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Hi friends, welcome to the Pain Free Birth podcast. I'm your host, Karen Welton, a certified doula childbirth educator and mother of three. In this space, we'll hear positive, supernatural, and yes, even pain free birth stories from women just like you. We'll explore the deeply spiritual side of childbirth and how God designed women's bodies brilliantly for birth. Let's get started.
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Hey, mama. Today, I'm doing a special solo episode on the transformational process of becoming a mother and what this rite of passage means for us as women as we make this journey as a single or married woman into the motherhood role from maiden to mother and how it awakens our femininity and our mother in a whole new way.
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With Mother's Day coming up around the corner, I felt like I needed to do just a little like check-in and really just share the heart behind pain-free birth and the heart behind why I do what I do. And in many ways, it's all about mothers. It's about supporting women through this journey that is in many ways scary and unknown and confusing.
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and exhausting. I think that alone, I mean, no one can really prepare you for the sheer exhaustion and the work and what it will take and what you will have to give in this journey of becoming a mother. And it can be intimidating, but it's also the most rewarding, fruitful, fulfilling roles and journeys that you will ever take.
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And so I want to honor Mother's Day today for every mother out there and celebrate you. I want you to know that you are seen. And I also want to acknowledge that this is a hard day for many women who have experienced a loss of a mother or conflict or estrangement with a mother figure. And I want you to know that you too are seen and you are valued and you are heard. And that this day, while there may be pain there can also be a really special day.
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And I just want to take this session to really celebrate mothers and women for the incredible contributions and sacrifices that we have made and to shed a little light on how to make that journey into motherhood. Even whether you are pregnant and looking forward to motherhood or whether you're a mom of five or 10 kids, in many ways we're all still on this journey of motherhood and
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I wanted to just kind of share a little bit, some thoughts on that, on, on what that transition does to us on the inside. It really is like, we're just in many ways, it can feel like we're being wrung out. Like we're going from the inside out and it takes so much of us. It's probably one of the most demanding jobs that exist on the planet. You know, I think I've heard people quoted as saying like, it takes like, it's like you're doing five jobs full time and it's like breastfeeding is like
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10,000 hours or, you know, I don't have the statistics, but I'm sure you've heard those kind of quotes about the demands that a mother takes and to replace a mother would, you'd need five or six people to replace her, you know, whether transportation and meal chef and education and housekeeping and all of the roles that mothers wear. It is just so all encompassing. And so in many ways it is an initiation. It's a sacred.
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rite of passage. And we don't treat it like that in this culture. In this culture, motherhood is diminished and it's also highly judged. And I think that there's just so much judgment we have as mothers, mostly toward ourselves, that it can be really hard to not be hard on ourselves and the job we're doing. And really, I think in the birth process, you have this
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like death to self that's happening. It's like there's a death and there's a rebirth. There's a birth of a child and there's a birth of a mother. And it's this beautiful picture of going through the depths, going through the depths of labor that even when it's pain-free, truly requires complete and total surrender. And so even-
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as I share about the ecstasy of birth and the joy and the euphoria and the pain-free aspects of it, in many ways, you don't even, it's hard to get those benefits if you're holding on to control, if you're trying to stay in some semblance of control and composure. And what birth really does to us is to prepare us for motherhood. And in order to do that, we go through the fire.
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You know, the ring of fire, literally, physically, we can feel that when the baby's crowning, but we also go through this fire that requires a surrender. And in many ways, it's also the death of our maiden, the maiden archetype that is living for herself, that is, you know, just free flowing and fun and innocent and naive. And as much as I love my maiden now, there's a part of her that, that dies. There's there's a
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part of her that kind of steps back and the mother is born. And that transition from the maiden archetype to the mother archetype is so sacred and profound and the birth experience really initiates that for many women. And it's an experience that I just wanna say is one that we can numb out. And I don't just mean numb out with drugs or getting epidurals but numb out and disassociate from.
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you know, nam-maw and try to avoid the pain, avoid the hard work, avoid the heartache of motherhood. And there is a heartache, there is a depth to this journey that requires your all. And so I feel just like this sense of awe and wonder and reverence for women who go through this journey that is hard to even articulate with words.
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But I wanted to share about this and to honor this process and to perhaps invoke a little bit of awe and wonder in you, whether you're going through this journey now, you're preparing to go through this journey, or you've been through this journey many times, or you're possibly supporting someone who's going through this journey, because we all have mothers in our lives. We've all been born by a mother and women and mothers impact us in so many ways. And if you yourself are going on this journey.
