We can all be doulas, with Max Priest-Heck
Offering to help is help enough, if you mean it
We’re in a recession, a deficit of nurturing and care and community, a neighborhood of closed doors. We feel it, we see it in each others’ eyes, we talk about it in hushed tones. But Mackenzie Priest-Heck knows how to get us out, or at least how to start.
Max’s dog Lucy lies between us, panting in the shade at Barnsdall Art Park. It’s the first place where Max and I really got to know each other in the early days of our friendship, and we’re going over how long we’ve had the pleasure of each other’s acquaintance. A year and a half ago seems too short, but in fact it was almost exactly so. It was spring, after heavy rains let up into a dry March. A season to come out of shells, to find others.
From where we sit now the Hollywood sign is obstructed, but the Griffith Observatory looms above, copper-domed and glinting on a faraway cliffside. We pat Lucy’s head intermittently when she sniffs at our knuckles, never begging attention but silently commanding it with her brown cow eyes and patchwork spots and pitbull grin.
The third time I met Max — Mackenzie, Max, comfort personified, genderfluid, activist, therapist in training, doula — she was hosting a castor packing session in her living room, inviting friends to sit cross-legged on patterned rugs and massage anti-inflammatory castor oil into our bare chests for two hours, following a ritual she’d learned through a workshop in L.A. It felt radical. To some, completely foreign. Sitting on the floor half nude among strangers felt like a secret garden, a space cultivated by Max, intrinsic trust and incense bathing the room. It didn’t seem radical nor foreign to Max, but like the most comfortable morning hangout with ten of their friends.
We met when Max was less than a year into their doula work, still getting into the matrix of interpersonal care and postpartum aid. In some ways, Max has felt like they’ve been a doula all their life. In others, the work was a leap into an unknown field.
“I had a lot of imposter syndrome,” Max says of their early doula days. “Even now, I haven't actually worked with that many clients, but I feel like that doesn't make me any less of a doula, and that who I am at my core is a doula in terms of my values and how I see the world.”
Doula connotes pregnancy, midwifery. But the principle centers around care in all forms. As Max says, a doula is someone who aids in transitions, whether in birth, death, loss, or basic needs, mundane as moving.
Last month I moved in with Max, adding “roommate” to our layered friendship. Max is one of those people who asks without being nosey, who cares without coddling. They want to know, but they never pry.
Anybody can be a doula, Max says, just by choosing to be there for someone as they navigate a transition.
There’s a component of intervention and healing, but an added spiritual element. In doula training — Max is working toward their Doulas of North America (DONA) certification — they say doulas walk with a person through their experience, rather than guide them. Just being there is a majority of the practice. So much of love is sitting in silence together.
Max specializes in postpartum care, tending to new parents. Always interested in the event and ritual of birth, she detected a steep decline in attention toward those who had just given birth, left to their own care and 29 days of maternity leave.
Most mothers Max has worked with don’t seek doula care themselves. More often than not, someone else has connected them to Max, either as a baby shower gift or as a preemptive crutch from an empathetic figure who knows the value of having a postpartum careworker. A third of Max’s clients, however, are “self-aware, radical people,” Max says, resisting the convention of figuring out early parenthood alone.
“If they'd had any other operation people would be tending to them, but because it's birth, nobody thinks to attend to them,” Max posits. “I think that last third of people also unfortunately come to me out of desperation, because they had a really traumatic birth and they're not sure how they're going to be able to get through it.”
What Max’s clients appreciate most hasn’t primarily been direct care, but instead the offer of care itself. The single most impactful thing Max does while with a client is to simply be there, she’s found.
Preferred care varies. Some mothers find peace in having another body in the room while they’re with the baby, another set of eyes or gentle hands available. Some mothers just sleep in Max’s presence as they do light chores. Others look to their doula as a resource, often seeking advice regarding postpartum depression. Everybody's so scared of postpartum depression, Max says.
Most birthing people go through waves of it at varying degrees, she tells them, and it’s all common. There's a book she gives each client, Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts, normalizing and naming the flood of thoughts and emotions a mother may have, advising on how to mitigate the anxiety of new parenthood. It grants the validation that you’re experiencing something normal as you experience it for the first time.
“Most people I've worked with are just navigating the normal scary thoughts of, like, the fact that they just gave birth to something and are now responsible for it,” they say causally. I, casually, am nauseated by this thought, despite my own unwavering desire to one day bring life into this world, despite the exterior perception that doing so is controversially selfish.
At my last birthday Max mentioned her doula work, spurring one of the guys at the table to ask, “So does that mean you, uh, want kids?”
She does, while acknowledging the heavy, confusing ethical dilemma of having kids at a time like this, in the state of the world. Parenthood isn’t as scary a concept to Max, attuned to the different ways being a parent can look, the inherently messy nature of sustaining new life in the world.
“I have no misconceptions of it being really glamorous,” Max says. “It’s something that should be based on interdependence, not something to brave solo. I mean that beyond a partner too. If I'm gonna have a kid, I'm gonna have a whole network of people with me."
Max, raised in the Bay Area and living in L.A. for nearly eight years, has always been close with their family, with two sisters and parents that encouraged therapy and unwaveringly open communication. Max is one of the most open and communicative people I know, the person who taught me that conflict can be safe, who disarmed my fear of confrontation (it’s an ongoing battle).
