Why do I specialize in pregnancy?

I wanted to be an ob/gyn and after I graduated from medical school, I started in that field as an intern. It was amazing. We took care of women in all stages of life--helping adolescents decide which birth control to use, assisting elderly women with urinary incontinence, diagnosing and treating middle aged women with cancer, but my favorite patients were pregnant. I learned to use the ultrasound to check on the health of the unborn babies, read the heart tones strip to see how labor was progressing, and I loved delivering babies! I would have stayed as an ob/gyn, except that I had a small child of my own. My own baby had been born 2 months early and spent time in the NICU when I was finishing my third year of medical school. When she was 18 months old I started as an ob/gyn intern, and I pretty much never saw her. She would apparently come home from school and look for me in the bed (asleep from being on call the night before). If I wasn't there, she figured I wasn't there at all, and I usually wasn't. I quickly realized that the path I had chosen was not going to allow me to be the mother I wanted to be to my daughter. I switched into a psychiatry residency, but I never forgot how amazing it was to be a part of a pregnant woman's journey to becoming a mother. Once trained as a psychiatrist, I specialized in caring for women during pregnancy and the postpartum period, but now with skills to help them with the psychological transition. I was able to offer psychological support as well as medications (which many other psychiatrists refused to do) to women who were truly suffering during this important time of life. Many psychiatrists did not understand why I would pick such a high risk population to work with, but my passion is in helping women through one of the most important time of their lives--the rite of passage we know as becoming a mother. It is an honor to walk alongside women as they navigate this profound journey.