The Trembling of Transition
Something is happening,
and the body knows it before anyone announces that she has entered a new phase.
The Trembling of Transition
When you watch a woman transitioning in labor, many tremble. They shake.
Even as I write that, those who work in birth may already have a visual of the phase we commonly call transition.
There is a birth video that has been shown in childbirth education classes for years. In one scene, a laboring mother is turned onto her side in the bed, gripping the rail. Her body is trembling as she braces herself through the intensity of what she is experiencing. Nothing is announced.
The narrator doesn't point it out or explain what we are seeing. The video simply continues. Yet every time I reference that moment after showing the video, I barely have to finish my sentence before heads begin nodding around the room. They saw it. Although no one talked about it or gave it a name, they recognized that something had changed.
There is often a hint of concern behind those nods, too. I can see the anticipation as they wait for me to explain what they just witnessed. Why was she shaking like that? Is that normal? Should I be afraid if that happens to me?
I find that moment fascinating because the body communicated something significant enough for people with no clinical birth experience to recognize that a transition was occurring, even though no one had given them language for it. Interestingly, transition itself is not formally identified as a separate stage of labor.
The first stage is generally divided into latent and active phases, while "transition" is commonly used to describe that intense period toward the end of cervical dilation. Whether formally named or not, those of us who have stood beside laboring women witness it.
The body may shake as the intensity changes. What had been manageable moments earlier can suddenly feel destabilizing, and a woman who has been coping beautifully may begin saying that she can't do it anymore.
For someone hoping to labor without medical pain management, this can be the point when she begins questioning that decision. Those standing beside her can become frightened too, particularly when they don't recognize what they are seeing.
Something is happening, and the body knows it before anyone announces that she has entered a new phase.
In birth work, we sometimes describe this trembling as the body "shaking the apple tree." Giving it that imagery can make the experience feel less alarming to the birthing person and the people supporting her. Rather than immediately interpreting the shaking as a sign that something is wrong, there is another possibility to consider: her body may be responding to and moving through an incredibly demanding process.
At times, we even mimic that shaking manually with assistance, introducing gentle shaking or jiggling to encourage the body to release some of the tension that naturally accompanies intensity. The explanation matters because it changes the way everyone in the room interprets what they see. A body that appears to be losing control can instead be understood as a body actively moving through transition.
But there is another transition I have witnessed countless times that we don't talk about in quite the same way. The baby has been born. The work of opening has ended, and the mother's body begins its return. She may tremble and shake then, too.
Our response to that shaking is completely different. Warm blankets come out almost instinctively as we cover her, offer reassurance and remind her, It's okay. This is normal. Just breathe. There isn't usually the same fear in the room. The shaking may be surprising to the woman experiencing it, but to those of us who recognize it, it makes sense.
Her body has just done something enormous. There is an explanation for her trembling.
I've been thinking about the difference between those two moments. One transition happens as the body is opening toward birth. The other follows the birth, as the body begins closing and moving toward recovery.
Both can involve trembling, but the first can feel frightening because we don't yet know what waits on the other side. The second feels justified because we can point to what just happened.
She just gave birth.
Perhaps the transitions carrying us toward something we cannot yet see are inherently more destabilizing than those following an ending we can explain. We tend to give ourselves more grace when we can look backward and justify why we are tired, unsettled or unsure. Offering ourselves that same understanding can be much harder when the trembling comes before we have language for what is being born.
It makes me wonder whether transitions in life follow similar patterns.
Do trees experience their own version of trembling as they push out new leaves in spring? Is there some tiny vibration beneath the ground as it warms enough to support new growth? What happens within a tree as summer ends and it begins extracting what it can from leaves that will soon be released? Is there a vibration as those leaves prepare to fall, or as the ground hardens in preparation for the cold and the grass begins to disappear?
I don't know whether nature literally trembles through those changes. I do know that nature rarely moves from one state into another without a transition between them.
Which brings me to September.
There is another reason this reflection feels particularly fitting today. Sixteen years ago, to the day, I experienced both sides of this trembling myself during the labor and birth of my son. I experienced the shaking that came with opening toward his birth, followed by the trembling that came afterward as my body began closing and recovering from what it had just done.
Yesterday was September 1, the day monthly announcements, newsletters and reflections tend to arrive. Mine didn't. Instead, it is arriving today, on the anniversary of my own experience with the trembling of transition. Somehow, that feels more appropriate.
Sixteen years later, I find myself in another transition. My son is entering another season of his own development, my experience of motherhood continues to change alongside him, and the work that grew from so much of what I learned not just through supporting others, but through my own pregnancy, birth and mothering experience is transitioning too.
September and the Space Between Seasons
September is a transitional month. We enter it in summer, surrounded by warmth, activity, vibrant colors and the fullness that has been building since spring. Before the month ends, we cross into autumn. Temperatures begin fluctuating, daylight gradually retreats, and the colors around us transition before eventually becoming more muted and disappearing.
Nothing has gone wrong. The season is changing.
Over this past month, I have noticed some trembling of my own. Not necessarily physical trembling, but the internal destabilization that happens when something you've understood one way begins asking to be understood differently.
I have felt it personally, but I have also felt it in my work and in Peaceful Motives.
What makes this particular transition interesting is that the question underneath it isn't new. In many ways, it has followed me throughout my career:
What have these experiences taught us that we can carry beyond motherhood?
