06/04/2026
My first birth taught me somethings I didn’t expect.
1 You can prepare… and still feel completely unprepared.
I thought I knew what was coming.
I didn’t.
It was intense, overwhelming, and nothing like the calm images I had in my head.
I experience things really deeply—
sounds, sensations, environments.
And in birth, that intensity is amplified.
Which means the space around you matters more than you realise.
Who’s there.
What you’re lying on.
How safe you feel.
You don’t control everything in birth.
But those things… they stay with you.
2 When I became pregnant with my second a year later I knew I wanted something else, I made lists of what had been amazing and what had been, basically, awful. I also worked on my expectations.
Here’s a little secret - birth doesn’t have to be a fluffy dream of fairylike perfection!
Wait… I’ll say in again, at the risk of outing myself as more human than I’d like to be… it can be so many things, bold, loud, peaceful, scary, empowering, shocking, intense, surprising, confusing, beautiful, loooong, jarringly quick… I could go on. In short it’s kind of like everything that’s possible, with the volume turned up.
And it’s life changing
And magnificent
And, a lot.
And it doesn’t have to be a bubble of soft clouds and angelic voices singing to be good or right x
I, personally, always know when I’m about to birth because all of a sudden, just after that bit where you want to stop the train and not give birth at all thank you very much, I hear roaring, like a lion, its starts to echo around the room, and then I suddenly realise the roars are coming from me! Loud. Brash. Not musically pleasing. Very very real. That’s how my body brings babies into the world.
How have your births aligned or not aligned with your vision?
How do you do birth?
How can you take back any disappointing or negative birth stories and reclaim them as beautifully human?
