Interview with Alessandra Martinelli, February 22, 2011

Interview Summary

Interview with Alessandra Martinelli Belfast, ME. In this interview, facilitator and project director, Nora Weatherby is joined by interviewee Gina Forbes to interview Alessandra Martinelli.

Alessandra starts by talking about growing up in Wilmington, DE until she was eight years old. She shares stories about her parents work and about moving around a lot as a child from Delaware to New Mexico to Massachusetts. She talks about always being the new kid and being best friends with her brother. She went to Maine for college and there she met her husband Tom. A year after they met they had their first daughter, Lily. She compares her upbringing moving around to her husbands roots in a small town in Maine and how she hopes her children have what he had. She talks about being young parents and being on MaineCare.

Alessandra compares her first birth at Pen Bay Hospital in Rockport, ME to her second birth at home with midwives. She shares insights and frustrations about the medicalized experience she felt she had the first time around and how that experience influenced her to make different choices when she had her second daughter, Charlotte. She describes herself as stubborn and explains how that can be both challenging and useful in birthing and parenting. She also relays stories about her mother?s birthing experiences in the 1980?s.

Interview Keyword

Maine

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Interview Usage

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