Melanie Mawji is the founder of Mels Space and Mama Bear Birth Prep, offering compassionate, trauma-informed support for individuals and families navigating pregnancy, birth and beyond. Beginning her career as a birth doula, she witnessed firsthand the emotional impact that challenging birth experiences can have. This inspired her to train as a counsellor and create a safe, supportive space where her clients can feel heard, empowered and better prepared, whether they are processing past experiences or approaching birth with confidence and clarity. Here, she talks to The Natural Parent Magazine about the passion behind her work, the challenges she has overcome along the way, and her hopes and dreams for the future.
The passion: What inspired you to set up your business?
I had always wanted to be a midwife! Supporting women through birth is in my soul. I was drawn to independent midwifery rather than the growing medicalised directive NHS midwifery, however I knew that I would still need to train as an NHS midwife to become independent, and that didn’t sit right with me. A little heartbroken at the realisation that I would never be a midwife, instead I trained as a birth doula because it spoke more to my wish to support autonomy in birth. I loved and felt incredibly honoured to be with the families that I supported through their birth, and I very quickly realised that the part that I loved even more was seeing them grow in confidence, being empowered, believing in their ability and learning to hold their own space in the birthing room! This was working so much better for clients than blindly handing over autonomy when they walked through the hospital doors. Honestly, it was so beautiful to see their confidence blossom.
Next, I wanted to make sure that I was a safe space for my clients to land, and so, I trained as a counsellor. I understood that birthing people could be incredibly vulnerable throughout pregnancy, birth and the months after. Hormones were changing to prepare them for optimal birth and nurturing. On top of that, people bring their own history and generational trauma into the birthing space. Being a counsellor gave me the confidence to hold all of that.
From here, I built Mels Space counselling, with a specialism in birth. I absolutely love the work and even trained in EMDR so that I could feel confident in supporting all of my clients that had experienced trauma well. And yet, something still wasn’t sitting right for me. Why was I left dealing with the fallout of unnecessary interventions, which left the birthing person or even the whole family damaged?! The long-term implications of this were not lost on me.
This drove me to launch Mama Bear Birth Prep, a birth preparation course designed to prepare parents for the realities of our current maternity service. Mama Bear is effectively a bootcamp for birth! I’m so passionate about preventing the damage by helping parents prepare fully for what they might be presented with, rather than picking up the pieces of broken families, both emotionally and physically. I really feel like I can offer the whole package, no matter what stage I meet my families at.
The launch: How did you start out in the beginning?
Unsurprisingly, being passionate about birth came from my own experience of having one hospital birth with my son and then two beautiful home waterbirths with my daughters. Both of the home birth experiences presented me with challenges that required me to fight for the birth that I believed passionately that I was capable of. For example, when I booked in with my youngest, I was told that because I’m a “geriatric mother”, I would need to book in for an induction. This made absolutely no sense to me. If I was so old and weak, being a “geriatric”, then surely contractions that were forced rather than progressive would be harder to cope with and more likely to lead to problems. I was 41 and fit, with no presenting medical reasons for my baby or I, as to why another homebirth wasn’t an option. I went home and trawled the internet for studies that backed up what I was being told. I found just one study from the 1960s that was based on clinically obese women. I contacted the consultant midwife at the hospital and told her that I still intended to birth my baby at home as I had with my last birth and that I absolutely wouldn’t be having an induction. The consultant midwife completely agreed with me and emailed all the other consultants to tell them to essentially, leave me alone. I went on to have my second lovely homebirth. However, all around me, people were being traumatised or damaged by their births, because they were simply doing as they were told. People didn’t know that in most cases the system was one-size-fits-all and wasn’t offering bespoke care to them as it should.
And so, coming back to your original question, the launch is recent and has just been about getting the message out there through socials, blogs and here with you guys of course. We live in a time where the system is not resourced to advocate for you and your baby’s needs, so you must and can do it for yourself.
The innovation: What was the biggest breakthrough for you with your business?
I have been banging on about the problems of the direct impact of overstretched midwifery services and the easy use of medical interventions for years and so each time a new report comes out supporting what I have been saying, I would do a little happy dance that understanding was growing. And then nothing happens, nothing changes and so I feel deflated again. But my inner fire pulls me back up and I get back on the soap box. Right now, midwives themselves, led by the fabulous Leah Hazard, are shouting about the dangerous working conditions that they practise under. I’m behind them all the way, because if they aren’t safe to work, no one in the birthing room is safe. So rather than a big breakthrough, it’s about staying resilient for the cause.
Yin and Yang: How do you balance work and family?
That’s a tough one, because I was already home educating my oldest daughter. My youngest is thriving at school, but for my older daughter, school had started to crush her confidence and didn’t suit her at all. I was fortunate that my husband was earning enough to enable me to focus on her education. As she got older and more autonomous in her learning, and then started to work towards GCSEs, I was able to scrape some time to start to build my business. Throughout my counselling course, I had become used to staying up late after the kids went to bed to complete essays and case studies, but that really wasn’t sustainable. And so I have basically chipped away bit by bit, slowly building when I had small windows of time. My passion for wanting to see better birth outcomes has never changed, even through my most difficult times. The key has really been to see my goal at the top of a mountain, to just keep climbing in small steps, while not being tough on myself if I have to pause because of family needs. I’m here for the long haul and I will be delighted if the day arrives when I can put my soap box away, because the system does what it should.
