Meeting yourself on the other side with Samantha Rae

This is the eighth in a Q&A series available to paid subscribers of What Do We Do Now That We’re Here. Know someone who might like this newsletter? Forward them the subscribe link here.

I’m a big believer in the idea that if you’re paying attention—and willing to be surprised—life will deliver to you the teachers and healers you need, right on schedule.

Samantha Rae is one such teacher to me. I met her when my partner and I attended her antenatal and birth preparation course in April. To be honest, we both sort of dragged ourselves to the first Saturday of her five week course, thinking we would have to endure a lot of cringey role-play and self conscious icebreaker exercises in order to learn practical things like how to swaddle a baby and when to go to the hospital during labor. 

It wasn’t like that at all. In fact, Sam’s course served as turning point for me in the pregnancy—and went way beyond mere practicalities. It was the moment where I finally found a source of information that didn’t feel judgmental, dogmatic, reductive, overly-sentimental or too crunchy. Up until that point, everything I came across seemed to describe birth as one of two things: a distinctly medical event that happens in a fluorescent lit hospital ward or a spiritual awakening done by candle light in a home birthing pool. Neither felt quite right to me. Sam made me see that there was more nuance and more options in between those two poles, and that I had the agency to make them happen. For the first time, I could imagine myself doing this.

But this interview isn’t just about birth. I’m fascinated by people who massively changed their lives as a result of the pandemic. Sam is one of those people, and she shares in our interview about how she left a 20-year masculine-driven corporate career to start her own business as an antenatal educator, birth/parent coach, and post-natal doula. We talk about the personal development work that often lays the groundwork for those moments where we decide, against all reason, to decisively change course. And how good it feels when you get to stop living a double life and settle into a more integrated version of yourself—and how that in turn benefits the wider world.  

“Matrescence'' is the term used to define the physical, psychological, and spiritual transition into motherhood. However, I’ve started to wonder if matrescence can’t also be about the transition into something even broader and more expansive than being a parent to your own child. After meeting Sam and hearing her story, I’m feeling excited to meet myself on the other side—whoever she is. 

Photo by Gabriela Tamara Cycman on Unsplash

I’m interested in the term “birth educator.” I hadn’t heard it before pregnancy, but it seems like a distinct artifact of our culture—one where nobody really talks about birth and its realities until you are actually pregnant, and then everyone pretty much just wants to tell you how horrible it is. So I wonder how you think about this work? It’s your job, but it’s also kind of filling this massive hole in our culture.

You come into a job like this based at least in part on your own experiences. Most other birth educators or people that work in the birthing world unfortunately have usually had a negative experience and that tends to be the driving force or passion. Most do this work because they feel a real need to help other people go through the process in a more positive way. 

I think it’s really weird that we prepare for everything else that we do—like running a marathon or going on a big trip—but we don’t prepare for this. I believe there are two reasons for that: One, we’re brought up with a narrative that this is simply what you do, babies are born every day, your mother never complained about it, your grandmother certainly never complained about it. And so we expect to be the same. And I also think there’s an element of overwhelm, like, how on earth do you prepare for it? 

Right, people think “it’s so massive and scary, I’ll just avoid thinking about it and try to go on as normal.” We live in a very avoidant culture, so that tracks.

Exactly. Also because we are in a culture here where we think that preparation is buying the things or reading the books. But it isn’t about that—it’s about connection. Connecting with yourself, and about connecting other people who have been through it. And we lack that community. We have it online but it doesn’t mean anything, there’s no real connection there. Most of us don’t even live near our parents anymore. So other cultures, sure, they do it one established way, but quite often they’re supported in that one way of doing it. 

I’m interested in this idea that maybe part of the reason all this (pregnancy, birth, post-natal etc.) feels so hard, so mystifying for people in our culture is partly because the most important preparation may be to just do what you said: to stop, to connect with self, to do less, to go inwards. And that is antithetical to basically everything about our culture and economy. We’re not encouraged or not able to those things in any other area of our lives. In many, if not most, cases women can’t slow down before birth for financial reasons. 

Yes and I didn’t do any of this in my pregnancy—this is why I tell everyone to do it. I’m not telling you this because I connected with myself in the 3rd trimester and it was amazing. I regret not doing it.

I grew up in corporate media, worked in it for 20 years, in a very male dominated space. And I was that person who was trying to stand head and shoulders in that world and didn’t respect women for getting pregnant and having a baby. I had no concept, no understanding of what that involved. I was all about my career and that’s what defined me. There are of course reasons for that we don’t have time to get into…

Then I became pregnant, and I didn’t feel any of it. Then I had my child, and I still didn’t really feel any of it. And then the pandemic hit and I realized that I was just pretending. I woke up one day and felt ashamed of my own thought processes and my behavior. 

So in order for you to have that big realization during covid—which resulted in you starting your own business as a birth educator—was there a process of personal work you’d been doing prior to that? One that was separate from pregnancy and becoming a mother? I’m interested in how that process unfolded.

So I was doing a lot of work, but I was still having to go back into that office and be that person. There was this dissonance, like a double life. So I was doing all this therapy, but assuming that just by doing that work, things would just change. But then I realized that wasn’t happening. It took until I was forced to stop—which was the pandemic—for me to realize that I really had to make the change happen. I also stopped drinking and that brought an unbelievable change in clarity. It was another piece of that puzzle. 

It was like someone had taken the glasses off. I realized I was not authentic. I turned 40. I thought, “I’m halfway through my life, why on earth am I still doing this?” Once you have that thought, going back is not an option. 

The realization made things worse for a while. I didn’t have the answer. I just knew “Oh no, I can’t do this anymore.” Then I went from being that glorious lightbulb moment to sleepless nights of “What am I going to do?”

