Dogon Country, Bandiagara, Mali, West Africa.

The Sovereign Birthkeeper: The RE-Awakening of Anjanette Silas

The Invisible Patterns of Our Lives

Most of us live our lives forward and understand them backward. A career choice feels like a career choice. A song is simply a song. A conversation with our mother becomes one of thousands stored somewhere in our memory. We rarely recognize lineage while it is moving through us, and we certainly do not expect a date on the calendar to return eighteen years later carrying an entirely different meaning. Every so often, though, enough pieces accumulate that we can finally see the architecture.

For Anjanette R. Silas, August 8 is one of those pieces. On August 8, 2008, at exactly 8:00 AM, Anjanette sat for the NCLEX, the licensing examination that would formally begin her career as a Registered Nurse. She finished in approximately 45 minutes and walked away believing she had failed. Then, while others celebrated, her exam was pulled for evaluation. For twelve days she waited, wondering what those 45 minutes meant. She had not failed. She passed, celebrating with an awkward cartwheel, beginning an 18-year chapter that would take her through clinical nursing, maternal healthcare, NICU, childbirth education, advocacy and eventually community-based birthwork.

Eighteen years later, on August 8, 2026, Anjanette celebrates the 5th anniversary of Birth & Beyond, NYC just weeks after formally retiring at 49 years old.

The numerical symmetry is difficult to ignore. Her nursing journey began on 8/8/08 at 8:00 AM. Her fifth business anniversary falls on 8/8/26, where the final digits, 2 + 6, create another 8: a symbolic 8/8/8. Those numbers do not need to prove anything to be extraordinary. They are simply the dates of her actual life, and what they mean belongs to the woman who lived them.

For Anjanette, that first August 8 has always carried her mother with it. Completing the NCLEX in approximately 45 minutes felt impossible enough that she has long understood that morning in her own spiritual language: Her mommy was tapped in. Eighteen years later, on the morning of this anniversary, Anjanette woke up and did what she does when she wakes for the day. She kissed her mother’s photograph, yet this morning, the message was simple: We did it!

That moment provides the key to understanding everything that follows, because this is not ultimately a story about numbers, nursing, retirement or even birth. It is a story about lineage, and lineage is exactly where Birth & Beyond, NYC has always said the story begins.

Queen Matriarch Energy

The first words visitors encounter in Anjanette’s mission are deliberate: Honoring lineage. Centering families. Uplifting communities. Five years into the life of her company, those words reveal something that even its founder may not have fully understood when she chose them. Lineage was never simply one of the values of Birth & Beyond, NYC. Lineage helped to create it.

Anjanette’s mother spent much of her life carrying the world on her shoulders. Eventually, mother and daughter quietly switched places. There was no family announcement marking the transition. Anjanette simply recognized that the woman who had carried everyone deserved to be carried herself, and she stepped into that role, immediately. Near the end of her mother’s life, during one of their last conversations, her mother said something that would eventually become remarkably important: “You should start your own business. You’re so good at business.”

That sentence matters because of who said it and when. Her mother was not making an abstract prediction about her daughter’s potential. By then, she had experienced Anjanette’s ability to manage, advocate, organize, protect and take responsibility. The matriarch had watched her daughter step forward and lead, and then she named what she saw. Years later, that seed became Birth & Beyond, NYC.

Even the name now contains an affectionate family echo. Bed, Bath & Beyond was one of her mother’s favorite stores, and her mother also called her daughter Barefoot Contessa, another small memory that survived her. After Anjanette was born, they discovered a crescent moon birthmark on her palm, the same crescent moon her mother carried on hers. Their importance is intimate. Families leave language inside one another, and sometimes we discover years later that the people we lost are still present in the vocabulary of the very lives we built.

This is the first visible line of transmission between the two. Anjanette’s mother recognized the gift, her daughter embodied it, and the business grew from the seed. But lineage does not stop with the generation before us. To understand what Anjanette was building, we also have to look at the generation watching her.

Forensics Investigator at Four Years Old

There is another thread that began long before nursing school, birthwork or entrepreneurship. At four years old, Anjanette was already investigating; some would call this being “nosy.”

