Personally, I would miss a wedding. I would miss childbirth. I would miss a bar mitzvah just to see me talk at all.

Postpartum depression is a very real and very serious problem for many mothers. It can happen to a first time mom or a veteran mother. It can occur a few days... or a few months after childbirth.

I once heard two ladies going on and on about the pains of childbirth and how men don't seem to know what real pain is. I asked if either of them ever got themselves caught in a zipper.

I know we can't always know what medical surprises may happen during childbirth. But my hope is to go fully natural - no epidural, no interventions. Wish me luck.

Every Mother Counts is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother. We inform, engage, and mobilize audiences to take action and raise funds that support maternal health programs around the world.

Maternal health remains a staggering challenge, particularly in the developing world. Globally, a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute.

On the one hand, we'll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open all our own jars.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

Childbirth is normal until proven otherwise.

I tend to categorize my emotions the same way I categorize my drawers, trying to put like things together. To separate the jeans from the pajamas. If I'm sad, I can't also be happy. If I'm longing, then I must not be satisfied. But I'm learning in this upside down and inside out kingdom of spirit beings walking around in broken bodies, we are not just one way. Sorrow and peace shake hands in the corner with laughter, anger, and fear. Desire and disappointment often keep company with one another on the bench. You can realize this in any number of ways: laughing at a funeral, pain during childbirth, crying at graduation. We have all experienced the reality of a multicolored life?.hope and grief mixed up all together, just like that. You feel the desire of what could be, alongside the disappointment of what is.

Prior to about 40,000 years ago, hominins had been observing other hominins die for more than six million years. They were intimately acquainted with death as something that happened to others. They observed people die within their living group - children from disease, women from childbirth, men from hunting accidents, and older adults from starvation. They also occasionally encountered deceased hominins as they foraged for food or followed herds of deer. Unlike today, when the biological realities of death are relegated to the offices of medical examiners and morticians, early hominins saw corpses in all stages of decomposition, since even the occasional burial of bodies was apparently not practiced until the last 100,000 years.

Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.

Life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech and often drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving.

Postpartum depression is a very real and very serious problem for many mothers. It can happen to a first time mom or a veteran mother. It can occur a few days... or a few months after childbirth.

I once heard two ladies going on and on about the pains of childbirth and how men don't seem to know what real pain is. I asked if either of them ever got themselves caught in a zipper.

I know we can't always know what medical surprises may happen during childbirth. But my hope is to go fully natural - no epidural no interventions. Wish me luck.

On the one hand we'll never experience childbirth. On the other hand we can open all our own jars.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest more amazing than self-defense and as courageous as either one.

At the moment of childbirth every woman has the same aura of isolation as though she were abandoned alone.