Once upon a time, pregnant women were revered as goddesses bringing the gift of life to a family and community. Statues of pregnant women were created, and women gave birth in Temples surrounded by caring female relations together with women who had already given birth. The woman felt supported, nurtured, cared for, relaxed and excited about her birth. Birth was considered a natural, beautiful and spiritual journey to motherhood. It's often talked about how far away we are from that now, but I've certainly started to feel as though a supportive community is beginning to grow. This community is online and it's called Twitter. Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."

Unlike other online resources, when you sign up to Twitter you can choose who to follow. This is incredibly important and it is the key to creating your own personal community as you can control the type of people you surround yourself with. Compare this to magazines you may have been reading which document head turning, heart stopping stories which are more about sales that about truly supporting and nurturing a pregnant lady. On Twitter in comparison, as you jot down day by day what you are doing, any concerns you have and what you are feeling, you will receive supportive responses from people who have already given birth plus support from the countless experienced Doulas and Midwives who freely give advice. I too have responded to concerns posted by pregnant people both with advice and by recording downloads and posting them free on my website all available within a matter of days.

Why not also join me on Twittermoms, again, you can choose which communities you join and take part as much as you want too. They have some great communities on there both for when you are pregnant and afterwards, for example you could join the "Calm and Gentle Birth" community and read stories from women who have had great birth experiences. Once you have given birth you could join the "Potty Training" community and the popular wine tasting community where they actually have scheduled wine tasting events.

You could even take this one step further and blog about your pregnancy alongside using Twitter, a great example of this is the blog at www.hisboyscanswim.com "Tarzan" and "Jane" are both completely anonymous in their blog and on Twitter, they are sharing their pregnancy experiences and receive a huge amount of support from their followers (466 replies to their blog posts in 40 days and 4052 followers in Twitter!).

You may think that supporting someone remotely is somehow "less than" supporting them in person, but I can assure you that certainly form the supporter side I feel just as close as if they were in my living room. I've celebrated with people, laughed with people, lay awake at night thinking about how I can help people and also shed a few tears. This is exactly as it should be and although they may have to be virtual rose petals being thrown at the pregnant ladies feet, the sense of being supported and nurtured is as real as it gets.

To get you started, here's the link to Twitter and 10 great people to begin following:

1. Birthdownload (me!)
2. Savvydoula
3. Doulamama
4. LaMamaNaturale
5. Twittermoms
6. Crunchygoddess
7. AngEngland
8. Birthgoddess
9. Doulasurround
10. PeacefulDoulaAK

There are plenty more people you can add to your community, check out who I'm following or search for "Doula" for example.

I look forward to meeting you on Twitter.