About — The New Parent Diaries

About This Project

Who is this site for?

The New Parent Diaries is a resource for all parents, including queer parents, trans and gender-nonconforming parents, and cisgender fathers. Our goal is for this space to incite a feeling of belonging and camaraderie amongst parents going through different but similar experiences. We hope that in reading other people’s honest accounts you find some shared experience reflected back to you. We want to include as many voices here as possible, from as many walks of life as we can reach. Please help this project be the best it can be by sharing it far and wide.

What this site is not:

This website is not a space for medical advice or any advice for that matter. It is also not a discussion forum. If you choose to leave a comment, we ask that people offer their comments with care and respect for the writer. We are creating a space that is safe to share vulnerably and are committed to that vision. We screen each submission to do our best to protect our community from potential harm.

If you have any feedback for us, we would love to hear it. You can contact us here.

Who are we?

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and hold an MA in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Somatic Psychotherapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). I am passionate about supporting others to become experts of their own bodies and nervous systems, and in gaining insight into parts of themselves previously kept under subconscious or experienced through tension and pain. This insight includes understanding and working with ancestral trauma, and/or the impacts of systems of oppression on our bodies and nervous systems. I am fascinated by the collaborative and creative process of using ritual in my work as a vehicle for healing and transformation.

I endured a long and trying conception journey when trying to conceive my first child, which was an incredibly isolating experience. I spent countless hours reading “TTC” blogs and forums in desperate search of stories from others going through a similar experience. My search often left me feeling even more anxious, defeated, and alone. If only The New Parent Diaries had existed!

My desire and prayer is that this website can serve as an offering to those who are seeking connection, wisdom, hope, inspiration, support, or closure in whatever phase of the parenting journey they might be in and/or have experienced in the past.

To learn more about Amy and her work, please visit amyruben.com.

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and hold an MA in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Expressive Arts Therapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). My work is dedicated to the weaving together of healing, spirituality, social justice, and the arts. I love creating and facilitating therapeutic spaces for people to connect to their higher selves and to one another, and that is one of the places from which the New Parent Diaries was born.

I have been fascinated by pregnancy, birth, and parenting for as long as I can remember. Taking a doula training course in 2013 radically shifted my life trajectory and was a significant milestone in my path towards becoming a psychotherapist. I’m still recovering from and integrating the birth of my daughter in September 2021 and a very challenging 4th trimester. Creating this website has been a great place for me to channel my strong feelings about the lack of connectedness to myself and others that I experienced during my perinatal experience. My prayer is that this can be a space that garners those connections for the parents and parents-to-be that find their way here.

To learn more about me and my work, please visit ellielotan.com

Who is the incredible genius behind these illustrations?

Ariella Elovic is the author and illustrator of CHEEKY: A Head to Toe Memoir. She is the founder of @thecheekyblog, an online platform through which she combats the shame so many of us feel in relation to our bodies.