Her mother’s forbidden no-no drawer held information about Vietnam and Agent Orange, her own father’s experience through devastation and tragedy. She was learning to read, driven in part by a child’s desire to understand the world her mother carried and to keep Mommy close without making her feel guilty for everything she had to do. Agent Orange was not an abstract historical subject in a textbook. It became something her mother would contact people about, something connected to questions that demanded answers. But there were never any answers or accountability.

Decades later, that same instinct only sharpened. Anjanette went on to investigate systems, records, timelines and inconsistencies with a level of accuracy that sometimes surprised the people around her. When her brother needed an advocate, that skill became particularly important. The adult woman could comb through information, notice what did not make sense and keep asking questions long after an easier answer had been offered. Anjanette became the guardian of her brother, while he lived in their mother’s womb. Twenty-seven years ago, she stepped into court-appointed legal guardianship, standing beside her brother and her mother. Advocacy is a deep love of hers; it’s how she protects the individuals and communities she pours into.

Looking backward, the pattern is almost funny in its consistency. The four-year-old rummaging through the drawer was already asking the question the adult advocate would ask repeatedly: What actually happened here? That instinct shaped her writing, her approach to healthcare and the way she examined research, institutional practices and maternal-health policy. Even the multiple investigations behind this anniversary story followed the same pattern: do not simply accept the version handed to you. Look again. Ask who said it. Ask who checked it. Ask whose voice is missing.

The detective did not suddenly appear. She grew from pain and anguish, sharpened by a lifetime of noticing what others missed.

Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island: The Geography of Becoming

Lineage tells us where we come from, but geography also records where we became ourselves. Anjanette is a Brooklyn native; Astoria, Queens, holds another chapter. Her office window once faced the World Trade Center, making September 11, 2001, something she witnessed not as a distant history but as a New Yorker whose familiar skyline became the site of catastrophe. She eventually made the long journey home to Astoria on foot, carrying memories of a city fractured in an instant and of ordinary people finding ways to keep moving through it. Like they always do.

Staten Island would become another kind of home. It is where much of Birth & Beyond, NYC would take root, where Anjanette would teach, advocate, build community, encounter resistance, question who was being included and excluded, and continue expanding the work. Brooklyn gave her origin. Queens holds part of her becoming. Staten Island became a place of building.

Then, decades into that New York story, another geography entered the map: Mali, West Africa.

The Blackout: Mother, Son and the Inheritance of Autonomy

On August 14, 2003, the Northeast blackout shut down electrical systems while Anjanette and her mother were talking on the phone. New York City came to a complete standstill. Subway trains stopped, traffic signals went dark, workers poured into the streets and ordinary people stepped into the gaps left by failing infrastructure.

Anjanette experienced that historic day three months pregnant with her son. Over twenty years later, that detail becomes difficult to overlook because the child she carried through one enormous societal disruption would come of age during another. COVID-19 reshaped his adolescence and education. In 2022, he graduated high school as part of the inaugural graduating class of a new school and moved directly toward entrepreneurship. Her son sat alone, watching as other high school students excitedly snapped pictures and signed their college poster boards. That stillness was painful to witness. There was no board for her son to sign, no pictures to take. Instead, he made the brave decision to head in another direction.

Like mother, like son.

His decision did not occur in a vacuum. Anjanette’s last day of full-time employment had been in August 2021. By the time her son graduated, he had already watched his mother build Birth & Beyond, NYC and begin constructing a professional life outside conventional full-time employment. He had watched entrepreneurship become something tangible rather than theoretical. He lives a life of freedom and deep-seated passion, the very extension of his own lineage.

This is where the family pattern becomes visible. His grandmother told his mother to build something of her own. His mother did, and then he watched her and began building something of his own. The mechanism can be entirely human and still be profound: one generation expands the possibilities available to the next. A child who has seen ownership modeled knows that ownership exists. A grandmother planted the seed, a daughter grew it, and a grandson grew up beneath the tree. That is lineage.

The pair also screams at the top of their lungs as her son, a gamer and content creator, and his loyal soldiers tear through various teams on Xbox Live. Lineage also has range.

SN: When GTA VI finally drops, all bets are off. Let’s go. Run up and you can get done up.

Let’s head back to the story at hand, before Anjanette decides to run amok.

Trauma-Informed Before It Had a Professional Name

Anjanette’s approach to care cannot be separated from what she has lived and what she has witnessed. Her ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) score is six. She does not disclose that number with shame, and it does not require a warning label to exist in her own history. It is one piece of the life that eventually informed the way she understands safety, vulnerability, power and care.

