We often prepare for birth by learning what will happen to our bodies. We learn about contractions and the stages of labour, pain relief, birth positions, medical options, what to take to hospital and what to expect in those first hours with our baby. All of this can be valuable. But birth is more than a physical event, and preparing for it can be about more than preparing for labour.
A baby is not the only one being born. A mother is being born too.
This is what I mean when I describe birth as a rite of passage. A rite of passage marks a significant transition in our lives. It recognises that we are crossing from one stage into another and that we may not be quite the same on the other side. Birth does this in a very real way. We give birth to our children, but we are also entering motherhood, with all the changes in body, identity, relationships, responsibility and daily life that this can bring.
Across cultures and throughout history, birth and the transition into motherhood have been marked in many different ways through ritual, community and care. What those practices looked like varied enormously, but there is something important in the recognition that the person giving birth is also going through a significant transition. The baby is not the only one whose arrival matters. Our transition matters too.
I think something important can be lost when this part of birth becomes invisible. In many modern birth systems, childbirth has increasingly come to be approached primarily as a medical event. Medical care can be enormously important and at times lifesaving, and recognising birth as a rite of passage does not mean rejecting that care. But when birth is understood mainly through what needs to be monitored, managed or treated, our own experience can easily move into the background. Our bodies can begin to feel like something being managed, our choices can become secondary, and the enormous transition we are living through can receive very little attention.
This is why it matters to me to reconnect women with birth as a rite of passage. Not because your birth needs to be spiritual, ceremonial or beautiful, and certainly not because it should happen in one particular way. Your birth may be straightforward or complicated, physiological or highly medicalised, close to what you hoped for or completely different. None of this takes away from the significance of what you are going through.
The rite of passage is the transition itself.
The transition into motherhood, often called matrescence, begins during pregnancy and continues well beyond birth. Like adolescence, it can involve profound physical, emotional and social change, as well as changes in the brain as we adapt to caring for a baby. Your relationship with your body may change, as may your relationships with other people, your independence, your priorities and your understanding of yourself. And then there is your baby — a completely new person whose arrival changes the shape and rhythm of your life.
I hear many women who have given birth speak about the enormity of this change. I gave birth myself at 36, and looking back, my birth feels like a great opening in my life. It asked me to put aside — or perhaps let go of — some of my girlhood dreams, ambitions and ideals, and to make space for the more complex role of becoming a mother and a growing woman. Motherhood did not arrive neatly at the moment my baby was born. I had to grow into it, and in many ways I am still growing into the woman that experience asked me to become.
When we see birth only as something to get through safely, another kind of preparation can easily be missed: not simply preparing to give birth, but preparing for the changes that becoming a mother may bring.
For me, this is where recognising birth as a rite of passage becomes practical. Alongside the usual questions about labour and birth, you might begin to ask different ones. Who do I want around me? What helps me feel safe enough to listen to my body? How do I want my partner to support me? Who will care for me once my baby is here? What might I need in those first weeks when so much attention naturally turns towards my child? What support can I begin putting around myself now?
Seeing birth in this way gives you permission to make more space around the transition itself: to talk about what is changing, to involve your partner, to build supportive relationships before your baby arrives, and to think about the weeks and months after birth, not only the hours of labour. It reminds you that your recovery matters and that becoming a mother can hold many experiences at once — love and exhaustion, joy and grief, tenderness and uncertainty, wonder and overwhelm.
None of this means turning birth into a ceremony or making motherhood into something sacred that you are expected to experience in a particular way. A rite of passage is not another ideal to live up to. For me, it is a way of recognising the magnitude of what is happening and giving it the attention it deserves.
I wish more women had the opportunity to approach birth with this wider understanding: to prepare practically for labour, yes, but also to prepare the ground around themselves. To gather people who genuinely care about their wellbeing, to talk about what they might need afterwards, to make space for the changes that cannot yet be known, and to be tender with themselves as they enter a period of enormous change.
Because as you give birth to your baby, you are also giving birth to the mother in you.
Perhaps this is the part I most want us to reclaim. Not an idealised version of birth, and not the idea that you should somehow be able to do it all through instinct or strength alone, but the recognition that something significant is happening to you too. Your experience matters, your choices matter, your recovery matters, and the woman you are becoming matters.
Birth is not simply an event at the end of pregnancy. It is a threshold into a new part of your life. And when we recognise it as such, perhaps we begin to make more room for the mother — not only during birth, but in everything that comes afterwards.
Thank you for reading,
Irida Hysenbelli — Rite of Passage Doula