One of the birth room in Shifrah and Puah Birth Center. Twenty-five births in a month. I did not set out to count them. I was too busy being inside them. But when I sit with the full weight of what this month has been, that number is the one that holds it most honestly. Twenty-five women. Twenty-five babies. Twenty-five times I walked into a room not knowing what was coming and walked out the other side carrying something new. This post is not about any one birth specifically

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