An ACE score measures childhood exposure to adversity; it does not assign that adversity to a particular parent. Her childhood contained significant adversity, but that does not mean her mother created that adversity. Many of the experiences reflected in her ACE score came from other people and circumstances. The score tells us what she was exposed to; it does not tell us who was responsible for it. Nor does it recognize that accountability was taken for it.

Nursing added another education entirely. Anjanette has witnessed life entering the world and life leaving it. She has held mothers in her arms. She has been present during moments when people were frightened, exposed, grieving, laboring, changing and relying on the people around them to recognize their humanity. Those experiences taught lessons no certification could completely reproduce.

Her trauma-informed practice therefore developed at the intersection of education, clinical experience, lived experience and witnessing. She understands that what appears on the surface of a person may be only a fraction of what their nervous system, history or body is carrying. That understanding reaches backward toward the child who always wanted Mommy close, forward toward the nurse holding mothers, outward toward the doula protecting emotional safety, and eventually inward toward Anjanette herself. After years of extending extraordinary attention to what other people needed, part of her homecoming has involved recognizing that she deserves access to that same tenderness.

Trauma is part of her history without becoming the author of her entire identity.

Masculine and Feminine Energy: The Story of Integration

One interpretation of Anjanette’s transition would be to describe her as leaving the rigid “masculine” world of institutional medicine and moving into the intuitive “feminine” world of holistic birthwork. That interpretation is too simple, and more importantly, it is not Anjanette.

Within spiritual frameworks that use the language of masculine and feminine energy, both can exist in all of us. Masculine energy does not inherently mean hierarchy, domination or emotional disconnection, any more than feminine energy automatically means intuition, gentleness or healing. Masculine expression can protect, stabilize, act and hold. Feminine expression can create, receive, transform and flow. Their expression depends upon the person and the context.

Birth itself makes the inadequacy of the binary obvious. There can be profoundly loving masculine energy in a birth room. A partner’s steadiness, protection and presence can create safety. There can also be controlling behavior inside institutions led by women. Gender does not determine the energy of a space, and neither masculine nor feminine energy is the villain in this story.

The problem Anjanette encountered was something different: systems in which hierarchy, institutional protection, efficiency or protocol could become more important than the humanity of the person receiving care. Her answer was never to reject structure. She knows too much for that. She is a Registered Nurse, and clinical assessment, evidence, physiology, emergency intervention and documentation matter. So do emotional safety, cultural awareness, intuition, family history, bodily autonomy and the experience of the person giving birth.

Anjanette’s work has always existed at the intersection, and there is perhaps no clearer embodiment of that balance than her own name. There is Anjanette, and there is AJ. Anjanette has long understood AJ as an expression of her androgyny. AJ is not an alter ego who replaces Anjanette, nor is one expression more authentic than the other. They coexist. The true story of her retirement is not that she finally abandoned masculinity and became feminine. She became free enough to inhabit her full range.

This helps explain part of her enduring connection to Aaliyah. Aaliyah turned that balance into an aesthetic language: oversized, menswear-influenced clothing alongside sensuality, softness and unmistakable femininity. She did not need to sacrifice one expression to authenticate the other. Later, Beyoncé would famously name Sasha Fierce as a performance persona through which another aspect of herself could emerge. Different expressions could inhabit one woman without requiring her to choose between them.

The same principle appears throughout Anjanette’s life: nurse and birthkeeper, scientist and spiritual seeker, mother and autonomous woman, structure and fluidity, strength and softness, Anjanette and AJ. Her sovereignty is found in the integration of them all.

The Clinical Bridge: Why Birth & Beyond Had to Exist

For years, Anjanette worked inside modern healthcare and learned its language intimately. Nursing gave her clinical knowledge that remains part of her foundation. She understands the value of assessment, protocols, technology and disciplined clinical judgment because she has practiced them.

Birthwork confirmed something equally important: a person giving birth cannot be reduced to the information contained in a medical chart. Birth carries culture, sexuality, family, memory, vulnerability, fear, power, trauma, joy and transformation into the room. A fetal monitor can provide essential information about a fetal heart rate. It cannot tell us whether the person attached to that monitor feels safe, respected or heard.

