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Village Midwifery & Family Care

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Renton, WA
Village Midwifery & Family Care

Village Fertility offers comprehensive preconception healthcare and assisted inseminations in WA.

Our model of care includes a combination of integrative health coaching and comprehensive midwifery care. Our clients may choose from a number of care plans—anything from a specific health coaching program, to a fertility consultation, to a full prenatal, birth, and postpartum plan. We provide comprehensive midwifery care while collaborating, referring, consulting, and transferring, when appropriate, with local healthcare providers including, but not limited to, doulas, social workers, obstetric-gynecologic and family practice physicians, pediatricians, psycho-social services, and fertility specialists.

08/14/2025

Restitution

One of the seven cardinal movements of labor. In lay terms, it means “the restoration of something lost or stolen.” In birth, it is the quiet, instinctive moment when a newborn turns their head back to center after the precise rotation that allowed the crown to emerge.

Lately, as both midwife and artist, I’ve been living in the seam between those two definitions. Reflecting on this past year—a holy transition from midwife to parent, to parent-midwife, to midwife-artist-parent—my work has felt like restitution: the restoration of lost arts, the retrieval of identities set down for a season. A return to a center only I can locate. Just as in birth, where restitution is rarely guided by the midwife, this return is a reflex I must enact on my own.

Art, too, is a form of restitution—because art is witness work, the work of testimony. It is witness to the one receiving care, to the parent, to the baby. But it is also the witness of the artist themselves: a record that someone was there, observing, interpreting, holding, remembering. My photographs testify not only to the moment but to my presence within it—they are evidence that I stood in that light, felt that air, carried that gaze. They are as much a witness of me as they are of what was before me.

Attending my first birth since giving birth myself has deepened this restoration. It feels like muscle memory in the soul—something that knows exactly how to find its way home.

(Photo from a birth I was privileged to witness both as midwife and photographer a few years ago.)

08/10/2025

The theme of roses keeps surfacing this week,
petals in conversations, in the pages I turn,
in the way the air smells when the sun first warms it.

And so I think of my friend Rosie,
her body tending to the tender work of growing a first child.
Her forehead smooth, as if the whole sky has poured its trust into her brow.
Her chest lifted and open, a slow-breathing bloom.
Her belly—round, full, a quiet moon cradling its own tides.

She lies here, the shape of patience, unhurried. Every curve, every stillness,
a petal unfolding toward the promise of what is coming.

07/31/2025

Double Exposure of Hidden Mother -

I don’t have many words as we close out this month’s project. In many ways I feel an exhale of relief as the labor for me was unexpectedly intense, internal work.

Unironically, it is finished (for now) and I’m deeply grateful for this group and the artists that make it up.
“The double exposure is not technique - it is truth. Sacred mother and child then, there, now.”

07/28/2025

A few years ago, we traveled to Iceland with two of our dearest friends. She was pregnant then, and the quiet anticipation of new life added a tender hue to every part of that trip. I remember standing on the windswept cliffs of the western coast, camera in hand, when I spotted a pair of puffins nestled close, tending their hidden nests. The day had been full of adventure, but in that moment, everything softened—just the stillness of the sea, the hush of feathers, the quiet work of building a home.

Tiny burrows dotted the cliffside like secrets, each holding its own quiet story.

Now, a few years later, there are two small children between us—two babies who have turned into little people. And still, the puffins return to my mind: a gentle emblem of that time, of our enduring friendship, and of the lives we’ve brought into this world. They’ve become a kind of quiet totem—of love, of nesting, of togetherness.

Photo for

07/23/2025

The labor of growing an o**m is a quiet, uncelebrated devotion. Rarely do we speak of the cyclical ache—of waiting, hoping, trying, then losing. A rhythm of anticipation and grief that repeats with unwavering patience. And still, the body remembers. It chooses. This egg, these s***m. A singular convergence amid countless possibilities.

When I look at s***m under the microscope, they shimmer like fireflies just beyond reach, or stars flickering in a far-off sky—each one a spark of potential, a tiny miracle hurtling toward home.

What better way to honor this cosmic choreography than to expose their likeness to sunlight, imprinting them onto a cyanotype’s blue field—an offering, a prayer. A tribute to the egg that called them forth and opened to receive the one that would begin a life.

And now, we wait again. We grow. We become. A baby takes shape. We edge closer to parenthood, held in the mystery of what already is and what is still becoming.

07/22/2025

I’ve been working—dragging myself through the ache—on this month’s project. Our prompt was the Madonna, the mother and child. I knew immediately: I wanted the ugliest one I could find.

The process took me everywhere at once. Research spilled out in a thousand directions, pulling threads from art history, religion, war, postpartum diaries, my camera roll, my body. It’s been intense. Complicated. Visceral. And I keep returning, again and again, to the Pietà—the suffering mother, cradling her dead son.

What does it mean to mother in a time of atrocity? What does it mean to have milk while others have famine? To swaddle my child while others swaddle their dead?

