Birth As the First Becoming 

When we think about birth, we usually think about the moment a baby enters the world. We celebrate birthdays, birth stories, first cries, and tiny fingers wrapped around ours. But there’s another birth happening at the very same time. The birth of a mother. And societally, we don’t talk about that birth enough.

So much of pregnancy is spent preparing for the baby. We build nurseries, wash tiny clothes, choose names, and wonder what labor will be like. We spend months imagining who this little person will become, but very little time wondering who we are about to become. But the fact is, birth changes us. Not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and in ways that are difficult to explain until you’ve lived them.

Birth is one of life’s great rites of passage. It asks us to step into the unknown with no guarantee of how the story will unfold. It asks us to loosen our grip on certainty and trust ourselves in a way most of us never have before. And that’s why birth has so much to teach us.

When a woman is deeply supported—when she feels safe, respected, informed, and trusted to make decisions about her own body—something remarkable often happens. Whether her birth is fast or long, medicated or unmedicated, vaginal or cesarean, she begins to see herself differently. She remembers she can do hard things. She learns that strength doesn’t always look like pushing through. Sometimes it looks like softening. Sometimes it looks like asking for help. Sometimes it looks like changing the plan. Sometimes it looks like radical surrendering.

Birth has a way of stripping away performance. There is no pretending in labor. Eventually, we’re invited to stop trying to control every outcome and instead listen—to our bodies, our instincts, our babies, and the moment right in front of us. That kind of surrender isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. And it becomes the foundation of motherhood. Because birth is only the first surrender. The first of countless moments where we’re asked to let go of who we were so we can become who our children need us to be—and who we are meant to become ourselves. We surrender the version of ourselves who could make plans without interruption. Then we surrender the mother who knew how to care for a newborn as our baby becomes a toddler. Then a school-aged child. A teenager. An adult. Just when we think we’ve found our footing, motherhood gently asks us to grow again. Again and again, we’re invited into a new version of ourselves.

I’ve noticed something after attending births for many years. The women who walk away feeling most empowered aren’t necessarily the ones whose births went exactly according to plan. They’re the ones who remained connected to themselves throughout the experience. They felt heard. They understood their choices. They were surrounded by people who believed in them. They trusted that whatever twists the road took, they were still an active participant in their own story. That kind of birth doesn’t just create confidence for one day. It becomes a reference point.

Years later, when motherhood stretches them in new ways, they remember. I’ve done something incredibly hard before. I’ve found my way through the unknown.I know how to come back to myself.

I think that’s one of the greatest gifts birth offers us. Not the promise of a perfect experience, but the opportunity to meet ourselves. To discover that underneath the fear is courage. Underneath the noise is intuition. Underneath all the expectations about what birth—or motherhood—should look like is a woman who is wiser than she knows.

Motherhood will ask us to surrender over and over again. It will ask us to release control, certainty, expectations, and even old identities. And every time we do, if we’re willing to listen, it brings us back to the same place. Back to ourselves. Maybe that’s what this journey has always been about.

Yes, we are raising children. But somewhere along the way, motherhood is also raising us.

And it all begins with birth.