It’s May and one of the first things that comes to mind is Mothers’ Day. It touches all of us because we all came from mothers even though those relationships take about as many forms as there are people. There’s variety even among children of the same mother.

     Children are born through a process that, except with intervention, has been the same since our beginning. The experience of that process has changed dramatically. I have to say that I don’t currently live in a baby world (although I do know a few of them). My generation is pretty much done and the next has, thankfully, not really gotten started yet. So I don’t know what the real picture is. And I know what I’m about to say doesn’t apply to many of you, our readers. But, when I had my first baby 22 years ago, I was naïve enough to think that the trend toward more conscious and gentle births would continue. What I’m hearing, though, is, “Honey, take the drugs!” Even Oprah, who champions the power of women, advocates them. Women are even scheduling elective C-sections!

     I straddled the conventional and alternative worlds when I had my first baby. I was fortunate, though, to have practiced yoga before and during my pregnancy. I spent the time reading a book called Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin. She was then a midwife on a commune filled with young pregnant women with little access to regular health care. While the book had technical information on prenatal care and delivery, it also had lots of birth stories by the women themselves. They were all filled with birds singing and sun shining through an open window with fluttering curtains.

     We had planned for a home birth, but as we were in the process of moving, we had two dwellings but no real home when the time came. There I was, in a regular labor room (they wouldn’t let us use a birthing room since we hadn’t attended an orientation), still expecting singing birds and sunshine.

     I was not prepared for the degree to which the birthing process allowed me to focus inward so completely and how one with the pulsing of time I became. I discovered that if I tensed during a contraction, it took over my whole body and really hurt, but if I stayed relaxed and focused, and breathed deeply from my toes, I could experience it as parts of my body working toward a purpose. It was like riding a wave. If I stayed on top of it, it was good. If I let my concentration go, it was like being tumbled helplessly through sand and water. Although I went to birth classes, I did not know these things.

     As labor progressed, time stopped, and I was overcome with the sense of oneness with the power of the universe, of belonging to the unbroken chain of women birthing the world, of the very enormity of life and death and my relation to it. I in no way went looking for this experience; didn’t know of its existence. But it changed me and I’m grateful for it. I’m reluctant to speak about it because it is so personal and I know it’s not everyone’s experience. But more and more it makes me crazy when I hear, “Why should it hurt when it doesn’t have to?”

     Most of us can appreciate the sense of accomplishment gained by a once out of shape person training for and running a first marathon. It’s a passage, a redefinition. We also intuitively understand why someone would choose to climb a mountain rather that drive up it for the same view. We’ve all seen films or read of young men going through feats of pain and endurance as a passage to adulthood. I think young women were not put through the same trials because, for them, birthing their first child was their initiation, their entry to the world of motherhood. While we still have something of a sense of that, we’ve lost a great deal.

     We have become so disconnected from our real selves that we’ve forgotten the gift that the birth process is. With few exceptions, our mothers didn’t know, so they couldn’t teach us, and just because many of our grandmothers had unmedicated births does not mean they were adequately prepared for them.

     I know there are some of you out there teaching these very things and I applaud your work. But as a society we need to do a better job. If we teach our girls to make the most of a process they’re likely to go through anyway, maybe we can help them find their real power, their connection with all women through time, and a sense of how precious it is to be alive. I have to think that this would not only lead to more consciously fulfilled women, but its effects would ripple far out into all other human endeavors.