EP 249: Mothering the Mother – Granny Midwifery, the Lying-In, and Diasporic Memory with Shafia Monroe

In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Shafia Monroe, the renowned midwife, doula trainer, cultural historian, and author of Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes, and Healing, with a foreword by Erykah Badu. Shafia begins with the inheritance she was raised on: a second-generation Boston Catholic mother who told her to burn the bra and not to stay anywhere she was unhappy, and a rural foot-washing Alabama father who turned an empty Boston lot into collard greens and turnips before anyone called it a community garden. From there the conversation follows the diasporic threads she has spent four decades tracing, from her father eating with his right hand to the Senegalese village where she watched women shape a newborn's head exactly as her mother had shaped her niece's. They talk about what enslavement broke in African-American postpartum culture and what was rebuilt after it: the lying-in, the warm soup, the darkened room, and a community that knew what to do without needing a book. Shafia lays out the history of the granny midwives, including the origin of the word granny itself. She and Kimberly work through the real difference between a doula and a midwife, why she trains in full circle rather than full spectrum, and why women are flock people whom Western birth deliberately separated. Shafia describes raising seven children inside the work rather than around it, and why the family that hired you has to come first. The conversation closes on money, policy, and fear: what makes birth work financially viable, what this country refuses to fund, and why she tells every woman and man she meets to stop fearing birth, to refuse the label of patient, and to trust a body that has been doing this since the beginning. Bio Shafia Monroe, MPH, is a renowned midwife, master doula trainer, cultural historian, author, and motivational speaker whose work has shaped birth and postpartum care for more than four decades. A leading subject matter expert on African American birth and postpartum traditions, she has researched the lives of twentieth century Black midwives and traveled to interview and observe them, learning traditional practices firsthand. In 1991 she founded the International Center for Traditional Childbearing, the first national nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of midwives and doulas of color and to promoting home birth in Black communities. In 2002 she created the SMC Full Circle Doula Birth Companion Training, a dual certification program built on the legacy of the twentieth century African American midwife, which has since trained thousands of birth workers worldwide. She is president of Shafia Monroe Consulting and Birthing CHANGE, which helps health care providers deliver culturally competent care. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including four lifetime achievement awards, and she was named by Scientific American in 2022 among those working to make health care more fair. Her book, Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes, and Healing, with a foreword by Erykah Badu, was published by Hachette Go. She draws on her Southern roots in rural Alabama, where her grandmother taught her that food is medicine. She is a mother of seven, a grandmother of nine, and a great-grandmother of two, and she lives in Portland, Oregon. What She Shares -  The two worlds she was raised between: a Boston Catholic mother and a rural foot-washing Alabama father -  Her father turning an empty Boston lot into a garden in the 1970s, before there was a name for it -  Her mother on burning the bra, on equality at home, and on never staying where you are unhappy -  Why her mother told her that what people do not want you to know is kept in a book -  Diasporic recognitions: eating with the right hand, banku and cornbread, rainwater, and infant massage -  Watching women in a Senegalese village do exactly what she had watched her mother do fifty years earlier -  Belly wrapping as something her community always practiced without a name for it -  What enslavement broke in African American postpartum care, and what was rebuilt after emancipation -  The lying-in, the warm soup, the quilts, and why the elders kept the room dark -  African Americans as the country's dominant providers of postpartum care, and the credit never given -  The granny midwives, where the word granny came from, and what it was meant to do -  Why wisdom mattered more than whether a midwife had borne children of her own -  The real difference between a doula and a midwife, and why she wants both -  Full circle rather than full spectrum, and why the circle is the right shape