Ohana Parents offers Child Birth Education and New Parent Groups for Summer

They say that it takes a village to raise a child, but what if you have no village? This is the issue that I ran into when my son was born in 2014. I was a new North Shore transplant and was missing that solidarity that new mothers have when they have Mothers, Grandmothers, Sisters, Aunts, and friends nearby to share their motherhood experience with. I had my husband, but no family in the area and no local friends who had decided to start a family yet. I understood that I was going to need more support if I was going to make it out of this experience with my sanity intact.

By definition, “Ohana” is a term that means“family” in Hawaiian, and refers to one’s inner circle of both family and close friends. This is what I so deeply desired for myself. Ironically, I was able to find this in an Evanston-based company bearing the same name: Ohana. (www.ohanaparents.com)

I had attended Childbirth Education classes at Ohana when I was pregnant, and used Ohana Doulas to attend my son’s birth at Evanston Hospital. During a post-birth visit from our Doula, I was reminded that Ohana also offered a Mom & Baby Group for new moms with babies up to 1 year. This reminder could not have come at a better time! My husband had just gone back to work and I found myself stuck in a post-birth funk. I was spending all of my time with baby who, while beautiful, could not yet interact much with me, and with few friends to turn to who would even begin to understand my daily struggles.

When my son turned 6 weeks, I attended my first meeting of Ohana’s Mom & Baby Group. It was such a relief! The group was hosted by warm, non-judgemental birthing professionals who had a new topic for us to discuss each week: birth stories, relationships with our partners, feeding, childcare, going back to work, and more. We all joined the group under the premise that it was a judgement-free zone, and that our conversations would not leave the room. What I loved about this group is that we were not “talked at”, rather allowed to speak and see where our conversations led each week. To be honest, most weeks our conversations would start on topic, but would evolve into exactly what we needed them to be. It was a safe-haven for us to speak the truth about our post-partum lives which society wouldn’t let us do in public. We had found our “sisters”, “mothers”, and friends. We had found solidarity. We had found our village.

It has now been nearly a year since I stopped attending Ohana’s Mom & Baby Group, but to this day, some of the other mothers that I met in that group are my best friends. The relationships that we forged in the safety of that group have been fortified by months and months of play dates, phone calls, tears, and hugs. I found my village, and I could not have done it without the help of Ohana’s Mom & Baby Group.