Sing A New Song

Introducing the first virtual retreat from Mothering Spirit

I was not a fan of birth stories.

That’s the honest truth, I’m embarrassed to admit. After all, as a mom of many I’ve got plenty of birth stories to share. But I have to confess that every time women started swapping stories at baby showers, my eyes would glaze over and I’d try to escape to the dessert table.

Why these one-upping war stories about who-had-it-worse? 

Why couldn’t we talk about more interesting things than dilation and Pitocin?

Back in the blogging days, birth stories were all the rage: long posts detailing each step and stage of labor. One day while scrolling past a fellow blogger’s birth story, I realized I had forgotten one of the maxims I coach others to hold close:

Turn from judgment to wonder. Choose curiosity.

So I sat back and tried to figure out what bugged me about birth stories. The paradox was that I had found birth to be a life-changing experience, beyond what I could put into words. Why didn’t I want to dive into the details with other mothers?

That’s when the lightbulb flash happened. 

What I wanted to hear were the stories beyond the stories.

Women were trying to narrate a life-changing event—exactly the kind of storytelling I crave as a reader and as a writer. But no one had given us adequate language to tell the deepest truths of what happened to us through birth. 

What new mothers fell back upon were clinical details, facts and figures. The medical chart summary of childbirth. Hours and inches, interventions and complications. 

My frustration came as a listener who longed to go deeper than the details. I wanted to hear what happened when women met their limits in that liminal space en route to motherhood: 

What did birth reveal to you? How did it change you? What did it teach you? How are your stories still shaping you today?

I missed the forest for the trees. Mothers were trying to make meaning from some of the most painful, powerful, beautiful, unexpected, or transformational experiences of their lives. But I was hung up on the limited language we had to describe the ineffable.

What’s more, what I mistook for competition was a craving for community. The woman who most needed to tell her story—the mom who took over at the baby classes, or the relative who stole the spotlight at the baby shower, or the friend who needed to narrate the same story again and again—she was often the one who felt unseen or abandoned during her hours of suffering. She needed to be seen, heard, and understood. She needed us to rally around her—but we were often rolling our eyes thinking she was too much.

So I tried to start listening with the ear of the heart to what friends and strangers alike were sharing: This is the story of how my whole life changed.

Birth stories are stories of women’s lives, faith, bodies, and souls. 

What would happen if we made space to dive into their depths together?

Photo by Rebekah Vos on Unsplash.

Birth stories are vocational stories. Each birth beckons a new calling: to parent this particular child. To change and be changed by what God will call forth through this new creation.

Once I saw how wrong I was to sell short these stories of women narrating their own lives, I realized there was a deeper calling for me, too: to invite mothers into reflection on birth as a spiritual experience. 

To create a different context to explore the meaning and spirituality of birth.

To offer language and wisdom from ancient traditions of faith.

To see how Scripture speaks to the transformations and turmoil that birth brings. 

To find ways to bring our hardest, hidden stories to God in prayer and discover how God was working in our lives all along.

So when I created Mothering Spirit, I knew this was the first retreat I wanted to bring to birth.

Sing A New Song is a birth story retreat. Whether women birthed their babies last week or decades ago, I want to invite us to explore birth as a spiritual experience. Rare is the local church community that has helped mothers prepare or pray through birth. Rarer still is a sermon that speaks about the actual embodied experience of how each of us enter the world. 

I’m ready for that to change. 

Even if a mother never prayed through birth, or found God in the experience of meeting her child, the stories of what we learned, lost, found, or feared through birth are stories of faith: fertile ground for finding how God is working in our lives. 

Scripture is full of stories of birth as a powerful, potent symbol for God’s own work in the world. On this virtual retreat, we’re going to dive into the Psalms and the Gospels (and plenty of birth stories along the way) to learn how to sing a new song about the crucible experience of bringing life into the world.

Unlike most of the virtual retreats I’ve offered, this one is particular—so I know it may not speak to who or where you are. (FYI I have another virtual retreat coming later this year that will be for a wide audience.) But I hope you might share this offering with someone who would love to reflect on her transition into motherhood through birth, whether recently or years ago.

The simple act of having our stories seen and heard can be enough to change our lives.

Find out more at Mothering Spirit to learn if this retreat is a good fit for you or a loved one. (Patrons at the $10/month level get a 20% discount, so it’s worth it to join Patreon for a month if you run the math!)

But if birth stories are the farthest thing from your experience, would you simply pray for our retreat on Nov. 4-6? Knowing that our retreatants are supported in prayer will be a tremendous gift.

Thanks for helping us to hold these stories sacred, too.