Anjanette did not need to choose between those truths. She became the bridge between them. As an RN, full-spectrum doula, childbirth educator and birthworker, she could understand the clinical conversation while remaining anchored to the person experiencing it. Her work increasingly centered the place where evidence and embodiment meet.

This is why the word full-spectrum matters. Full-spectrum work does not understand reproductive life as one isolated event called birth. It recognizes a continuum of bodies, choices, transitions, families, beginnings, endings, grief, joy and autonomy. In hindsight, the name Birth & Beyond was telling the truth before anyone understood just how large the Beyond would eventually become.

Mali, the African Diaspora and the Question of Who Gets to Know

In 2025, independent genealogical research gave Anjanette another piece of her maternal story: her direct maternal ancestry traced to Mali in West Africa. The discovery did not create her relationship with lineage. It gave geography to it.

That distinction becomes especially important when discussing African knowledge, because African histories are frequently narrated through a framework in which Africa possesses an ancient, mystical past while “Western civilization” eventually arrives carrying modern knowledge. That framework is insufficient for this story. African knowledge did not stop moving. African people carried it through families, migrations, scholarship, oral traditions, agriculture, healing practices, spirituality, music, art, birth traditions and community life.

Forced displacement radically disrupted those processes, but it did not erase African people or their capacity to preserve, transform and create. Throughout the African diaspora, descendants carried cultural memory forward while creating new traditions under new circumstances. The diaspora is not what happened after African history; the diaspora is part of African history continuing.

That understanding changes the way we approach one of the most famous stories associated with Mali: Dogon cosmology and Sirius. French ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen documented accounts in the twentieth century describing sophisticated Dogon cosmological traditions associated with Sirius. Their work later became internationally famous because it appeared to describe specific characteristics associated with Sirius B, the faint companion to Sirius that cannot be seen with the unaided eye.

Decades later, Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek conducted his own fieldwork and challenged aspects of those accounts when he could not reproduce the earlier findings in the same form. The Sirius story therefore became “contested,” but that word can hide the most interesting part of the story. The widely circulated written account of Dogon knowledge was produced by European ethnographers, and one of its most influential later challenges was also produced by a European ethnographer. The disagreement was therefore not simply “African people made a claim and science checked whether they were correct.” It was also a dispute among outsiders about what outsiders had heard, how they had gained access to knowledge, how questions had been asked, how information had been translated and how Dogon cosmology had been interpreted.

That does not automatically prove every modern claim made about Dogon knowledge of Sirius B. Intellectual respect does not require certainty where uncertainty remains. It does, however, require us to notice who has historically been granted the authority to interpret whom.

That question has contemporary echoes throughout the African diaspora. Black people can still find themselves sitting in rooms while people outside their lived experience explain the Black experience with institutional authority. The issue is not that outsiders can never contribute meaningful scholarship. The question is what happens when the observer becomes the authority while the people being observed become merely the subject.

For Anjanette, whose maternal lineage now points toward Mali, this is more than an interesting anthropological dispute. It belongs to a much larger question running through her work: Who gets heard? Who gets believed? Who gets interpreted? And who gets to tell their own story? Those questions sound remarkably familiar in maternal healthcare.

Akasha, Aaliyah and Divine Feminine Re-awakening

The original framework for this story brought forward the idea of the Akashic Records. The word akasha originates in Sanskrit philosophical traditions and has traveled through different spiritual movements, eventually becoming associated in contemporary metaphysical practice with the idea of an energetic record of consciousness and experience. That concept belongs to spirituality rather than empirical science, and the distinction matters because spirituality does not need to impersonate science to carry meaning.

For Anjanette, Akasha immediately creates another cultural connection: Aaliyah portrayed Queen Akasha in Queen of the Damned. Twenty-five years after Aaliyah’s death, Anjanette finds herself in a year filled with questions of ancestry, mortality, identity, creativity, feminine power, bodily autonomy and legacy. She is also encountering contemporary spiritual conversations about awakening, ancestral remembrance and divine feminine energy that gained particular resonance for her during June 2026.

There is another Aaliyah connection that feels almost too appropriate to leave out. The final music video Aaliyah completed before her death was “Rock the Boat.” Twenty-five years later, Anjanette has been rocking the boat in her honor, questioning systems, challenging who gets to hold authority, making room where there wasn’t any and refusing to stay inside the lanes she was handed. The title needs very little interpretation. Her girl left instructions. Anjanette understood the assignment.

