You’re not alone. It’s that moment, near the very end, when the baby is just about to emerge, when women reach that point of balance between life and death; when it feels as though you are no longer part of his world, but hovering somewhere over it.
Many will say, “I just want to die!” It hurts, they’re tired, and they have very little concern remaining for earthly things.
Pam England, in her famous book, Birthing From Within, captured this timeless moment so well when she wrote:
“Why does this thought of dying come up in a healthy labor, often just before giving birth? The mounting intensity of labor forces complete surrender of our body and will, dissolving our egos, ideas, and familiar sense of self. We’re not afraid of dying because there is no “self” left to resist and fear. At that transcendent moment we have become birth itself. This is the spiritual birth of woman into mother.”
I have given birth three times, and have been revisiting Pam England’s book recently because my fourth baby is due in just a couple of months. I don’t remember wishing I could die in labor, but I do recall feeling as though I did not exist anymore, that there was no going back to the person I once was. That last bit of resistance was gone and birth consumed me. Motherhood transformed my body and spirit.
As a birth doula, other women have given me the sacred gift of witnessing their motherhood transformation. Each time, when their baby is upon their perineum, their eyes open wide, their expression is one of unbelief and then suddenly, the baby emerges and that brief moment of intense, other-worldly birthing is gone in an instant, its purpose fulfilled.
The fear of dying in birth is a common fear. One that, for some women, is overpowering prior to birth. That kind of fear is one that a woman should have support to address, but there is also the thought of death which occurs in birthing and seems not to be harmful, but to be a normal process of moving from one phase of womanhood to the next.
Have you experienced this?
