Twenty-five births in a month — what it actually felt like to be inside them

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. This is about the texture of the month as a whole, what it felt like from the inside, what surprised me, what made me laugh, what made me look away and what kept proving itself true no matter how the birth went.

The thing that kept proving itself true

Across twenty-five births, through everything that was hard and everything that was beautiful and everything that sat uncomfortably in between, one thing showed itself again and again.

Give a woman a slice of support, just a slice, just the sense that someone is present and paying attention and genuinely holding the space around her and she can move a mountain. The baby is born. Whatever the length of the labour, whatever the complications, whatever the fear or the exhaustion or the pain, when a woman feels held, something in her finds what it needs.

That is not a philosophical observation from a distance. I watched it happen twenty-five times in thirty days. It is the most confirmed thing I am taking home from this month.

What surprised me most

I expected to find women who were different from the women I support in Australia. What I did not expect was the specific nature of that difference.

Many of the women who came through Shifrah and Puah were disconnected from their bodies in a way that surprised me. Not emotionally but physically. They did not know how birth worked. They did not know what their body was doing or why. Women who had given birth four or five times before arrived without any more understanding of the physiology of labour than they had at their first birth. The education simply had not been there. The conversation had never happened. Birth was something that occurred to them rather than something they moved through with any sense of how or why.

And then, within five minutes of the baby arriving, they were standing. Laughing. Moving around the room with a lightness that I can only describe as almost dancing. Ten hours of labour or thirty-five hours of labour, absorbed into the body and released. The community around them animated and celebratory, the woman already on the other side of it in a way that seemed to bypass the processing that I am used to seeing take days or weeks.

I do not yet know what to make of that. Whether it is resilience, dissociation, cultural conditioning or something else entirely. It is one of the questions I am bringing home with me.

The hardest thing that kept repeating

Not the complicated births. Not the transfers or the long nights or the moments where the clinical picture deteriorated faster than the resources could respond.

The hardest repeating thing was the support circle.

In Uganda, birth never happens alone. Women arrive with family, with neighbours, with community. Five, six, seven people sometimes, filling the corridor outside the birth room and rotating through it. That presence is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed here and I mean that genuinely.

But within that presence, there is a hierarchy. And the person at the top of that hierarchy is not always the woman giving birth.

The mother in law. Her power in the birth space here is something I was not expecting. Not always, there were mother in laws who were tender and protective and entirely focused on the woman in labour. But there were others whose presence became something the labouring woman had to navigate alongside everything else her body was already doing. Whose instructions, whose interventions, whose opinions about how the birth should go overrode the woman's own instincts and needs.

That dynamic, repeated in different forms across different births, was a challenge I carried through the month.

What made me laugh

Not everything was heavy. Far from it.

There was the husband who stayed for his wife's entire labour, attentive and devoted, bringing her food and water and sitting beside her through every contraction. In a context where men do not typically attend births and take almost no part in pregnancy preparation, this man was simply present for his wife in a way that moved me completely. That birth made me feel something I did not expect to feel here.

There was the birth room with no ventilation and a mother who was pushing and doing what bodies do when they push, and the smell that filled that sealed room until the midwives quietly retreated to the corridor. I stayed because that is the job. I could hear them laughing outside, not at the mother, at the situation, the way birth workers everywhere laugh at the things that cannot be laughed at any other way. I was laughing inside and holding it together on the outside and that gap between the inside and the outside was its own kind of full-body experience.

There was the woman who came in for false labour more than once. And then at three in the morning a sound came through the building, through the walls, through my sleep, into my dream before I understood what it was. A first-time mother, announcing her labour to the entire street with a volume and a conviction that I have never encountered before or since. By the time I was fully awake I was already smiling.

There was one of the midwives who had developed what could only be described as a "curse". Every first-time mother who arrived with complications seemed to arrive on her shift. It became the running joke of the centre, her sighing, the other midwives nodding knowingly, the acknowledgment that something inexplicable was happening and that it was specifically happening to her. The way the team held that together, with humour and solidarity, was one of the small things that made the month a real experience.

And there was the day where four women arrived in labour at the same time. Three birth rooms, four mothers. I was moving between antenatal visits and the birth ward when I turned a corner and found a woman on her knees on the floor of the antenatal office, looking directly at me, screaming through a contraction. I looked at her. She looked at me. The situation was completely absurd and completely serious at the same time. The laughter and the urgency existing in exactly the same moment, is one of the truest descriptions of what this month has felt like. Birth is the most serious joke there is.

What it felt like to walk out

After every birth I walked out of that room carrying one question.

Are they both alive?

In Uganda a woman faces a one in 66 lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy or birth related causes. That number is not abstract when you are inside the room. It is the measure of the shift. When the answer was yes, mother alive, baby breathing, both moving toward whatever came next, I felt something deep and quiet settle in me. Not triumph. Not relief exactly. Something more fundamental than either of those things. The feeling that she had done it. That they were both on the other side.

That feeling, repeated almost twenty-five times in thirty days, is what I am bringing home, life itself.

— Sabah, The Line Between · Beaufort, VIC

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Sabah is a certified doula and acupressure therapist based in Beaufort, Victoria. Her practice, The Line Between, is rooted in the philosophy of matrescence, the profound transformation of becoming a mother that deserves to be held with knowledge, presence and deep respect. She came to this work through her own pre-conception journey and a deep conviction that matrescence is a universal feminine passage that every woman deserves to move through with community, language and care. She is also the founder of The Mother's Village, a monthly gathering circle for women on every part of the motherhood journey. She writes from the threshold as a practitioner, a thinker and a woman navigating this passage herself.

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