So we left London, that was the first thing, and I told my husband I just needed to leave my job, which was of course a privilege to be able to do. I didn’t know what the next step was, I was full of anxiety. But I handed in my notice and I woke up the next morning with no anxiety. And then the morning after that, no word of a lie, I woke up and knew exactly what I needed to do. 

[Editor’s note: Sam had already researched the prospect of becoming an antenatal educator during her maternity leave, prompted by her negative birth experience. So at this point, she picked up where she left off and began training and building her business.] 

A very similar thing happened to me during the pandemic, and I think this process often has three stages: Stage 1: You are just in the culture, in the machine, and whether by circumstance or active denial, you can’t see how anything could ever be different. Stage 2: You’ve done enough work around the edges (maybe therapy, spirituality etc) to know this life is not right for you, it’s not authentic, but you haven’t changed anything yet. You’re living the double life. Stage 3: You start to integrate it all and figure out what your life looks like when you stop living a double life. 

I think people think that personal work is this efficiency-minded process of self optimization. But it’s the opposite! It’s the messiest, most volatile process with no certainty offered. And it’s likely to massively change your life in ways you don’t expect. 

I’m back in therapy now, and I feel now that as much as it’s exhausting and I wish I didn’t have to do it, it’s actually helping my life 360 degrees. Because I’m no longer in a position of doing therapy but still going to a job I don’t like, still living the double life. I’ve never experienced this before. It feels really hard, but really good. 

I have found the process of pregnancy incredibly humbling. It doesn’t really have anything to do with your thoughts or will or intellect. Your conscious self is no longer running the show, your body is. During the first trimester—which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through—I couldn’t believe how okay I was with how useless I felt. I could not be bothered to do one single thing. 

But even that term: useless. I totally get why you’re saying that because when you define you as not pregnant, then that’s useless. But it’s not useless at all. We don’t respect what’s happening internally. Whereas any athlete sprains a ligament and we respect that they need to heal, to rest. There’s so much respect around the human body and we don’t get given the same respect when we’re pregnant. And then we’re conditioned when we see this “Oh I carried on working until I went into labor!” 

There’s the structural, capitalist, economic reasons why people have to work up until birth, but then culturally we often take it a step further and kind of celebrate or glamorize that approach. I’m thinking of the journalist character in the Anna Delvey Netflix series, who closes this massive stressful story like an hour before giving birth and it’s depicted as a badass thing to do.

This is the problem that we’ve got, this is what we’re all watching on TV all the time and being given the idea that that is achievable. That goes in, whether you like it or not. It’s really damaging and comes back to the lack of connection: We’re constantly trying to connect externally but we’re not comfortable doing it inwardly because, quite a lot of the time, we don’t like what we find in there. It’s uncomfortable if you’re not doing the work. 

Right, if you go in there you might find out you’re living the double life—watch out! 

I want to finish on this idea of matrescence and go back to something you said to me before, which is that sometimes you look at your daughter and, as much as you love her, you wish that she was enough for you in terms of fulfillment. Your story is so interesting to me because you are the first to admit you were not a maternal person when you became a mom…

…I still don’t think I really am maternal, to be honest.

But this is what I’m getting at! The only model of maternal energy we see and celebrate is “Woman has a baby.” But there are all these ways that women in my life (some of which do not have children) have been super maternal towards me, and have helped me evolve and mature and get to the point where I am ready to do this. 

I see your story like this: Becoming a mom to your daughter has led you to take on this larger maternal mission, which helps a lot of other women like me make that same transition. So your matrescence was about something more than just becoming a mother to your own daughter—you actually became a more integrated and authentic version of yourself, a woman with a broader mission in the world. 

When you first emailed me about this interview and you mentioned the idea that matrescence might be bigger than just having a child—I’ve been thinking about that a lot. The three phases we go through in life are adolescence, matrescence and then menopause. All three have commonalities: a big hormonal shift, you can never go back etc. I thought, “Well what about those of us who don’t have children? Do they never develop into a more caring, nurturing person?” Of course they do. 

I love the thought that matrescence doesn’t need to be exclusively related to physically becoming a parent, because I have friends that don’t have children and they are unbelievably maternal and they have grown and evolved, and they look after people, and they love doing that. 

We talk about how when a child is born, a mother is born—I love that and experienced that myself. But I also think you can be re-birthed yourself. But, only if you are almost being maternal to yourself first—that’s the only way you can do it. 

Totally, I agree. And this broader idea of matrescence benefits everyone I think. It’s good for people who choose not to or can’t have children, because they get to be celebrated and their maternal energy can be appreciated and even utilized more. And then it’s good for the people who do have children, because it widens the definition of parenthood or motherhood to something more than just optimizing your offspring to succeed under capitalism, which feels kind of dark.

I think the process you take people on in your work, what you’re actually doing, is asking people to ask themselves: What do I want? What am I comfortable with? How does this feel to me? And giving them the info to answer those questions in an informed way. In that process, people start to connect to themselves, no matter how they end up giving birth. They start on their own inward journey toward matrescence.  

Right, so if they get to after their birth and it hasn’t gone how they wanted to, they understand why it went there. And they don’t feel like they’ve been taken somewhere they don’t want to go. From a mental well-being standpoint, that’s huge: Not only are you walking into this new life which is terrifying and incredible, you’ve gone through something that you have to process and if that is negative, it can swallow up a lot of the time you’re home with your baby. 

That’s how I felt after my birth: What the hell happened to me and why did I let it happen? That’s what I want more people to understand how to avoid. I just think parents deserve better.

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You can find more about Samantha’s work on her website, and follow her on Instagram at @heybabyperinatal