A little intro
Let me tell you how most conversations about sexual health go in a clinical setting.
A mother sits down. She has questions she’s been holding on to for months, maybe years. Something about her desire, her body, her sex life since having kids. One of three things happens in her visit:
~She is too scared to bring it up, the clinician she is seeing (Doctor, NP, Midwife, PA) does not ask anything about her Sex Life, or if they do, it is focused on protection, STI’’s, and/or pregnancy.
~She is ready to ask her question, but is rushed through the visit and never gets the chance to ask.
~She asks her question(s) and is met with either an unhelpful answer, her concerns minimized or brushed off.
I know these scenarios well. I actually used to partake in them when I first started out as a women’s health clinician.
It is not that I didn’t want to help.
It was that my training did not prepare me to help and/or my time was limited in visits (thanks to insurance companies) to focus on “more important” things.
That changed about a year into my practice.
I started dreading seeing "sex concerns" written next to a visit reason on my schedule of patients. Not because I did not care, but because I did not know what to do with it. I felt guilty knowing I could not provide the same quality of care I gave in every other type of visit. So I started doing what I do best when finding a gap in the system, I started researching and compiled resources. Handouts. Pamphlets. It was all I could manage between working full time as a midwife, being on call for 24 hours at a time, and raising three young children. I read books in my free time. I slowly started feeling a little more confident.
Then a few years later I completed my post-grad and started seeing mothers as a psychiatric mental health NP. The sex stuff was showing up in new ways. I was watching the disconnect in real time and seeing the harm that comes from mothers having nowhere to take their questions, no language for what they were experiencing, no support for their sexual lives. And once again, across three clinical specialties — CNM, PMHNP, WHNP — my training had not prepared me to help in a way that felt meaningful.
So I went looking. I went deep into sexual health resources specifically for mothers.
I came up short.
What existed was not enough. What mothers needed did not exist yet. So I set out to build it, starting with Mama Comes First, then pursuing specialized education in sexual health and wellness. And the further I went, the clearer it became: this was not a personal failure, mine or any other clinician's. It was a systemic one. Mothers are being failed at every level, by the lack of clinician training, by insurance companies, by a medical system that never decided their sexual health was worth prioritizing.
That is why Midwife for Your Sex Life exists. And that is why this blog exists.
Now that you know my story, let me actually introduce myself!
Hi! I am Dawn a Certified Nurse Midwife, Women's Health Nurse Practitioner, and Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner based in Wilmington, Delaware. I have been in clinical practice for over 14 years (and a nurse for 16 years). I have sat across from thousands of mothers who were told their concerns were normal, their questions were not urgent, and their sex lives don’t matter.
They were wrong every single time.
Sexual health is health. The World Health Organization says so. Your body has been saying so. And yet mothers across Delaware and beyond are walking out of appointments with nothing, no answers, no language, no roadmap for what is happening to their desire, their bodies, or their sense of themselves as sexual beings.
Midwife Musings exists because that has to change.
This is where I say the things the exam room does not have time for. Where I write about sex, desire, bodies, motherhood, and raising kids who grow up knowing their bodies without shame, without sugarcoating, and without the ten-minute clock running in the background.
Some posts will be clinical. Some will make you laugh. Some will make you angry, because the truth about how the system has failed mothers is genuinely infuriating.
All of them will be honest.
You have been waiting for a provider who will actually talk to you about this.
Welcome. Pull up a chair. We have a lot to cover.
~ Dawn
