The "Miracle" of Childbirth
Why do people get so schmaltzy about a woman's behaviour the moment she brings a child into this world? It has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with chemistry. Most women are hard-wired to experience a deep, unbreakable love and connection to the child they just bore, because mammals are programmed to experience such joy to ensure the protection and care for the new life. Women, in general, have this instinct. Some women, like myself, do not.
But when I see people get all squishy over the normally natural instincts of a female caught up in the heady miasma of birth, it makes me sad that so many are oblivious to the science surrounding it, and prefer to attribute some mystical love-fest to the proceedings. Let the woman be what she is in her moment. Don't decorate the experience with obsolete beliefs. She's doing the exact same thing a mother cat does when she removes her babies' placentas and cleans them vigourously. Her instincts, in the form of love, which is a collection of chemicals triggered by childbirth, dictate that she does this, just like most women are desperate to hold their newborns to their breasts.
Don't get me wrong. I honour the customs that surround childbirth. I sympathise with the mystic traditions that have been born out of the birthing process. I understand and sense the work of the Goddess in such events. But I also know that science has explained a lot of what we once thought divine in nature, and that's something that we cannot deny.
Be happy for the new mother, if she is indeed happy to be one. Celebrate with her. Enjoy the customs and traditions you practice in regard to pregnancy and birth. Just do so from an informed position, rather than from one of superstition and ignorance. Yes, she is in love. Yes, she is glowing with joy. And yes, she's enjoying a high from a cocktail of chemicals that demand she feel these things, for the well-being of her newborn child.
Walter White will tell you the same goddamn thing.