Giving birth is just another day in a woman’s life. You have the baby, you go home, life goes on. You continue living your life but now you just have a baby with you.
Well, not exactly.
As a postpartum doula, I’ve listened to many moms talk about their transition to motherhood. The thing that gets talked about the most are the emotions. Those emotions that come up when such a small creature yet so dependent changes who you are!
This is why the way we give birth matters. It matters because it has an impact on the way you see yourself and your baby as you walk through the rite of passage that birth is.
When a baby is born, so is a mother. ⠀
The initiation into motherhood is important! The way you are birthed into your new identity as a mother can have an incredibly empowering or disempowering effect on your core beliefs of yourself.
You can walk out of your birth experience feeling like you couldn’t do it alone and that someone else needed to help you. You may feel like you couldn’t trust your body to labor your baby by itself. Or then, you can go through birth feeling like YOU know your baby best, not any other doctor in the room, like YOU have the capabilities within you to understand your baby and to trust your sense of inner knowing.
To this day (8 months postpartum), I look back at my birth with awe. I reflect upon it to fill myself with energy, power, belief, strength, and love. ⠀
I don't feel scared of anything. I feel like I could move mountains - because I did. ⠀
The energy I felt in my body that day I birthed my baby fully capable and fully in control was out of this world! It was an ecstatic experience that fuels my belief in my abilities, my inner wisdom, and my capabilities as a mother! ⠀
This is why the way we birth matters! Don't settle for anything less than what you know you deserve. And if you don't know you deserve that, then let me be the one to tell you that you absolutely do - we all do! ⠀