Long before I had language such as the Maternal Lens to describe it, I was noticing connections. My experiences across nursing, childbirth education, birth work, movement and motherhood kept showing me patterns that didn't seem confined to pregnancy or parenting. The reproductive journey was teaching me something much broader about people and the ways we prepare, adapt, resist, surrender, communicate, develop, recover and move through change.
What feels different now isn't the question. It is my willingness to follow it further.
That distinction matters because Peaceful Motives isn't suddenly moving away from maternal work in search of something else. Pregnancy, birth, postpartum, movement and motherhood are where much of this understanding was formed. What is transitioning now is the container I have built around that knowledge and my understanding of how expansive its application may actually be.
The Woman Within Motherhood
A woman can deeply love being a mother and still crave conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with taking care of her child. She may want space to explore an idea she has been carrying, examine something happening in a relationship, think differently about her work, understand a change within herself, or simply engage the parts of her mind that are curious about something beyond the immediate responsibilities of mothering.
I no longer see that as a woman needing to "discover a new version of herself." Motherhood changes us, but change and loss are not synonymous. The woman is still there, continuing through her own development while simultaneously witnessing and supporting the development of another human being.
I understand that differently now that I am raising a teenager than I might have when I was immersed in the daily physical care of a young child. My experience of motherhood has changed, giving me room to look back at pregnancy, birth, postpartum and child development through another lens.
Pregnancy gives us an intimate experience of expansion and adaptation. Labor demonstrates how intensity can rise and fall and how something that worked beautifully at one point may no longer be appropriate as conditions change. Birth brings us to a threshold where what existed before cannot remain exactly as it was. Postpartum makes something particularly visible that our culture often overlooks: an event can be finished while the person who experienced it is still integrating what happened.
Years of supporting parents as they watch their children develop adds another dimension. Development is rarely a smooth climb toward maturity. Periods of rapid growth we call “growth spurts” are followed by plateaus. Those seasons of growth don’t just birth new abilities known as milestones, they often temporarily or permanently disrupt old rhythms. We generally understand these fluctuations when watching children because we recognize development as a process, not an event. A dear friend shared that reminder with me years ago as I picked my son’s poop up off the very expensive rug in our friends’ home during his potty-training season.
The same patterns become visible in our professional lives. Teams go through periods when old ways of working are no longer sufficient but new ones have not yet stabilized. Leaders can recognize that something within an organization is shifting long before they can articulate exactly what it will become. A career can still look intact from the outside while the person living inside of it already knows that something is changing.
Adults don't always receive that same allowance.
We are often expected to identify what is wrong, decide what needs to change and proceed toward the solution. Actual human development is rarely that orderly. A career shift, relationship change, transition into motherhood, transition out of intensive mothering, a changing body, a creative awakening or an evolving sense of purpose may include a period when we simply don't know what comes next.
My maternal experiences have given me a framework for understanding those periods differently.
That is becoming the heart of what I mean when I talk about looking at life through the Maternal Lens.
Taking the Maternal Lens Beyond Motherhood
Peaceful Motives began within maternal and reproductive spaces, and those roots remain important. What is expanding is my understanding of what can grow from them.
I am increasingly interested in the knowledge women carry from their maternal experiences into the rest of their lives, including their relationships, work, creativity, leadership and understanding of themselves. There is also another group I find myself wanting to invite further into this conversation: the professionals who spend their careers alongside women and families.
Birth workers, nurses, childbirth educators, therapists, movement professionals and others witness human transition from particularly intimate vantage points. Over time, we accumulate observations about adaptation, communication, vulnerability, resistance, autonomy, support and change. Some of that knowledge may have relevance far beyond the settings where we originally learned it.
I want to explore what happens when we carry it outward.
There are principles within maternal health, reproductive transitions and human development that may have something meaningful to contribute to how we understand relationships, workplaces, leadership, caregiving and our own periods of becoming. I don't yet know every place that exploration will lead, and I am becoming increasingly comfortable with not forcing myself to decide.
Perhaps that is part of what this particular transition is teaching me.
Recognizing the Trembling
There is a tendency to treat transition as an inconvenient hallway between two important rooms. We want to identify what we are leaving, determine where we are going and get there as efficiently as possible.
Nature seems considerably less concerned with efficiency. September does not wake up one morning and become fall. Summer gradually loosens its hold while autumn begins appearing within it. For a while, both are true.
An identity can still fit while another part of us is expanding beyond it. Work that has been meaningful doesn't have to become meaningless simply because additional possibilities are beginning to reveal themselves. Recognizing that change is underway also doesn't obligate us to immediately name its destination.
I keep thinking back to that mother in the birth video.
She is gripping the rail and trembling. Nobody narrates the transition for us, yet the people sitting in my childbirth classes recognize that something is happening before I ever give them the explanation.
Maybe there is something in that for us.
An obvious ending gives us something concrete to point toward when we feel unsettled, making our response seem justified. The transitions that begin while everything around us appears relatively unchanged can be harder to understand. Nothing dramatic may have happened at all. The discomfort may instead be coming from the realization that something is already happening within us.
As September carries us from summer into fall, I am less interested in rushing to define what Peaceful Motives, my work, or even I myself am becoming. I am more interested in paying attention to the movement that is already underway.
After spending years watching women move through labor, perhaps I should know this by now:
Sometimes the trembling comes before the birth.
