Founding Mama Kiersten
Kiersten is a born and raised New Yorker and a Rome resident as of 2004. At the age of 15 she lived in an Athabascan Indian village in Alaska where she ate moose meat ice cream and attended a potlatch. At 16 she lived in Arles, France for a semester where she learned what real coffee is. That summer she lived on the Carribean Island of Grenada where she worked in a batik factory and learned sign language to communicate with her deaf co-workers.
After graduating from Wesleyan university she started a career in film production where she walked up the on ramp of the 59th street bridge before dawn to stage a traffic jam, cued the shutting off of the lights at Yankee stadium, had Jack Nicholson call her “Sport” and spent a Christmas party adoringly listening to Christian Bale speak in depth about the incredible impact his stepmother had had on his life, only to later realize she had spent the better part of her evening hearing stories about the great Gloria Steinem.
In 2004 HBO brought her to Rome to work on their series “Rome”. At the end of season two she announced her pregnancy. At this point she spoke Italian, but no matter your mother tongue, pregnancy gives you a whole new vocabulary.
Living in Rome,, she soon realized how few resources there were for mothers. Despite all of the obstacles of Italian bureaucracy, she opened The Milk Bar in Rome in May 2009; it is a store, a meeting place and information point for pregnancy, breastfeeding and motherhood. Bellies Abroad is essentially The Milk Bar 2.0, whose aim is to arm women with the confidence and information to have the birth and motherhood experiences they are looking for instead of what is easiest for the medical professionals. When women become mothers, we are full of fears and doubts; we do not need the medical community exacerbating this for profit or indolence. Helping women go through this incredibly transformative process without the support of friends and family from home is a wonderfully fulfilling part of her job. She has seen women who have taken control of their birthing experiences by refusing to acquiesce to the bullying of the hospital staff, using the information she has given them and they have come through the experience empowered, knowing that their voices have made a difference in their own birth experience, and also hopefully for those who come after them. Even on slow days, one of her moms invariably comes in with a cake or a thank you note to remind her that although Italy can be infinitely frustrating, she is doing something worthwhile. It is also something that her daughter Millie can be proud of, as she said when she was five years old: “Mamma, I am proud of you, not because you are my mamma but because you help mammas learn how to birth, feed and take care of their babies, and that is really important.” No amount of cocktails with Christian Bale could ever top that.
