Her Story
About Marilyn
I come from a family of nurses - my mom's a nurse, I have some aunts that are nurses, so healthcare was kind of always a focus for me. I always wanted to help people. It's funny, because in high school, I was like, I either want to be a nurse or a teacher, and now I do both. When I was a senior in high school, I was at the delivery of my niece with my sister, and that really catapulted me into maternal health, and that's just kind of been my career path since then. I've been in maternal health this entire time, I guess, what, 16 years? But I just had my own children about 3 years ago, so I kind of experienced firsthand a lot of the disparities and issues that I saw previously, but didn't really truly understand it until I went through it myself. That's when I identified that a lot of times, we focus on the mom when she's pregnant, all of our attention's there, but as soon as the baby's born, we're kind of all about the baby, and we miss mom. I really focus on the postpartum period, supporting mental and physical health of the postpartum moms beyond the 6 weeks, especially up into the year postpartum. A typical day for me, if I'm teaching that day, I typically start my day at the university teaching undergraduate nurses about maternal health. A big thing about mine is I try to make sure that they're not just learning the hands-on things, but they're also learning how to be advocates for mothers. In the United States, women of color are at a high discrepancy for maternal morbidity and mortality - we see a double to triple rate of deaths, and some of that is because as healthcare professionals, we're not there advocating for them. So I make sure that the nurses that I'm training are culturally competent, know how to work with trauma-informed care, know the most evidence-based research, and are really personable. We can't lose the nursing out of nursing - we're really nursing people to health.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Marilyn
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say, follow your passion. I know I've been working in maternal health for a long period. For a while, I kind of stepped out. Actually, getting into the nursing field, you know, sometimes it's a little rough as a new nurse. So just follow your passion. And if you see something that's an injustice or something that you want to change, then don't be afraid to speak up. Sometimes, you know, you having that courage to speak up not only helps you, but helps the women around you, a generation. We might all be going through the same thing, but we need just one to start the conversation, and we can make a huge impact.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
As a working mom, it's a lot, it's hard. There's some initiatives that I'm working on, like with Mother Forward, with being able to afford childcare. Even as a full-time working individual with a job and a nonprofit and all of that, it's still a huge burden on our family. And then, specifically, promoting maternal health altogether in so many different spaces. If you've had a baby, making sure that you can postpartum, pump and breastfeed, and making sure there's spaces there. We're still, even though there's legislation that has been passed to require that, we're still struggling with being able to just pump after delivery and things like that. A lot of the things that I see come directly from the issues that moms are facing, so it's not individual, definitely more structural.
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