We really do have this belief that we're supposed to be doing it all by ourselves, and when a new life is in the world, that just can't be true. You need help. You need people to cook for you. You need more than six weeks to recover. You need community — and that's hard for people to piece together on their own.
By Erika Janes
Photos By Michael Buckner
Styled By Monique Lauren Peters
Makeup & Hair: Chris Gees
Tatyana Ali Is Reclaiming Her Joy
& Finding Her Voice
atyana Ali is having a relatable working-mom moment. We’re just minutes into our Zoom interview when the actor and singer apologizes — unnecessarily — because her youngest son has popped into the room.
“Give me one second, because I don’t know if you can see, but somebody got in,” she says, explaining, “We’re staying at my parents for a little bit because I just finished a job, and they have the handle door knobs so my 18-month-old is just letting himself in wherever he needs to. Sorry about that.”
We share a laugh because, well, what working mom hasn’t had a kid interrupt a work moment during quarantine? “I feel like this is a time of grace,” she says. “Working from home, everybody's like [she shrugs]. And for those who are not, well, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Ali has learned to give herself grace, too. But the quiet grace she exudes — the gentle laugh and the what-can-you-do shrug — are matched by a quiet fierceness that presents itself when she starts talking about birth. Having lived through two vastly different childbirth experiences, Tatyana Ali is intent on reclaiming her joy — and helping other Black birthing people find theirs. As an actor, Ali began her career at age 6 on Sesame Street and gained widespread fame playing Ashley Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But more recently, she has added roles of a completely different sort to her résumé. Chief among them: being mother to 4-year-old Edward “Aszi” and the aforementioned toddler, Alejandro; and championing reproductive justice. Both led her to her latest project: Ali is currently at work directing a documentary film titled Birth Right: The Quilt, which explores the Black maternal mortality crisis.
These newer roles — advocate, mama, filmmaker — are forever intertwined because of Ali’s birth story with Aszi. A healthy, complication-free, pregnancy that she describes as “wonderful” ended with an emergency C-section and a nearly week-long stay in the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit for her son.
“It was a very traumatic birth,” she says. “My experience in the hospital for my first son was really my first experience with institutional bias — you know, the kind of coercion and not really listening to our birth plan, interventions that were totally unnecessary and that I didn't want, all of that — and then the ensuing cascade of problems that come out of that.”
It took a year for Ali and her husband, Dr. Vaughn Rasberry, to process and unpack that trauma. And when she became pregnant with her second son, Alejandro, she knew she needed to change the narrative. “The fear came back: How are we going to do this? What is it going to be like? It can't be like what it was before. How do we prevent that?” she recalls. “And in trying to figure out how I would do birth the second time around, I started to realize and recognize that my story fits really neatly into the Black maternal health story.”
But Ali is clear: Her first birth story, and its potent mix of emotions, is not the whole story. It is the beginning — the beginning of finding her joy as a mom, finding her voice as an advocate, using her platform for good, and moving the dialogue about Black maternal health and Black motherhood forward in a meaningful and positive way.
A Better Birth
Ali’s path to a better birth for baby number two began, in part, with her participation in Black Mamas Matter Alliance’s 2018 Black Maternal Health Week, and the decision that a Black midwife and a vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) at home was the right choice for her this time around. The experience was utterly transformative and healing — but not in the way you might think.
“I had a dream midwife. I had my tub, I was so ready. And he ended up being transverse, so I ended up in a hospital having a C-section again,” she says. “But it was a completely different experience — and one where the experience actually healed the trauma from our first birth.
Postpartum Bliss
A better birth experience led, unsurprisingly, to a better postpartum period. While postpartum care, for many, comes down to the bare minimum of what insurance covers for a hospital stay and little if any paid leave, Ali looks back on this time with gratitude, as a time of recuperation and connection.
For the second-time mama, it was also a time of allowing herself to be cared for. Reverently, Ali recalls a South African peanut stew that her midwife cooked for her as part of her practice. “I want to cry just thinking about it," she says. “There's something about food that's cooked with love, with intention, that is incredibly healing.
“We really do have this belief that we're supposed to be doing it all by ourselves,” she adds, “and when a new life is in the world, that just can't be true. You need help. You need people to cook for you. You need more than six weeks to recover. You need community — and that's hard for people to piece together on their own.”
That was true for her personally, as well. “We felt bad about asking for help with our first son,” she admits. “With Alejandro it was totally different. I was like, ‘Everybody stay in the house. Come one, come all.’ I think it's important for us to understand culturally that we're not supposed to do it alone.”
Equally important, her husband was able to take parental leave from his job — something Ali is the first to recognize not every parent can do and that she desperately wants to change. “That was life saving for us, to be able to all be together for a period of time and just recuperate,” she says. “Because it is a fourth trimester — you're still connected; they cannot be out of your space.”
