Your Body Was Never the Problem: Megan’s Mission to Change the Way Women Are Cared For.
A few months ago, I met Megan at one of my meet and greets at a local business, and there was something about her that immediately made me feel comfortable. You know those people you meet for the first time and somehow feel like you have known them longer than five minutes? That was Megan for me. She was warm, kind and easy to talk to, and then I learned what she actually does for women, and I found myself thinking about it in a completely different way. Megan is a Whole Woman Care practitioner based here in Kingston, working with women throughout the Puget Sound region, offering something that I think so many women need but may not even realize they are missing. Her work includes breast tending, scar tissue remediation, pelvic and womb care and pregnancy support, but when you listen to Megan talk about it, you realize it is about so much more than those individual services. It is about women being seen as whole people and learning to reconnect with their own bodies.
As someone who has spent a great deal of my own life navigating the medical system, I understand what it can feel like to have your body become something that is constantly being examined, treated, measured or managed. There are times when medical care is absolutely necessary, and I am incredibly grateful for the doctors and specialists who have cared for me throughout my life. But there is another side to being sick for a long time, and that is sometimes forgetting that underneath the diagnoses, procedures, medications and appointments, there is still a person who wants to feel cared for, comforted and seen. Knowing that one day I will likely face dialysis and eventually a kidney transplant, I find myself thinking about what kind of care I will need beyond the medical treatment itself. What will it feel like to have someone like Megan, someone warm and compassionate, remind me that I am still a woman, still a whole person and still deserving of tenderness during a time when so much of my body may feel like it belongs to the medical world?
That is what stayed with me after meeting Megan. Her work made me think about how often women are taught to wait until something is wrong before they take care of themselves. We are so accustomed to being the caregivers, the mothers, the wives, the daughters, the employees and the people everyone else depends on that our own bodies often become the last thing on the list. We push through exhaustion. We accept pain. We live with changes after childbirth. We carry scars from surgeries and experiences that changed us. We go through menopause and other seasons of life while being told that certain things are simply part of being a woman. Megan challenges that idea. She believes women deserve to be tended to before something breaks, not simply treated after it does.
Megan describes Whole Woman Care as a return to an older tradition of women tending women, something she believes was interrupted long before any of us were born. Her own journey into this work came from a lifetime of experiences with the medical system, becoming a mother, working with women as a personal trainer and repeatedly seeing how much women carry in their bodies that they were never taught how to understand or care for. After seeking this kind of care herself and traveling to San Diego and Calgary to receive Whole Woman Care, she knew she had found something women in our area needed too. What began as a personal search became a calling.
Her story really made me think about how much our bodies remember. Megan talks about women coming to her with an accumulation of things rather than one simple diagnosis. Scar tissue from childbirth or surgery that was never addressed. Areas of the body that have become numb or disconnected. Experiences that women have simply learned to accept because nobody ever told them there could be another way. I think that is something worth sitting with. How many things have we women accepted as normal simply because nobody ever told us we were allowed to question them?
For Megan, women's health is not just about what happens when something goes wrong. It is about tending, noticing and learning to listen to your own body. She talks about bodily sovereignty and the importance of women feeling at home in their own skin. That phrase really stayed with me because I think so many women spend their lives feeling disconnected from themselves. We take care of everyone else and somewhere along the way, we forget how to take care of ourselves.
Megan is also a mother of three sons, and I loved hearing her talk about what motherhood has taught her. She does not believe balance is really the right word because life with children is not a perfectly balanced scale. It is a rhythm. Some seasons belong more to the children and other seasons allow more room for work and personal dreams. I think so many mothers need permission to hear that. We are constantly made to feel as though we should somehow be doing everything perfectly at the same time, when the truth is that life does not work that way.
What struck me most was hearing Megan talk about what her sons are learning simply by watching her live her life. They see their mother as a woman, not just as their mother. They see her pursuing something she believes in. They see her learning, growing, struggling, succeeding and caring for other women. They see her being honest about the realities of womanhood rather than hiding them. There is something incredibly powerful about that. Our children do not need us to make life look effortless. They need to see what it looks like to keep going, to follow a calling and to believe that what we have to offer the world matters.
Megan's connection to Kingston is another part of her story that I loved. She and her husband first came to the area in 2014, when Kingston was simply their town. Over the years, through marriage, children, moves and different adventures, they eventually found their way back and realized that Kingston felt like home. She grew up in a small town in the Ozarks and says she has always felt most comfortable in a community where people know one another. I understand that feeling completely. There is something special about Kingston and the surrounding communities. We may not always realize it while we are living it, but there is something beautiful about being known.
For Megan, raising her sons here means giving them a childhood where nature is part of everyday life, where neighbors know one another and where community is more than a word. She and her family have traveled the world, both before and after having children, and even after seeing so much of what is out there, they still chose to come back here to raise their family. I think that says something about the kind of place Kingston can be.
Megan has faced many of the same challenges that women business owners face, including having to prove herself in a field that has not always been given the same institutional legitimacy as traditional Western medicine. Instead of pretending to be something she is not, she has learned to stand firmly in what she knows, understand her scope and continue building her work from a place of honesty. She also talked about the quieter struggle of knowing what your time, knowledge and work are actually worth. That is something I think many women entrepreneurs can understand. Sometimes the hardest person to convince that your work matters is yourself.
But perhaps the message that stayed with me most was Megan's belief that self care is not indulgent. Somewhere along the way, we turned self care into something associated with luxury and pampering, when in reality, caring for yourself is maintenance. It is caring for the person everyone else depends on. It is recognizing that you cannot continually pour from yourself without ever being filled back up.
I think that message is especially important for women who have spent years caring for everyone else. We do not have to wait until our bodies are screaming at us to pay attention. We do not have to wait for a diagnosis or a crisis or permission from someone else to start listening. We can learn our bodies. We can notice changes. We can ask questions. We can seek support. We can decide that our comfort matters too.
And maybe that is why meeting Megan affected me as much as it did. Knowing my own future will likely involve more medical procedures, more appointments and more moments when my body becomes something that doctors have to manage, I find comfort in knowing there are also people like Megan who understand that a woman is more than what is happening medically. Sometimes we need someone to care for the person inside the body too.
When I asked Megan what she hoped every woman felt when she left a session, her answer was simple and incredibly powerful. She wants women to feel more at home in their own bodies than they did when she arrived. She wants them to feel less alone and to know they were actually met, not managed, rushed or treated like a checklist.
"I think every woman deserves that feeling." Not just when she is pregnant. Not just after surgery. Not just when something hurts. Not just when she has a diagnosis. Not just when she has finally taken care of everyone else.She deserves it simply because she is a woman with a body that has carried her through everything life has asked of her."
Megan's final message to women in Kingston is one I think we should all sit with: Your body was never the problem. The silence around it was. Come home to it. You are allowed.And maybe that is something we all need to hear a little more often.
