One of the questions I get asked most about my time at Shifrah and Puah is what I actually did. Not in theory, not as a philosophy, in practice, in the room, when something was happening. The honest answer is that it depended entirely on the birth. My role shifted from one woman to the next, sometimes from one hour to the next within the same labour. What I want to share in this post is four births that show that range, together they give an accurate picture of what showing u

I have been at Shifrah and Puah Maternity Center in Mbale, Uganda for a month now, and I leave next week. I had come with a question that has been forming in me since I started this work, a question about whether matrescence, the profound transformation of becoming a mother, is truly universal. Whether the psychological and identity-level dimensions of that passage move through every woman regardless of where she lives, how she births, or what cultural container holds her thr