Learning to trust and honor her instincts and intuition has also been an important part of Ali’s motherhood journey — and something she didn’t do initially. As Ali explains, when it came time to think about how she wanted to give birth to Aszi, “I wanted to make everybody [else] feel safe and secure,” she says. “And my feelings or instincts were really the last on the list.”
Well, lesson learned, because Ali didn’t silence her own inner voice again. Even in the early days with Aszi, her instincts started to kick in, if less for her own care than for his. Struggling with breastfeeding — something all of the women in her family had been told they couldn’t do — she recalls being exhausted at 3 a.m. with a cluster-feeding newborn when Rasberry gently suggested that giving the baby a bottle of formula would let her get some sleep. It was a valid suggestion, to be sure (and let’s be clear: Ali isn’t here to judge anyone for how they feed their baby, and, in fact, fed her child both formula and breastmilk in the NICU), but she was intent on breastfeeding her son.
“My husband is like, ‘Baby we have the formula, you can go to sleep.' And I was like, 'ROARRRRRRRR,'” she recalls, laughing. (And yes, she really did roar over our Zoom call.) “I apologized for the way I said it. But I'm not apologetic for my tenacity in trying to do what I want to do,” she continues. “I was really determined and strong in that conviction, and for some reason did not feel bad telling people to leave me the hell alone. And it worked. I had a beautiful long breastfeeding journey with Aszi, and with Ale [we’re] going in the same direction.
“My [maternal] instincts have made me a stronger person, in general, because I know what it feels like to speak up for them,” she says. “Sometimes you've got to be a lion, you know?”
Tapping into that fierce, inner mama lioness; trusting that gut feeling that makes you roar — that’s something Ali wants all of us to inhabit and own, deeply. Because it sounds simple — trust your instincts — but when we do, it’s powerful. It’s a powerful tool against patriarchy, she believes, and a powerful tool for Black birthing people, especially.
“That's where our power is; it's in what we know,” she says. “The deep-down-inside we know. Like, ‘I don't know why, but this doesn't feel right. What you're telling me doesn't feel good.’ Listen to that. Listen, because that's our power.”
It makes sense, then, that Ali’s experiences have led her back to a familiar place: the screen. Birth Right: The Quilt, is part passion project, part thesis that explores birth experiences, celebrates reproductive justice work, and reclaims the joy of birth for Black people. “I want to share it,” she says of the knowledge she’s gained from the grassroots communities and spaces she’s been able to sit in, listen in, and participate in, [“because] I wish I’d known it.”
Trusting Her Instincts & Intuition
After suffering a traumatic birth experience with her first son, an activist was born in Ali.
My experience in the hospital for my first son was really my first experience with institutional bias — you know, the kind of coercion and not really listening to our birth plan, interventions that were totally unnecessary and that I
didn't want, all of that — and then the ensuing cascade
of problems that come out of that.
take me
home
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Styled By: Monique Lauren Peters
“I was going for a paradigm shift,” she continues. “All-natural, home birth, water birth — all that. And then when it came down to it, I ended up in the hospital and I had an amazing experience. It was completely different — because I had choices. There was somebody there who respected me, respected us as a family, got to know us as a family, guided us through everything, and gave us choices. It was incredible.”
There’s a palpable sense of bliss listening to Ali describe her experience birthing Alejandro, and in having reclaimed the joyful experience she wanted — indeed, the joyful experience that every birthing person deserves — even when it still didn’t go as planned.
“I've always had this sense that our babies come as they come," she says, "and that is part of the birth experience."
Planning helped — Ali’s midwife not only took care of little things, like making sure that unused birthing tub was cleared away before the couple and their newborn returned home, she prepared Ali for the deluge of emotions she might experience going through a C-section again after hoping for a VBAC. “That actually happened to me in the hospital when the anesthesiologist said, ‘You're not going to feel anything from the neck down,’” Ali recalls. “I just fell apart — but my midwife had prepared me for that moment. And my husband and my mom and my midwife, they just kind of surrounded me and they were just there with me and I got through it. I had that moment that I wanted to have.”
White Shirt: Wolford Pure T-shirt, $135
Skirt: Christopher John Rogers Floral-Print Puffball Skirt, $2,655
Necklace: Kholusi Kollection
Gloves: Stylist’s Own
Crown: Stylist’s Own
Dress: Mara Hoffman Leonara Dress, $575
Earrings: Stylist’s Own
Blazer: Dolce & Gabbana Jacquard Patchwork Fitted Long Jacket, $4,995
Wolford Leo Tights, $67
Earrings: Stylist's Own
Makeup & Hair: Chris Gees
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