up in a really holistic household as a child, so my mother used essential oils and herbs, and ground her own wheat to make her own bread, and was just very in touch with all of that. And so that has continued to be a theme for me in my work, of using herbs. So I might do some of that, but often I just wear the baby and run the vacuum and mama sleeps or something like that. Yeah, and by the end of six to eight weeks, I really feel like I just have gained another dear friend. Another woman in the circle. It's just one long, continuous line of all these women that I'm connected with and continue to be in touch with. So yeah, it feels a lot less like works at the end of six weeks.
What is the focus of your cookbook? (19:53)
Julia Jones:
Yeah. Oh, that's so, so beautiful. So beautiful. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your cookbook you said that's coming out?
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah, it's an E-cookbook, and yeah, it's coming out October 5th. It's a collection of recipes that are specific to the postpartum period and focused on healing the new mother's body. So there's, I write a little forward. It's mostly using Ayurvedic medicine, so similar to some of the things that you've done, Julia. But I have recipes in there for specific things as well like I said. A lot of it's geared toward digestion, because the more I've worked with mothers the more I've realized there's a lot of things that just sort of spring out of digestion. And all mothers have such poor digestion, so it's pretty heavily spiced but it's nothing too funky. They're all really, really simple recipes. I really tried to simplify things, and the whole cookbook is very accessible and warm, and the goal is that it would be purchased to pass on to somebody else, that you're not actually cooking any of this food for yourself, right?
Julia Jones:
Yes, yes.
Rachael Hollinger:
Which has been really fun. I have a pre-order list, and I've had so many emails of women saying, "I'm getting this for my daughter-in-law," or, "I'm getting this for my mother," and things like that. So that makes me really happy. Yeah, and that's really exciting. Yeah.
What has your experience been with starting mothers’ circles? (21:40)
Julia Jones:
I love it. And one more thing I'm going to ask about is your mother's circle. You're just starting those?
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah, just starting it. It's been pretty simple. I mean it's really, I feel like I learn so much just as I go. I'm not an expert in any of this, although I do think that if you're in this work you're called to it. There's a really deep sense of that for me. It feels like finally trying on the right pair of jeans, like I've just been trying to figure out what am I supposed to do, and so this is, it fits everything about who I am.
And so I've tried to keep it really simple. We normally just talk about what's going on for each woman that month, and I feel like out of that springs a lot of questions, or a lot of, "Oh, me too." And so I sometimes feel like I hardly facilitate it, because everyone's just sort of doing their thing. And I'm also partnering with a woman's health coach, and in the spring we're launching something we're calling the Greenhouse. And it's going to be a more intensive group of eight women, and then the program will be for three months long. And the premise of it is basically how to grow a mother, and so we're starting all the way at conception and doing fertility, and birth, postpartum, infant care, and then at the end we have a Q&A farm to table dinner with a whole panel of, lactation consultant, and placenta encapsulation, and that kind of thing. And just really walking women through, these are what your options are.
Women, I just feel like we don't know our bodies well enough to feel like we have power over them and be our own health advocates. So our goal is not to teach women how to be mothers, but just to empower them and give them their options and their choices, and also help them to form a close knit group, their village, to walk through that journey with. So we're really excited. We've been teaching workshops together, and they've been really successful. And we just feel like they keep getting sold out faster and faster, and we keep wanting to dig into things a little bit deeper. And she's really, really knowledgeable with hormone health and things like that. So that'll be in the spring.
Julia Jones:
Oh, amazing.
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah.
What would you tell other women who are thinking about working with Newborn Mothers? (24:20)
Julia Jones:
That's great. And so what would you tell other women who are kind of thinking about working with newborn mothers? Maybe they already do, but they're not sure if they want to really commit to the business side of things, or they're having doubts about whether they can or they're good enough, or fear of visibility. All of these things that come up. But do you have anything to say to women who are kind of just feeling like they're on the fence at the moment?
Rachael Hollinger:
Oh, gosh. I think the number one thing that women do is compare ourselves to one another, and so I think that's what holds a lot of women back from doing what they want to do, because someone might be doing it better somewhere. And I don't think that that's true when it comes to this. I don't think that we should ever be in a comparison game, but every woman just has her own twist to this. And it's so amazing. That's why I love the collective, is seeing all of these women doing the work, but they're doing it so differently and so uniquely. I don't think that that should ever be a reason to hold back.