“I think it's a nature versus nurture thing,” she says of her proclivity for doula work. “Part of the reason that I'm a caregiver is because of how I was nurtured, and a part of it is just endemic to my nature. I think that I used to be very interested in why, but now I'm less interested in why. Being somebody in this field is just who I am, regardless.”
Max stands by the fact that anyone can be a doula without training — unless you’re trying to start a business — as the foundation of the work simply maintains being responsive and attuned to another human being.
They lend the example of caring for the elderly in one’s community. Being a doula is as easy as spending time with them, or simply watering their plants. You can be a doula helping your friends move, helping somebody through a transition. What not to do is pester, even if well-intentioned.
“It's about asking, ‘What can I do for you right now?’ and also accepting that they might not have an answer,” Max says. “You're moving moment to moment for them. Being an effective doula is feeling out how the other person's responding, and asking, ‘Would it be helpful for me to do this thing right now?’ That's a bit of a mentality shift for folks.”
In many cases, offering is half the battle, Max says.
“How can we take care of each other better?” I ask. We’re lying down, the ground beneath our blanket shouldering our weight, the breeze brushing our hair back, the shade cupping our faces. Lucy sniffs, sighs, drops her gentle head.
Max takes a breath and lies back, propped up on an elbow. “I think slowing down. Being curious. Starting with the question of, ‘What do you need?’ and not, ‘What do I think you need?’”
Our ability to care for each other makes us better, Max says, providing the caveat that we shouldn’t decide to care just to further our own self-growth. The notion is part of the overall process. I can recognize that I'm a better person when I'm a better friend or roommate to Max, without making the conceit of self-growth my entire motivation.
Caring for others feels innate for Max, but they acknowledge that it doesn’t come naturally for everyone. Care is creative, Max says, and finding ways to care for each other can be “the most profound creativity.”
“If you want to show up for each other, don't try to follow a model, but try to do something that feels authentic for you,” Max says. “If it's not authentic for you to sit in the park and talk for hours, like we're doing right now, don't do that. If it's more authentic for you to walk with a friend, start from there, then keep pushing yourself. But start from a place that feels like it's actually you.”
It’s humbling, we agree, to realize that people recognize you as a person with needs. The ability to open up and recognize that you have needs as much as others do can come as an ego death in its own right.
While Max specializes in postpartum care, they also work as an abortion doula, caring for people before and after the procedure of ending a pregnancy. Max speaks about it with both sensitivity and neutrality. Being a doula is about providing information, and true bodily autonomy is being able to do what you want with said information.
Over the phone and in person, Max lends her gentle ear for empathy, sitting in the mud with people in a period of emotional limbo. Depending on the client, the experience eventuates sentiments ranging from mourning to relief. Or it can feel as linear as getting a haircut. Absorbing some experiences impacts Max more than others, but within the ability to lend deep empathy is a removal from the situation, evidence of her capacity for support without inserting herself beyond her means.
“That's one of those other parts of reproductive work with so much value put on it that really doesn't have to be there,” Max says. “There's no inherent value attached to birth, but we’re kind of obsessed with birth. Same with abortion. Abortion is something that feels so old to me. It's so wild that we still think about it so intensely when it’s one of our oldest forms of healthcare.”
We have a conversation we’ve had before, rehashing the double-standard fixation the government has on dictating what life is, but rarely applying that fixation to anything besides abortion. A staunch mob debates the ethical ramifications of abortion just to turn a blind eye to leagues of injustice and suffering.
Between us, sensing our sudden emotional upheaval, Lucy peers up at Max, bringing her brown nose to their sweet face.
“Lucy, more than anything, has taught me how to actually be responsible for another life,” Max says, pressing their face to Lucy’s. “I think a dog is the most pure love you can have. I can get frustrated with her, but I can't get angry with her. I'm responsible for her having a good quality of life. She deserves more than just the absence of harm.”
One day, when they have the capacity, Max will become a death doula, tending to others across the full life cycle.
The sun is arcing in the blue above us, beginning to wilt toward the horizon. We have dinner plans with friends in an hour. If the conversation has taken any emotional toll on Max they don’t show it, while my thoughts on childbirth and motherhood whirlpool swirl in my head, hyper-spun and dizzying. I think about all the things I need a doula for. A doula for getting out of bed. A doula for furniture shopping. A doula for making it to the end of one day and starting another. It just sounds like having someone who loves you.
“Would it be a conflict of interest if you became my doula, either postpartum, or if you're willing, while I'm pregnant?” I ask.
“Honestly, no,” Max says. “Because it's such a specific line of work, and because we'll set boundaries, it's actually not that messy.”
“What boundaries would you set with me if I was your client?”
“I would just remind you that I'm not going to tell you what the right thing to do is,” she says.
She knows me too well.
“I'm also not going to be a relayer of information about what our friends are saying or anything like that,” she continues. “What I am going to do is just be your advocate and be your caretaker. Our friendship will be naturally interwoven in that, but there will be some limits, for both our sakes, because it'll also give you space to get mad at me and to be angry.”
“Why would I be mad at you?”
“I guess because you just had something come out of you.” Max pauses. “I like to think that I don't get what it's like for any pregnant person, and I don't need to. I just need to be there for them. Every experience is different.”
Offering is half the battle.
Find Mackenzie Priest-Heck at @mackenzie.priestheck and on her website.
First Name Basis is Izzy Sami’s bridge between journalistic integrity and personal relationships, pushing the definition of “conflict of interest.” Profiles of people she meets out in the world will be published once a month, or twice a month if she gets a grip on her time management skills.