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I just want to encourage you with some helpful things along the way, helpful pieces of encouragement and faith, because it can knock you off your horse. It can, it can humble you. It can shatter you to pieces even. And the birth experience itself, when we can set ourselves up for an empowered birth, I believe we can go through that journey and still come out empowered, feeling so much more capable.
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than if we went through it and tried to cling on to the old self, tried to cling on to who we want to stay because maybe we're afraid of who will become or we're afraid of where we're going. And in many ways you hear women talk about this where they say, I'm losing myself or I've lost myself in motherhood. And that can be a real thing in losing yourself, always having to respond to the needs of these tiny humans that you're charged with caring
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But what if it wasn't you've lost yourself, but you're being reborn into someone entirely new and who you were no longer exists and who you are becoming is someone more mature in love, with more wisdom, with more grace, with a surrendered heart. And I just see this, what if there's this parallel between this surrender that we go through in the birth process?
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And there's surrender that is required in motherhood, the sacrifice that is required. It's like in order to become a mother, be born as a mother, we must go through that fire, those depths and surrender. And even in that transition phase, especially in labor and in pushing, there's such intensity there that our bodies just take over. It starts pushing on its own. It's waves and waves of contraction, sometimes back to back. It's the intensity.
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of it. And if we try to hold on and cling to this idea, this notion, that's really just an idea of control as if we had any control and labor. But if we try to hold on and grip and freeze, it hurts so much more that we can make this transition so much more painful than it needs to be by, by resisting. And the work of the feminine is not to resist. It is to embrace and surrender. It is to yield.
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So just as our pelvic floor yields and moves out of the way and our body morphs and opens to create a passage for a baby to come through, so too does our lives. So too are we required to do so in motherhood. We yield, we surrender. And I see so much pain, not only in birth, but in the postpartum and women trying to like get their grounding.
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almost like hold their head above water or keep their feet on the ground. Because in that season of feeling like motherhood could just swallow us up whole. And I, and I remember, cause I've been in those moments of those sleepless nights and that exhaustion, that feeling like I'm at the end of myself, but always come to this place of like, okay, I surrender God, I give it all to you. I surrender to you. And rather than trying to grip on to control,
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and trying to figure it all out in my head and judge myself. Am I doing a good job? Am I doing it right? You know, being in my head, have you ever been in your head as a mother and just wondered like, am I doing this right? Is this what my baby needs? What if I'm making a mistake? What if she's in pain? What if this cry means something else? And those thoughts that we get in our head and we try to figure it out, we doubt, are we really a good mother? Or do we really know what our babies need? And there's like, there's a lot of, that I can feel the weightiness of that.
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And I can feel that there's lots of women experiencing that right now, doubting themselves and their abilities to birth and to mother and questioning if they're doing a good job. And when we're in our head, we're actually out of our feminine where we've stepped outside of that. And I just remember coming to the end of myself several times in this journey, especially when my children were really young and babies and you're in that first year of postpartum and feeling like, man, I don't know if I'm doing this. Right.
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I don't know if I can keep going. Like, this is hard. There was the extreme bliss and the joy and the euphoria and the oxytocin and all of that. And there was also like the really hard dark times, the times that I didn't know if I was doing it right, that I questioned myself. And we don't often talk about that, but those both are equally important and valid. And I would always, rather than getting lost in that place, in that darkness and staying there, I would always come to a place
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complete surrender. And I would say, okay, God, like you have my all. I surrender to you. Like, I don't know how to do this or I need your guidance on this or I'm gonna reach out for help. And so too in birth. And the same happens in labor. When we hit that wall and we realize we can't do this on our own strength, we can't control it, we can't fight it, we can't resist it.
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And the more we resist it, the more it hurts and we let go and we surrender. And it's that beautiful moment. I just believe like that sometimes God is up there watching us, looking at us going, okay, it's that moment. It's that moment is coming. And then when we finally surrender in our hearts and we just like, let go of whatever's in our hands and we like, Surrender, we let it just fall through the cracks in our hands, all the things that we've been trying to control, all our fears, all our.
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resistance and we just let it all go energetically. It's like God celebrates and he goes, yes, now I can take you, now I can mold you, now I can have my will, now I can celebrate. We can really move forward. We can really, now is when the miracles happen. Now is when your body opens, now is when you dilate, now is when that baby shifts down and opens and comes and ejects and everything just shifts in a moment when we surrender.