The important point is not that a June portal scientifically caused millions of people throughout the African diaspora to awaken simultaneously. The more interesting truth is that Anjanette recognized herself in the language of awakening because an awakening was already occurring in her life. Her writing was changing. Her relationship with work and institutions was changing. Her understanding of ancestry was changing. Her body was asking to return to parts of itself that responsibility had pushed aside, and she was beginning to imagine a life organized around passion rather than obligation.

The spiritual framework did not need to manufacture the transformation. It gave her language for recognizing it.

The Writing Knew Before Anjanette Did

There is an unusually good paper trail documenting this transition because Anjanette is a writer. Before she consciously declared herself retired, her work had already begun questioning the ideas that once structured her life. Let’s Redistribute That Top 1% interrogated labor, wealth, scarcity and the cultural expectation that endless work should be treated as virtue. Her writing about Slovenia humbled her and widened her perspective. Other pieces explored birth, medicine, trauma-informed care, institutional power, identity and the cost of fitting inside systems that no longer fit her.

Then Bohemian Rhapsody entered the story, and Queen arrived before retirement had been fully named. That does not require Freddie Mercury to have filed paperwork in the Akashic Records. It demonstrates something writers know well: sometimes the work understands what the writer is circling before the writer consciously says it aloud. Creative expression can become a record of transformation while the transformation is still happening.

Eventually came Are You There God? It’s Me, AJ. That title contains an entire history of its own. The former Catholic-school girl who says she met her Father immediately eventually writes to God using the name that represents another dimension of herself. Religion, private spirituality, humor, androgyny, adulthood and memory meet in one title.

Somewhere along the way, writing became easier because the individual essays were no longer isolated observations. They were chapters of the same transformation. This anniversary piece is where the series finally turns around and recognizes itself. There is also an irresistible piece of symmetry here: two Queens are now examining the story together, while a third, Queen, appears to have provided part of the soundtrack before either fully understood what it was announcing. The scales remain balanced.

She Did Not Leave the Work. She Changed Altitude.

If Anjanette’s retirement represented a withdrawal from maternal health, the weeks surrounding it make very little sense. One local professional chapter had closed, yet the larger maternal-health world began opening doors.

Anjanette was appointed to the AABC/NACPM Community Birth Conference Program Committee, a one-year appointment extending through June 2027. Instead of serving inside one community birth setting, she had been invited to participate in shaping a conference serving the broader community-birth field.

Then came Lamaze. On July 23, Anjanette was contacted as one of the subject matter experts volunteering for a standard-setting study for the Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator examination. For an educator who had spent years thinking deeply about what families deserve from childbirth education, the invitation represented a striking shift. Her knowledge was no longer being called upon only to teach the material; it was being called upon in work connected to the standards surrounding certification itself.

Six days later, on July 29, another message arrived. This time, it concerned Senator Cory Booker’s reintroduction of the Momnibus in the United States Senate. Anjanette had already endorsed the legislation, and because the Senate version maintained text identical to the House companion legislation she had previously endorsed, she was contacted to let her know that her endorsement would continue unless she chose otherwise.

The closing language captured the moment beautifully: “Senator Booker values your partnership in this vital work and looks forward to continuing to work together to advance maternal health equity for Black women.”

Community birth, professional standards and federal maternal-health advocacy were all appearing around the same moment Anjanette was supposedly “leaving” maternal healthcare. She was not leaving. She had changed altitude.

Retirement meant that her expertise no longer had to be exchanged primarily through shifts, schedules and daily labor. She could participate in maternal health at the level of advocacy, standards, programming, education, policy and special projects while retaining control over her time. The birth center could say no while AABC said yes. Lamaze could call her a subject matter expert. Senator Booker’s team could return to an endorsement she had already given and recognize her partnership in advancing maternal health equity for Black women.

Stepping away from one structure did not shrink the reach of her work. It expanded the ways she could choose to use it.

The Return to the Body: Wild and Free, As it Was Intended

There is another homecoming happening at the same time, and this one has nothing to do with a résumé. Years ago, during her bartending days, Anjanette learned pole. What she remembers most clearly is how it made her feel: wild and free.

Now she is returning to it, and the word returning matters. Pole already belongs to her history. This time, she is approaching it deliberately through sensuality, giving herself permission to explore a dimension of embodiment that work, caregiving and decades of responsibility did not always leave room to center.

