Jessica is a Board Certified Nurse-Midwife and owner of Clary Sage Midwifery & Wellness. She offers full-spectrum pregnancy and postpartum care for childbearing families. As a Nurse Practitioner, Jessica also provides primary care for women throughout the lifespan. She is passionate about equal access to trauma-informed care and the importance of birth to age 3 in determining life-long health outcomes.

In January of 2020, Jessica decided the women of the greater Okanogan could no longer go without the service of a midwifery-led birth center. In partnership with Sarah Simmons, Jessica carried to fruition the opening of the Maple Street Birth Center, Okanogan County’s first state-licensed, free-standing birth center. Clients who sign up for care with Jessica may choose to birth in their own home anywhere in the county or in the expansive birth suite at the Maple Street Birth Center.

Jessica was born and raised on a 5th generation ranch in Tonasket, Washington where her mother taught her to assist with the births of lambs, colts, and calves. She was often tasked with the nurturing and care of sick and injured animals on the ranch. She dreamt of treating the wounds of more than a horse caught in wire, and was often found with a roll of gauze, tending to her older brother’s injuries after one play battle or another. As soon as she was able, she began her nursing assistant training and applied to Nursing School at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her experiences with Seattle Natural Family Medicine and the Labor & Delivery Ward of Evergreen Hospital sparked a passion in her for the care of childbearing families, women in labor, and those struggling with infertility. It was not long after graduating with her Bachelor’s degree in Nursing that she felt the pull of the Okanogan calling her home.

Three years into her nursing career, she began to transition from an acute care nurse to a labor nurse at North Valley Hospital’s Birthing Center. She began to seek out training and immersement in all birth-related things. Jessica trained as a doula, began teaching childbirth education, took on the research and writing of breastfeeding policies for the hospital, and wrote to the local home-birth midwife to see if she’d be interested in having a nurse. The birth of her own child cemented the foundation for Jessica to become a midwife herself. She began working with home-birth practices, encapsulating placentas, and providing birth kits for home-birth clients. Her apprenticeship with Sarah Simmons of Methow Valley Midwifery taught her an immense amount about physiologic birth and herbology. As her own family grew, Jessica was drawn to attain her advanced practice degree from Frontier Nursing University, and within a month from the birth of her fourth baby, she graduated with her Master’s Degree in Nurse-Midwifery.

For Jessica, there is no greater blessing of fulfillment than supporting a mother in birth; but when she is not catching a baby, you can catch her hiking, gardening, riding horses, or revisiting family histories on the backroads of Okanogan County.