But the other thing is, I just was reading this article the other day, and you have maybe heard of this, about just this idea that, for me this means that this work is not just about me, not just about you, it's about all the generations of women that are trickling down from us and from the women that we're serving. But this idea that when a baby girl is in utero, she's born with all of her eggs, how many that is. 300,000 or something like that. And so when you're pregnant with a girl, you're pregnant with the generations that come, you're pregnant with your own grandchildren in a sense. What you give your body and how you treat your body is literally impacting generations behind you.
And so all the time, there's no one else in this area doing this kind of work, and I'm constantly having to turn women away because I can't maintain my goals as a mother and protect that time with my daughter and do all of it. And I just think keep thinking, oh, we just need more women. And all the women that are on the fence and unsure if what they have to offer is valuable, I just would want to say it's not just about you. It's about your daughters, and it's about the daughters of all the other women that you have the opportunity to impact. And I think that we have to, in order to see a better change for ourselves we have to realize that change in other women.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I love that. I completely agree. It is just so much more about the individual, and for me that really helps me to overcome a lot of my fears and my doubts, because I realize that it's actually not about me. But it's just so much bigger. And our society, we don't tend to think about future generations anymore. We've sort of lost that, but I think we really ought to start thinking about future generations. That's a really valuable gift. Thank you so much, Rachael, that was just completely amazing. And if anyone wants to have a look, Rachael's business is called Nourish Her Doula, and the website is Nourisher Doula, so it's N-O-U-R-I-S-H-E-R-D-O-U-L-A, .com. Anyway, I'll pop that up in the show notes in case you can't figure it out, but it is a beautiful website. I do recommend you go and check it out. And yeah, thank you.
Why is it important to support mothers who are adopted mothers or have suffered a loss, miscarriage or stillbirth? (28:13)
Julia Jones:
Do you have anything else you want to add before we say goodbye?
Rachael Hollinger:
Oh gosh, no I don't think so. Except that I was going to say, I don't know if there's anyone that's more well suited to this than I am, but I have recently seen a huge need in two groups of mothers, one being adoptive mothers and one being mothers who suffered a loss or a miscarriage of some sort, or a stillbirth. And I did a little bit of market research this past year and was just finding that those two groups of mothers were feeling completely neglected, like they weren't valid mothers because they weren't traditional mothers. Or even women... so I started working with adoptive mothers and it's been a beautiful process, but women who... I've never had a miscarriage, and so I feel like there's an element that I don't fully understand.
But women who have lost a baby, a couple of my clients that's happened to, they've communicated to me that, "I'm experiencing all the same things. My body is grieving in all the same ways as if I've given birth." And so I don't know, that's just been on my heart recently, and so if I could plant that seed for someone else, or if anyone else has ideas or resources I'd love to develop a package for women who have experienced loss. I think that would be a great need. But that's my only caveat.
Julia Jones:
No I love it, and I completely agree. And you've made me think, because I know in the graduate program we do have some extra training on grief and loss, but we don't have extra training on supporting adoptive families, and I think it would be really great if we could get someone in to teach us about that kind of stuff, because yeah like you, I kind of feel like if I haven't lived that experience, and I haven't really had a lot of... yeah, I don't really have a lot of even academic understanding other than having, like you, just met women and seen this need. But it would be great if we could get someone in to teach us more about that. And if anyone is listening to this and going, "Oh my God that's me," then there you go. There's a niche for you.
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah, exactly. Everyone has a niche. Yeah, it's been really rewarding for me too, because I have two adopted siblings. My two youngest siblings are adopted. And so it's been a neat theme for me just to serve those kinds of families, and really dig into what do adoptive mothers need. It's really the same needs that a biological mother needs when it boils down to it. I did a focus group and it was at the end of it, I was like, okay, so this is the same exact thing as a woman who's given birth to her own child. So yeah, it's really, there's so many places for us to serve.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I agree. And like you said, it's not that the service needs to be that different, it's just that we need to notice that. We need to pay attention that these are people who also need that.
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah. In the world we live in there's so many ways to become a mother or a parent.
Julia Jones:
And so many ways to become a doula.
Rachael Hollinger:
Yep.
Julia Jones:
Awesome. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in the graduates group again. So thanks Rachael. Bye.
Rachael Hollinger:
Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Julia, bye.