Contortion carries an older memory still. Before the nurse, before the doula, before the entrepreneur and before decades of adult responsibility, there was a gymnastics girl. Contortion offers her the chance to ask what that body remembers while discovering what this body can learn now.

Pole is a return to something that once made her feel wild and free, while contortion is a conversation between a former gymnast and the woman she became. Neither needs to become a business, serve anyone or produce anything measurable. For a woman whose body has spent decades working, caregiving, mothering, standing through shifts, assisting births and responding to the needs of other people, pleasure and curiosity are sufficient reasons. That, too, is sovereignty.

The Beyond

Perhaps the most revealing word in the name of Anjanette’s company was never Birth. Perhaps it was Beyond.

As a full-spectrum doula, Anjanette’s work was never truly confined to the moment a baby emerged. Full-spectrum care recognizes reproductive life as a continuum filled with decisions, transitions, families, bodies, beginnings, endings, joy, grief, autonomy and change. The same principle now describes the company itself.

Birth & Beyond does not have to remain inside a single lane because its founder does not exist inside one. Maternal health remains part of the work, but so do writing, visual art, advocacy, culture, ancestry, spirituality, sensuality, movement and whatever else Anjanette becomes curious enough to explore.

This is not Birth & Beyond becoming less focused. It is Birth & Beyond becoming more fully itself. Birth tells us where so much of the professional journey was forged. Beyond tells us there was never supposed to be a wall around where it could go.

Current & Upcoming Projects

Visual Arts & Storytelling: Expanding into birth photography, photography, video and YouTube, bringing Anjanette’s eye as a birthworker, writer and storyteller into a new visual medium.
Aaliyah Tribute: Honoring Aaliyah twenty-five years after her passing and exploring the artist, imagery, memories and personal connections that have made her such an enduring presence in Anjanette’s story.
9/11 Tribute: Remembering September 11 through Anjanette’s experience as a New Yorker whose office window faced the World Trade Center and who ultimately walked home to Astoria, Queens that day.
Tribute Project: Expanding the spirit of the tribute wall Anjanette created in her living room in May 2026 into a space honoring the people, places and creative influences that helped carry her through this transformative year.
AABC/NACPM Community Birth Conference: Serving on the Program Committee through June 2027 and helping shape the upcoming Community Birth Conference.
Lamaze LCCE Standard Setting: Participating as a subject matter expert in the standard-setting study for the Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator examination.
Senator Cory Booker & the Momnibus Act: Following outreach regarding Senator Booker’s reintroduction of the Momnibus in the U.S. Senate, Anjanette’s previous endorsement will continue with the legislation. The correspondence recognized her partnership in advancing maternal health equity for Black women.
Pole & Sensuality: Returning to pole and reconnecting with the wild-and-free feeling Anjanette remembers from learning it during her bartending days, now with sensuality at the center.
Contortion Training: Reconnecting the former gymnastics girl with flexibility, strength and movement while discovering what her body can do in this chapter.
Special Projects: New creative, advocacy and community projects chosen because they inspire her, not because they fit neatly into anybody else’s definition of what Birth & Beyond should be.

The Pride Is Safe and the Lioness Is Home

When the pieces of Anjanette Silas’s story are placed beside one another, the most compelling pattern does not require exaggerating history, turning spirituality into science or forcing every coincidence into proof of divine intervention. The real story is already extraordinary.

A four-year-old girl was rummaging through a forbidden drawer trying to understand information connected to her mother. She grew into a woman who would spend decades asking questions, examining records and advocating when explanations did not make sense. A matriarch who spent her life carrying others eventually found herself being carried by her daughter, and before she left, she looked at that daughter and told her to build something of her own.

Her daughter listened.

She carried a son through the darkness of the 2003 blackout and raised him long enough for him to watch her step outside conventional full-time employment and build on her own terms. He came of age through another historic disruption, graduated in 2022 and moved toward entrepreneurship himself. Across three generations, the form changes while the impulse toward possibility continues.

Anjanette’s nursing journey formally began on 8/8/08 at 8:00 AM with a 45-minute NCLEX experience followed by twelve days of waiting while her exam was evaluated, an experience she still understands as a moment when Mommy was tapped in. Eighteen years later, 8/8/26 arrived as the fifth anniversary of the business her mother had once encouraged her to create. Her maternal ancestry led her toward Mali. Her questions about African and diasporic knowledge led naturally into questions about who is permitted to interpret whom. Her own history and years of witnessing human vulnerability shaped a trauma-informed practice rooted in more than theory.

