As I read Erykah’s latest article in Fader Magazine, I found myself asking the question, would I let Erykah Badu deliver my baby?
Erykah will soon be able to add Midwife to her long list of accomplishments. We all know she loves her children but what you might not know is that she gave birth to all three of them naturally. She is also now a doula and is working on getting her certification to be a Midwife.
From Fader Magazine:
Badu gave birth to all three of her children totally naturally, in the house where she grew up; now she is a fully credentialed doula working towards certification as a midwife. “I love motherhood,” she says.
“It’s natural for me. Being a doula, or being a mom, or even, like, making food—it’s just breathing and trusting, and allowing the creativity to flow through.”
Her doula career began in 2001, after she vowed to her friend Afya Ibomu—the wife of Stic from the hip-hop group Dead Prez—that she’d assist with the birth of her child.
After a frenzied international flight back to New York and a travail of 54 hours in labor, Badu was there to catch the baby. She has been devoted to the practice ever since. Between tour dates and recording, she’s beset by textbooks, essays, research, anatomy lessons, and shadowing the midwife we’ll see today.
She also has a mentor who she works with at a Dallas birthing center so she should be receiving her certification soon.
In addition to her new ambition Fader talked To Erykah about her autobiography and I found her process quite interesting.
She uses boxes that she painted as the outline of the book and after she finishes each chapter she will drop things in the boxes so that she has a visual of what she has done and what is left to do.
Badu tells me that she’s starting the process of writing an autobiography, and that the boxes are a kind of outline.
“I just painted them,” she says. “I’m gonna line them up on the table, one for each chapter, and I’m gonna drop things in each box so I can have a visual for what I’m doing.”
Red is for family, orange for sex—“baby daddies, love affairs”—yellow for the creative life, green for her work as a doula and “holistic healer,” light blue for music, darker blue for spirituality, and a purple box that she says is a mystery.
Interesting right? That is one autobiography I absolutely have to read because as you will find out from the article, Erykah is as much normal as she is eccentric which makes for an incredible human being.
Read the entire article here.