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and in the postpartum and in motherhood when we surrender. Surrender feels to me like feminine, like the purest depth of the feminine to me. And I was thinking about this earlier that we live in this very masculine culture and we birth in a very masculine culture, right? Like think about that. Birth is all about the feminine. It is feminine energy that guides birth. It is oxytocin, it is love, it is...
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movement, it is swaying hips, it is surrender, it is depth, it is moans, it is sound, it is sound waves, it is opening and loosening of muscles, it is movement and flow and everything and trust and intuition, it is all feminine. And yet where do we go in labor? In most cases, women go to a hospital setting run by doctors and administrators who are trained for years.
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in masculine protocol. And I don't mean masculine as if it's always a bad thing. We need the masculine. It is our strength and it's our support. But when we take a very feminine experience and inject it into a masculine environment, the masculine needs to take control. The masculine is in their head. The masculine is goal-oriented and outcome-focused. And what do they care about? Get the baby out, alive.
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That's basically the main goal. Get the baby out alive and healthy and without any damage. We don't account for the potential physiological damage or psychological damage that could be done to baby or mom. It's just is baby breathing and get baby out of mom's body as fast as possible before an emergency happens. It's this very masculine way of thinking. Everything about labor and the management of it in the medical system is masculine in nature. It is.
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observations, statistics, heart tones, numbers, data, graphs, bell curves, due dates, you know, test results. And not that there's not a place for all of these things, but in the truest, like most raw form of birth in physiological birth, it is completely unnecessary. And in fact, it pulls us out of our feminine flow and puts us in our heads. And then what happens when you go into motherhood and we're in postpartum.
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and our hormones haven't quite balanced yet because maybe we didn't get that peak high release of oxytocin and labor in order to have a baseline in postpartum in order to keep, in order to balance our hormones in postpartum. And we get in our heads in, because we're trained in a culture that is also very masculine, that values performance and goals and productivity, especially here in the U.S.
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You know, it's all about how much you can work and we value and reward busyness and we reward your outcomes and we meet someone new and we ask them, Hey, what do you do? It's all about what are you doing? What are you accomplishing? What are you, what are your, you know, accolades and your acronyms after your name and your degrees and your accomplishments. And that is simply just the culture, American culture and way of life. And then we go through this journey, this sacred transition phase into
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motherhood. And we are confronted again with like, what did you produce? And it can be very hard as women, as mothers, especially new moms, to get out of this mental way of thinking and being that is focused on productivity. And I've heard many mothers talk about this, like, well, what did you do today? What did you accomplish? We ask ourselves this. And unknowingly, we kind of ask each other, and we judge ourselves. Have you ever judged yourself?
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Like as a mom, getting to the end of your day, being a stay at home mom with your kids, perhaps, and your husband gets home and says, Hey, what did you do today? You're like half a load of laundry. The kids I kept the kids alive. Yeah. I kept the kids alive. They are fed. The house is semi a disaster, you know, and society has this impression that we're just sitting at home watching soap rappers all day sometimes and yet we are constantly moving constantly feeding constantly cleaning.
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constantly doing chores and we get to the end of the day and we feel like, what do I have to show for my day? Especially if you're a ambitious woman or you've worked in a career and you're accustomed to having outcomes and you have performance metrics and you like having something at the end of the day that you have accomplished. And then motherhood can hit us like a freight truck when we get to the end of the day and all we did was wipe butts and clean up puke and.
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we're covered in spit up and the laundry's not even done. And the dinner's barely made and we're reheating frozen pizza and chicken nuggets for dinner. Like, has anyone else been there? It can be a massive reality shift, massive, you know, quantum shift in identity. And it requires, motherhood requires this whole new way of being. And if we're not careful, we'll judge ourselves for not being more masculine.
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and not being more productive. And yet the season has nothing to do with that. In fact, it'll kill your joy. It'll completely kill your joy in motherhood. And in the postpartum, if you are judging yourself based on masculine societal standards of production and output and goals and time management and all of those things. And in many ways it is a shift and a surrender to the feminine.
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to the feminine that is the mother and the nurturer. And the mother simply has value because of who she is, because of how she is, because she is there to nurture and cherish and love these tiny humans to life. And it really doesn't matter at the end of the day whether the laundry is done. I mean, you guys know that, right? But sometimes we need to hear it. We need to be reminded. But what matters is that we're present with ourselves, first of all.
