into the wild I'm going into the wild I am it's been a wild freedom child since I left my roots back home

into the wild I'm going into the wild I am it's been a wild freedom child since I left my roots back home

Welcome to the Free Birth Society podcast. This is a radical space for women who are ready to celebrate their autonomous choices in birth, motherhood and beyond.

Together, we'll learn about wild birth through personal narrative, we'll explore the politics of birth, and we'll analyze everything that relates to our lives as women from a feminist perspective.

Here's your host Emily Faldin.

Today on the show we have the amazing Mary Lou from Wisconsin, mother of six children and the owner of two businesses.

Mary Lou shares how she learned the hard way who not to invite to her births, why she chose Free Birth from the very beginning, and what it's like raising a big family.

All right, welcome, welcome. Thank you. So we have my friend Mary Lou on the show today. Good morning. Yeah, good morning, a mother of six in Wisconsin, and she actually gave birth during her attending the radical birth keeper school, which was so such a delight in our first round, not on camera.

To be clear, but yeah, we are here to explore all of your stories. So I'm just going to pass it to you, kick us off wherever, wherever you kind of note that your mothering journey begins.

Okay, well, I think my mothering journey began when I guess I never really thought about birthing or being a mother until I was pregnant.

I the father of all six of my children is a I would say we're both sort of anarchists and we met in a he's from Wisconsin. I'm actually from Texas. So we met kind of both on our own journey solo traveling. I was in an RV and he got in and pretty much never got out.

So he brought me back to Wisconsin. We met in California and we he brought me back to Wisconsin and we started a business together in Wisconsin and we think two years and is it this business that I'm seeing it is this business. This is, you know, kind of a third rendition of it.

Nice, but it was a huge bar. Yeah, it's a beautiful juice bar for anyone who is and we also we run a pretty large kombucha brewing company all tap a lot. So we, you know, we brew and bottle kombucha and sell to the states that touch Wisconsin pretty much.

So yeah, we are ever do it yourself first business owners entrepreneurs.

My husband also runs a glass trade show so glass functional glass so glass art pipes and it's kind of big into the

glass scene. So that also ends up being in the, you know, legalization of marijuana.

Mm hmm.

So I got pregnant in 2008 about a year after we started that first juice bar and we were just living above it and it was winter and was my first winter in Wisconsin and I never really considered

as being an option. And I don't know, I think it's just my personality with health and with wellness. I think it's also my perspective on the medical system.

And so how old are you with this first kiddo 27?

Okay, so yeah, okay, so you had had some time in your 20s to kind of untangle how I thought about it.

Yeah, my mother is has been a hospital administrator, you know, that's what I grew up kind of in seeing her in that system.

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