|
|
||
|
|
For
New Moms, She Is the Answer Lady by Carl Glassman If I don't pick her up she gets that big, open mouth scream," said the young mother, holding her 13-week-old daughter tight against her chest.
Michel Cohen, Chevallerau runs free groups for mothers of infants up to three-months old (non-Cohen patients also are welcome). Mothers of older babies attend their own weekly group and pay for the sessions themselves. Both groups meet in Battery Park City's Rockefeller Park in warm weather, but these days they are at Yaffa's. "I function as an in-between person so the mothers don't have to go to Michel and ask the ears off his head," Chevallerau said. Or as Lindsay Camins, 29, the mother of 10-week-old J.D., put it, "You don't want to feel like you're stalking your baby's doctor. And you can only make so many calls to your own mom before she just doesn't answer the phone any more." Chevallerau, a Battery Park City resident and the single mother of a son, 13, and daughter, 6, makes her living mostly as a post-partum consultant, called a doula. First-time parents of newborns hire her to come to their homes, where she soothes their jitters and works through their fatigue with advice and reassurance. Her mostly wealthy clients can–and often do–also buy the services of a baby nurse. But they still miss the emotional comfort of distant family members. "They have little or no support system" said Chevallerau. "That's why my services work so well." "She's a real educator and not someone who does everything for you," said Frances Guillemot, a Tribeca resident who chose Chevallerau over a baby nurse after her son, Henry, was born last summer. "In a very gentle and affirming way, she allows the mother to trust her own instincts." There are some high-powered mommies in the homes Chevallerau enters, and sometimes her first job is to convince them to leave work behind. "They'd be on the phone doing business and at the same time trying to breast-feed the baby, and assistants would come in the room," she said. "I make it clear, in a delicate way, that they need to stop this. The hospital, family or others can't tell them. But they accept it from me." "After the first few days," recalled Guillemot, "I said to her, 'You found your calling.'" It was a painful turn of events that brought Chevallerau to that calling. Trained as a textile printer in her native Amsterdam, she came to New York in 1991 and, eight years later, was the mother of a six-year-old and pregnant when her marriage fell apart. After talking to her own doula, and needing work, Chevallerau was struck with the idea of helping other mothers. She attended workshops, read books, and two months after giving birth went into the post-partum advice business. "It's very nurturing for me," she said, "and maybe that's one of the things I was longing for when I became a single mom. I needed something that would make me feel good about myself." She provides that same feeling to the women she counsels. As Chevallerau's moms' meeting at Yaffa's wound down last month, the mothers were asked what they had learned. "I'm not doing anything damaging," proclaimed one mom. "I'm normal!" |
|||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
|