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that we're witnessing ourselves in our transformation, that we're giving ourselves some grace in that transformation journey. Even when those around us might not understand, maybe our partners don't understand what we're doing all day. And society is looking at you like, oh, what is she accomplishing? Oh, now she has a 10-year gap on her resume, poor her. And you know what, most of the time this is just our own heads speaking to us because.
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What I love now is so many women reinventing themselves. So many women just shifting cultural and societal norms to value motherhood and bring the skills that we've acquired in motherhood into the workforce, into society, into culture, and to share our journey, whether that's on social media or whether that's with your mom group or your friends at work. Like there's a transference going on in the world today.
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that is shifting. The women are speaking up and mothers are speaking up and sharing about not only how good birth can be and how rewarding motherhood is, but also like how we don't have to judge ourselves. And we don't have to conform to this masculine society, cultural agenda of production and stress and busyness and work. And the more we try to do that, I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but the more I try to like,
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produce and be masculine and set goals and accomplish them, especially with little kids. Motherhood becomes harder and harder and it's more painful. But when we can just step back and embrace the fullness of motherhood in all its glory without trying to perform, without...
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judging ourselves without looking at it as if there's a output that we have to measure, which is again, masculine, but what if we could just be, what if we could just sit back and simply be with who we are now without being afraid that we're losing ourselves, because in many ways we are, and we must, and it requires a losing of yourself because you're creating and building someone new. You're building someone new that is a whole new archetype, a whole new identity of mother.
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And then you get to reinvent her again. You get to look at and go, wow, I'm not just a mother, like quote unquote, just a mother, as if that's not enough. But you're also an individual with human needs and desires and dreams that are even outside of motherhood. And that's beautiful too. And it's also okay to quote unquote, just be a mother and be fully a mother and fully in that season, fully devoted to her kids.
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and this journey that motherhood is bringing us on. And what an epic, tremendous journey it is. What a glorious journey it is. And I just, if I could impart one thing to you today, I think it would be this, don't fight the journey. Don't resist the journey, whether in labor or in the postpartum or in motherhood or whether you're on your 10th baby. In what areas can you surrender more?
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In what areas can you fully embrace this gift of life, this gift of new life, of a new baby, and this gift of becoming a new woman, a new woman who is a mother, who is a lover, who is a giver, who is a nurturer, who is an artist, a creative, a genius in her own right? How do you define yourself now?
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And in what ways do you need to surrender the old you that you may be clinging to? Because she gives you some sense of significance and worth and a feeling of importance or value. Who, who's that old you that you're clinging to? What identity are you clinging to that is causing maybe some resistance and pain and that you need to surrender? Is there anything that God is asking you to surrender?
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in this journey of motherhood that you haven't yet. And maybe it's time. And maybe there's a reawakening happening because motherhood is not the end. It is not the completion. There's many other seasons and identities and archetypes that we get to transition into. As much as I love motherhood, as much as I find it such a sacred, incredible rite of passage, this death and dying and rebirth and nurturing.
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And then we get to go on and we're nurturing these little ones and we get to also reinvent who am I? We get to remember again, like, oh, who am I? Who do I need to resurrect? Who do I need to recreate? Who do I want to recreate and rebuild? And who am I now? Who does God say I am? Who do I say I am? Am I the lover? Am I the temptress? Am I the entrepreneur? Am I still mother? And do I just sit with that for a decade or two?
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The beautiful thing is we get to be whoever we want to be. And in that journey of motherhood and transition, there's just a beautiful metamorphosis that happens. And it happens seamlessly and eloquently in the surrender. In the surrender is where the caterpillar becomes the butterfly. You know, think about that. There's like no striving. The caterpillar isn't resisting at all.
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He's about to turn into complete mush and goo inside the cocoon and go through a radical metamorphosis and transformation down to the cellular level, like every piece of him becomes mush. And yet he does not resist one bit. What would happen if he resisted?
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That would be incredibly painful. He would probably break out of the shell too early before the transformation has been completed, or he would struggle and think that this change into becoming goo was trying to kill him, and he might panic and freak out and think that he's dying. What would happen if the caterpillar resisted? It seems like what so many of us do in motherhood in resisting this call, this high call.
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that God has given us in this transition. And it very much requires that we become like goo, that we become like putty in His hands that God can use and mold. And what beauty awaits us on the other side when we surrender to that process, when we trust in our Creator's design for birth, for motherhood, for postpartum, without judging.
