Elizabeth Noble quotes:

Because parents are transients in the maternity care system, there is little cumulative birth experience over successive generations of mothers. Women giving birth don't make the same mistakes as their mothers or grandmothers-they make new ones.

Adulthood isn't black and white - it's a thousand shades of grey. Or taupe. It's not who you are, it's where you are.

However much we know about birth in general, we know nothing about a particular birth. We must let it unfold with its own uniqueness.

Childbirth calls into question our very existence, requiring an expectant couple to confront not only new life but death, pain, fear and, most of all, change.

Birth, like love, is an energy and a process, happening within a relationship. Both unfold with their own timing, with a uniqueness that can never be anticipated, with a power that can never be controlled, but with an exquisite mystery to be appreciated.

Birth is what women do. Women are privileged to stand in such power! Birth stretches a woman's limits in every sense. To allow such stretching of one's limits is the challenge of pregnancy, birth, and parenting. The challenge is to be fully present and to allow the process because of inner trust.

It couldn't last of course. They both knew it. Not the evening, Not the holiday.