My mother giving birth to me was just like Lady Sybil giving birth, except that there wasn't such a tragic ending.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Instead of joyfully looking forward to my birth, my mother began systematically preparing for her own death. She was fatalistic.
When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.
My natural mother died one month after I was born, apparently due to giving birth at an advanced age.
Mum was an amazing parent and my best pal. The tragedy of it, really, was that she died from breast cancer just as I was becoming a man, aged 17, and we were just starting to speak as adults. She was snatched away, and it felt cruel. She made me laugh.
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.
When I gave birth to my son, something happened. It is a huge thing for a woman: a whole set of emotions you never had before arrives, and a love you never had before in your life is now on tap.
My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7.
Maybe I was just lucky, but I had the best pregnancy, and I loved giving birth. It was just the most amazing thing, so surreal but so real.
My grandmother spoiled my father rotten, and he grew up expecting women to do whatever he wanted. When he married my beautiful mother, Elsa, he expected her to give up her career as a champion ballroom dancer and become a good wife and mother, which she dutifully did.
Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.