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we doing a good enough job? Or are we failing at this? Or are we allocating enough time or devotion to all the things society says we should be doing? But you know, the caterpillar doesn't do anything in that cocoon. For those days, he waits until he turns to complete mush, and then by some miracle, he grows wings and re-forms into a beautiful butterfly. And by that same token,
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we get to spread our wings. We go through the birth and the postpartum and the journey that requires complete surrender. And then we too also are reborn and we get to paint the colors on our new wings. Imagine that, like what if we got to paint the new colors? What if we got to decide and lean into the design? What is it that God has for me now? What is it that I'm to look at? Where can I find the beauty in this season that I'm in right now?
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Where can I find the beauty? Where do I look? And where do I need to surrender more? And I just find that this journey into motherhood is such a sacred one and such a beautiful one when we do it with others and we understand what's really going on, what God is really doing in our hearts, and we stop resisting and we stop judging ourselves for not being more masculine when all we need to be is the most feminine.
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motherly, loving person to these little children. I saw this quote on Instagram and it just took my breath away. It said, don't forget that you are your child's experience of childhood. And I thought, wow, what an epic responsibility. I am crafting my child's childhood right now. And so much of it they look to me for. That's
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that I am creating that reality for them. And we get to create their childhood. And don't we wanna be present for that? Don't we wanna be fully in the moment and in the mother that we are? So as I wrap this up, I'm gonna go be with my kids and relieve my babysitter and go tuck my kids into bed and remember that I'm creating their childhood no matter what age. And they're only at this age for such a short period of time.
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So whatever stage you're at, mom, whether you're trying to get pregnant or whether you're pregnant now, awaiting this transformation, preparing your heart for it, or whether you're in the thick of the postpartum, sleepless nights, covered in spit up and wiping butts all day, or you're struggling and chasing after toddlers all day long or have multiple kids at home and you're at your wits end, maybe you feel lonely and alone in this world.
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And like, I don't know if anyone else is struggling like me and I'm just doing a horrible job and I don't know if I can go on. I don't know how to keep going or I don't think I'm doing a good job. I just want you to know, I see you, I see you, I see you, and you're not alone and you're doing an amazing job. And where is the surrender for you? What is the surrender? What is it you're still holding onto? And what beautiful art are you creating?
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Who are you becoming? Because that is the art. It's who you are. It's your journey. And you can just be in the midst of it. And you can just be goo. And you can just be a puddle. And that's beautiful. And that's all you need to be. And God loves you in the puddle. He loves the caterpillar as much as the mush, as much as the beautiful butterfly. And at no stage in this transformation, metamorphosis process, are you any less valuable?
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Isn't that amazing? Like in the midst of our depth of covered in slime and poop and goo and spit up, we are just as valuable as if we are producing eight figures of a salary or managing a company of a hundred or writing books and whatever success looks like to you. There is celebration for you in this journey, mama, and I want
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you to feel acknowledged and seen. And I want you to know you're not alone and that you're creating beauty all around you. There is beauty in your creation, even if that is your children right now, that you are instilling their childhood into them. You are their childhood right now in this moment. And I want you to just like look up and see that.
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Look up and see the world you're creating and the beauty you're creating and the home you're creating and the family you're creating and what the work of your hands are doing. And you may not see the fruit of it now because you're in the goo and you're melting. But I promise you the beauty is unfolding before your eyes and you get to redesign and reinvent yourself and be reborn many times over.
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and it's okay to lose yourself. This all reminds me of a scripture, Matthew 10 39, that says, He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it. So maybe we need a little bit of a reason to lose our life sometimes, because we're not just losing it and losing ourselves, we're losing it for him so that we can find it again. Isn't that so much like motherhood?
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Because sometimes it's exactly what needs to happen so that we can become the butterfly, so that we can stop fighting it and surrender to the metamorphosis and the journey of motherhood. No matter how many babies you've had, that journey is one of honor and beauty and sacrifice. And I see you and I honor you. And I wish you all a happy Mother's Day.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of the Pain Free Birth podcast. If you were encouraged, it would mean so much if you left us a five-star review and shared this with your community. I'd love to connect with you on Instagram at PainFreeBirth. To learn more about the Pain Free Birth e-course, free resources, private coaching, and upcoming events, find out more at painfreebirth.com. See you next week.
