Lonneke Helena (she/her) |founder of Female gaze doula care & doula in training
A memory. I am a photography-student in my twenties and recently moved from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, a city bold and unpretentious, and unfamiliar to me yet. A bit unsettled by the distance this city keeps me at, I try to get to know it by silently observing, and taking aimless strolls on empty afternoons and nights.
On another gloomy afternoon, I am sitting on a block of concrete beside a parking lot by the waterside. I watch a bunch of women learning how to drive a motorbike. They look dangerous. They look far more dangerous than any man on any motorbike could ever wish to be. The most dangerous thing about them is how utterly clueless they seem to be about how invincible they look, taming their mechanical two-wheeled speed-machines. I am in awe.
I sign up at a place that turns out to be the wrong driving-school, a place exclusively accustomed to men. I put on motorcycle suits that are way too big for my size. Pants: too long. Waste: too wide. Helmets: too big. Gloves: far too big. I don’t feel nearly as dangerous as I had hoped to feel, neither do I feel very safe. I tolerate the usual jokes and comments the instructors make about me. After falling off my motorbike and tolerating a joke a few too many times, I decide it’s time to go.
Some time later I run into the website of Nora’s driving-school and on a dusky Tuesday evening I find myself on the back of a motorbike again, in a suiting suit, with another female co-student and a female instructor by my side. Nora listens to me. She helps me grow a confidence that enables me to navigate safely and independently on the road. On rainy days she brings me home in her car, so I don’t have to bike. You could call her a motorbike-doula if you like. I pass my license-test with grace, and it is probably the first time that I realise:
“Women thrive when they are supported by women.”
But it wasn’t until my own pregnancy and abortion-experience, that I started to understand how crucial it is to be able to meet the deeply existential and intimate nature of reproductive events with an uninhibited mind, unaffected by the male gaze that conditions our society and disregards women’s and any person-with-a-queer-gender-identity’s birthright to autonomy, diversity and safety.
As a doula, I am deeply devoted to pushing back on this androcentric societal norm, to create a space for you where you can safely explore and evolve through this transformational time.
A space where your unique pace, capacity and needs are seen and prioritized.
A space where doubts and uncertainty, too, are held with compassion and care.
A space where the non-linear enigmatic chaos of what it’s like to be alive, and give life, is witnessed, honored and celebrated.