Her writing documented the transition before she consciously called herself retired. Queen entered the soundtrack before she understood the announcement. Aaliyah offered a cultural mirror for the balance between androgyny and femininity that Anjanette already knew as AJ. And Aaliyah’s final completed visual work, Rock the Boat, found a fitting echo twenty-five years later in a woman who has been doing exactly that in her honor. Her spiritual exploration gave language to an awakening her life was already demonstrating.

Then, as she stepped away from clinical nursing, the work met her somewhere else. AABC/NACPM invited her into community-birth conference planning. Lamaze invited her into standard-setting work as a subject matter expert. Senator Cory Booker’s Momnibus reintroduction carried forward an endorsement she had already made, accompanied by recognition of her partnership in advancing maternal health equity for Black women.

At the same time, the rest of the woman began coming home. The former gymnast found contortion. The bartender who once felt wild and free found the pole again. The birthworker found the camera. The advocate found special projects. The writer found the thread connecting a year’s worth of stories. Anjanette and AJ found room to coexist without explanation.

And the daughter woke on August 8, kissed the photograph of the woman who first saw the entrepreneur in her, and understood exactly what needed to be said: We did it.

Perhaps that is what awakening looks like when stripped of all the language we use to explain it. It is not always becoming someone new. Sometimes it is finally recognizing the continuity between all the people you have already been. The nurse does not disappear when the birthkeeper emerges. The birthkeeper does not disappear because the nurse retires. The mother does not disappear inside the entrepreneur. AJ never has to defeat Anjanette. The clinical mind does not cancel the spiritual one. Sensuality does not diminish intellect. Trauma does not own the rest of the story. Rest does not invalidate accomplishment. Leaving an institution does not mean abandoning a calling.

The scales are balanced because the whole woman is finally allowed onto them.

Birth & Beyond, NYC turns five today. Its founder is retired from clinical nursing, but she is not finished with maternal health, advocacy, creating, learning her body, documenting birth, honoring the people who carried her, investigating her lineage, questioning systems, writing stories or discovering what the word Beyond will permit next.

Her mother planted the seed. Anjanette grew the tree. Her son grew up beneath it. The pride is safe, the cubs are growing, the matriarch is honored and the work continues, now on her terms.

The lioness did not leave birth behind. She finally reached the Beyond.

Happy fifth anniversary, Birth & Beyond, NYC. Happy Freedom Anniversary, Anjanette. Welcome to the damn Beyond.

Special Shoutout to YOU, the reader, thank you!

My people in these healthcare trenches, my birthworkers, nice nurses, compassionate doulas, my fellow expert childbirth educators, ONLY the people not down for the copy-and-paste version of business. For everyone who has supported me, prayed for me, believed in me or loved me unconditionally. It’s a Wild & Free Community. Welcome to Our World. Classes and continued support will be back again after I pick the twigs out of my hair. Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is that woman for me. The trad(itional) wife comment I made? Please strike that from the record. That is me. I am her. I found my old aprons. I twirled with them like Cinderella did. I will wear them because I missed that version of myself. The womanly, sensual parts of myself. Menopause brain fog is REAL. I’ll be back to share more.

This wouldn’t be possible without a true Queen by my side, please give a shoutout for a local Staten Islander, a true relic in our community. Ife, you already know LOL. Please share her gifts across every continent! My knees buckle when she speaks her truth. Ife Damon, LLC, please STAND UP! Our throne awaits. I look forward to our one-year celebration together. Life could have separated us, but this right here is 4LIFE. Thank you for recognizing that I am a reflection of you.

Rewa Thompson, DNP, from Elektra Health is the greatest of all time. I was referred to Elektra by another NP from my community. This NP is being addressed behind the scenes. The NP I speak of was supposed to become my new GYN. Not anymore. I am 49 years old. I’m grown, and I know that shared decision-making didn’t take place. I now have 17 investigations that I initiated against those corporate entities within the healthcare system. There’s still more. As long as we stand up, we tell the world that we will not sit down. I’m here to lift you to your feet, as long as you do the same for me.

With Immense and Eternal Gratitude,

Anjanette R. Silas