At To Become a Mother, we believe that birth stories are incredibly important. To give birth is an intensely physical and emotional experience, a pivotal moment in our own and our child’s life. Telling our birth story is a way for us to process our experience, to make sense of it. To discuss our fears, concerns and “missing pieces”, to gain an understanding of our strengths and weaknesses and to see the experience in a new light.
Telling our birth story is also an opportunity to share a significant life experience with other women and help future mothers in their birth preparations. By sharing our story, we normalise the actual experience of birth and help bring nuance to a public discourse that is too often polarised between horror and euphoria. For most women, the reality of childbirth is somewhere in the middle.
Giving birth is a staggering challenge and one of the most powerful, life altering experiences a woman can go through. It is also a natural phenomenon and a normal rite of passage. However, unlike other rites of passages, such as weddings, the stories of birth are shared in an invisible space. As a consequence, we go into birth without a real working familiarity of what births are like and without the information we need to adequately prepare for all possibilities. It's through birth stories that we process the profound experience of giving birth, before the fact and long after.
The To Become a Mother’s Birth Story Series seek to give women a forum where they can share their experience and connect with other women. Nyree Wright, midwife and founder of the independent midwifery practice Sage Femme, sits in on these debriefs to explain the twists and turns of labour and answer any questions. With her 25 years of experience as a midwife, Nyree is able to help women look at their birth from a new perspective and to help them integrate the experience into the framework of their lives as mothers.
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