CHRISTIE WILLIAMS

Hey there! I’m Christie! I’m a wife of 26 years, mom to 4 amazing teens & beyond, follower of Jesus, and a woman passionate about helping mamas raise healthy families in today’s world! 

I met my husband, Shane, early in my college years, and we married not long afterward.  After graduating from nursing school in 2000, I immediately took a job in the ER and found that I loved it. Less than a year later, I was charge nurse on nights for a 15 bed Level 3 Trauma Center in Alabama. From there, my nursing career led me all over the country working in Emergency Departments from Arizona to Washington to California. After settling in GA, I worked for a short season in inpatient recovery before giving birth to our first child. 

Prior to this season change of life, I lived and looked a lot like the culture around me.  We ate a lot of cheap filler foods.  We had all the mainstream products in our home packed with chemicals of which I never considered the consequences. Not surprisingly, our health began mirroring our choices.  I had irritable bowel issues, chronic bladder problems, and frequent migraines.  We decided to take childbirth classes while pregnant with our first. Those classes changed the trajectory of our family’s health.  It was there that I began to realize that the foods I ate actually mattered and I wasn’t a sitting duck to whatever might happen during my pregnancy and birth. I felt so empowered! We embraced the education, the intentional choices and changes, and the risk vs benefit decision making concepts that we were learning. We were blessed with a wonderful natural birth with the help of our doula and midwife. 

Family life moved forward, and we went on to have 3 more wonderful babies. With the help of great nutrition and prenatal exercises, I was able to stay low risk and healthy for all my births. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t face challenges along the way. Birth is never the same. We met the choices before us with the informed decision making skills we had learned in our childbirth classes. Those are the same skills I’m passionate about passing on to couples today.  

I believe you were created well and that your body is perfectly made to not only grow a healthy baby but to birth one too. 

We live in unique days friend. We have more disease-causing chemicals in, on, and around us than any generation before us. Our bodies are bombarded on a daily basis from the foods and products of our world. And in the midst of this, we are surrounded by cultural beliefs that tell us to expect pain and breed fear when we birth our children. 

Childbirth is miraculous.  It is powerful.  Labor births a baby… and a mom and dad.  A whole new family emerges! 

————

Dr. Grantly Dick-Read is considered the “father of natural childbirth”.  He said “It is not only that we want to bring about an easy labor, without risking injury to the mother or the child; we must go further.  We must understand that childbirth is fundamentally a spiritual, as well as physical, achievement.  The birth of a child is the ultimate perfection of human love.”

I believe that we can raise the bar of goals surrounding childbirth in America today. Simply having a “healthy baby” cannot be the highest achievement. We can do better. We can help moms stay low risk and have births that are filled with joy and freedom in a wild and sacred way. Somewhere in the midst of this kind of birth, women find inner strength and power that is unmatched through any other human act.  It is beautiful and to be protected and fought for.