72% of Pregnant and New Moms Are Overwhelmed With Anxiety. I’m on a Mission To Change That.
Being a new mother is a universal challenge. Being a new mother in the age of the coronavirus is a herculean effort. Being a Black mother in the U.S. is taking a life-threatening risk. Learning all of this firsthand this year was the ultimate endurance test, and it also led me to my next job and a mission to make life better for other women in pursuit of motherhood.
I am a Stanford-educated wellness junkie who runs marathons, does yoga 5 times a week, and drinks a daily kale smoothie. So when my doctor told me at my 20-week ultrasound that my pregnancy was high-risk for preterm labor and that if I wasn’t careful, my baby could be born at any time, I figured she must have made a mistake. I was in excellent health four weeks earlier, and I had arrived at the doctor’s office with my luggage in tow, ready to fly off for my babymoon later in the day.
But something had changed. “Not so fast,” a new doctor I had never before met said, “you’re not going anywhere.” She told me that if I traveled anywhere that wasn’t within a 20-mile radius of a level IV NICU, and I suddenly went into labor, my child would not survive.
This was day 140 of my pregnancy. I had to make it to day 259 in order to deliver my baby at term.
I started to live my life in days and then later in hours. Every hour that my baby remained inside got us one hour closer to a safe delivery. Over the next 18 weeks, I would make 52 visits to various doctor’s offices; did I mention I had just started a new job for a tech company? In pushing the boundaries of human endurance, extreme athletes and pregnant women are unmatched, and those 18 weeks were the most difficult exercise in endurance I would never want to put anyone through.
My goal was to reach 259 days of pregnancy, so as I passed 260, 261, 262, I felt triumphant. I made it. We had made it. Crossed the finish line of the hardest marathon I would ever run, and was still running.
Until we both nearly died during childbirth.
The delivery doctor described my birth as an “emergency of all emergencies”; my placenta had abrupted and my son, Everett, and I were fortunate to make it out alive. Had I not been in one the country’s top hospitals, and had I not had access to every possible wellness resource that one can encounter, my story may not have had the same outcome.
It’s no wonder that in a recent survey of pregnant and new mothers, 72% of those surveyed said that they are experiencing moderate to high anxiety. The current healthcare system fails pregnant and new moms.
Throughout my pregnancy, and in the weeks and months following Everett’s birth, I kept asking myself, “how do families who don’t have an abundance of resources survive?”
The sad reality is that many families don’t survive. Black mothers are 3–4 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications (and are more likely to have pregnancy complications) than White women. Frankly, it wouldn’t have mattered if I were Beyoncé or Serena Williams; as Black women, they too faced life-threatening situations during their motherhood journey. Regardless of education, socio-economic status, or physical ability, to be pregnant as a Black woman in the United States is an existential risk.
In my quest to push towards the moving finish line of Everett’s birth, I discovered a breadth of evidence-based wellness tools: meditation, acupuncture, nutrition, yoga, hypnobirthing, and holotropic breathwork (to name a few). I found a weekly mother’s group that supported me through sleepless nights and never ending days. I also joined Expectful, a meditation and sleep app that creates targeted meditations for women in their fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood journeys. Expectful’s meditations, in combination with myriad wellness resources, helped me adopt a warrior’s mentality and cope with my harrowing journey.
While I was on maternity leave, I connected with Maya Baratz at Founders Factory New York about a partnerships advisory role at Expectful, one of their portfolio companies. Having led many first-in-kind partnerships in my eight years at Google, eBay, and Airbnb, I was eager to work with an early stage company. I had no idea Expectful’s founder, Mark Krassner, was looking for the right person to succeed him as CEO, and when we met, something clicked. As a user, a new mother, a longstanding wellness enthusiast, and the person who built the roadmap for scaling Google’s Local Commerce offerings, this felt like the perfect opportunity at the perfect time. I was passionate about the prospect of making Expectful available to every pregnant woman, especially those whose doctors hadn’t offered them the support and resources they could be utilizing.
Expectul’s meditation and sleep platform has already transformed the lives of thousands of expectant and new families. My vision is to build on this success by broadening Expectful’s offerings, and growing it into the go-to wellness resource for anyone in their motherhood journey. Expectful will provide universal access to the holistic, evidence-based wellness solutions that have already helped millions of women around the world.
I personally want to improve Black maternal health outcomes, which are currently abysmal. No education, wealth, or status can protect pregnant Black women or their babies. Expectful will strive to create more equitable outcomes for underrepresented women and their babies.
Everett is nine months old now, and we’re both as healthy as can be. But our near miss shook me. We can do better; every pregnant woman deserves better.
That’s why my mission as the new CEO of Expectful is to solve the wellbeing crisis facing the 21 million women in the U.S. who are new parents, pregnant, or aspiring to conceive. We deserve better than what the current health system is offering us. I’m thrilled to be part of a greatly overdue solution.