In the last couple of years, she’s all I see. She’s there, side by side with my own vibrant postpartum world: my plump, giggling baby in his sleep sack, sunlight on his lashes, milk pooling in the corner of his mouth. And still—this joy doesn’t cancel out the grief.

I see her—the mother—kneeling over a white body bag while I bend to unzip my babe, sticky with laughter. Another child starves across the ocean, and another algorithm scrolls her out of sight.

What Madonna do I see when I look at my phone? When I glance in the mirror?

Pietà. Always Pietà.

07/12/2025

R and T at home, 37 weeks, waiting for labor to start. Soft touches in the liminal space—baby shifting, parents-to-be murmuring, oxytocin moving between them like a tide. Not quite two, not yet three. Just this tender waiting.

07/10/2025

My abuelita, “Rosalía” the baby-catcher of her community. Mother to 16 children (14 of which she birthed), and many, many grandchildren. The baby in the wash-basin is me. My father is taking the photo and my mother, freshly postpartum is resting just outside of frame.
The threads weaving this photo together and all that I am…

06/30/2025

End of June

It’s the end of Pride Month. Summer deepens, thick with scent and shadow. Now, as the parent of a one-year-old, I find myself remembering.
Thank you to the first girl who kissed me— a neighbor, a childhood crush. I remember the taste: watermelon and salty Play-Doh, a sacred, silly initiation.
I’m grateful for every girl, every partner, even those whose names have softened in my memory. Each one, at the time, a balm— a glass of cold water offered with tenderness.
This month, my partner and I mark twelve years married. We cried the other day, remembering that in 2012, many of our q***r friends still could not marry. How recent, how absurd, how enraging.
I think of headlines— bodies legislated into danger or erasure. I think of Gaza, of invisible q***r lives both unseen and destroyed.
I think of my child, new, tender, still untouched by this cruelty. And I rage at the thought that anyone might try to withhold the fullness of their becoming.
June feels heavy. With grief, with hope, with sun that lingers late.
It feels like the flowers in my garden— vivid, open, and weighed down by heat.

06/26/2025

Amnion.
 A gown. Living lace. Veil of biology. My body’s finest tailoring. A bespoke garment made only once, for only one. Hemmed heirloom—meant not to last forever, but to hold eternity for nine sacred months. Divine garment. Part veil. Part shroud. Silken cradle. A first robe, swaddling within the cathedral of my pelvis. Caress offered on my behalf, cradling to the rhythm of my belly’s tide.
Until the moment came— and it burst, not destruction, but annunciation, spilling forth with sacred urgency.
Pressing and parting, wrapping in the swell of each contraction— a sacrament of rupture, a holy offering surrendering babe into my hands.
And then it waited, patient remnant, for the first latch, the first feeding. Breast and newborn in communion, summoning from the womb a choral echo: second birth.
Present witness, folded silk. What once held oceans now resting in the palm of my hand. What once curved around becoming, now slack and speechless— radiant in red, a delicate drape of satin, glistening with memory. The final fabric of a vanished temple.

—
the gloved hand of my midwife, Lizz

06/20/2025

Inheritance

I have been in the garden again—
cleaving weeds from soil as if extracting molars,
as if unearthing the marrow of swelling grief.
Each root resists like a memory unwilling to be spoken.

I shovel and heave—
not to conceal, but to cradle what time refuses to hold.
Unearthing tender scraps,
sour-sweet with the weight of newborn breath.
Grief clings like sweat—
my own Sisyphus ritual.

My fingernails split at their beds,
raw and red as the day I bore my child.
Earth packed beneath crescents of torn keratin,
blood mixing with soil like suture thread once braided
through my own flesh—
tender, torn,
where life once pressed its head against my cervix,
against time.

The sun leans in,
laying its heat across my shoulders,
not unlike the dull throb of a contraction—
blessing me and burning me.
There is brightness—
sharp as the flare of a crowning skull.
A sudden bloom of pain.
An unfolding.

I remember the curl of his ear,
soft as a petal folding in moonlight.
His cry pierced the hush—
an unrepeatable sound.

And still,
this thorn bush does not apologize
for raking its teeth across my arm—
offering blood in place of milk,
offering memory instead of mercy.

06/16/2025

I brought my baby into the world a year ago, just as spring gave way to summer on June 12. Since then, writing and photography have been the lifelines through which I’ve begun to process and integrate my experience—as a birther, as a parent, as midwife. Finding the time to shape the swirl of thoughts into language has been its own kind of labor; sometimes they emerge as small poems, other times as quiet lullabies. Lately, I’ve been reading more poetry, which has gently opened the door to my own words. This week, language has been swimming in my head—it feels much like those hours in the birth tub, suspended in waiting, on the edge of something about to be released.

Address

Renton, WA
98057

Opening Hours

Tuesday	9am - 4pm
Wednesday	9am - 4pm
Thursday	9am - 4pm
Friday	9am - 2pm

Telephone

+14252245301

Website

http://www.villagefertilitycare.com/

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