The Birth Of Sacred Love

By Judy Ribner, DNP, CNM 

She is kneeling in the birth pool, folded forward, hands gripping its edge as though anchoring herself to the world. The baby slips into the water. We lift it gently and lay the wet, blinking little human across its mother’s back. Tiny toes drift in the warm pool remembering the language of the womb. I test the water with my wrist—perfect. There is a moment after birth that exists outside of time and language. It is not loud. It is not performative. It does not ask to be witnessed. It simply is.

“I love you,” the mother whispers, her voice low and steady. The baby cries softly, then settles, as if recognizing the sound. They are suspended together in awe. Relief moves through the mother’s body, followed by the radiance of a woman who has just released an entire human she once carried inside her.

The baby cries some more. Not in distress, but in announcement. The mother does not turn. She does not ask to see. She does not ask to know. She speaks instead. She soothes.

“You are mine. I waited for you so long. I love you.”

She remembers something older than memory. The primal love is deepening.

I stand quietly as we secure the baby against her bare back, skin to skin, heart to heart.

I wonder if I should offer to hand her the baby. I don’t. Thirteen minutes pass. She has not yet seen her child. But if she wanted to, she would ask. Mothers know. I remind myself of this. I trust her knowing. I remain invisible.

“Boy or girl?” her husband asks, his voice barely breaking the spell.

“We have a pure soul.” she says.

His parents are on the phone, their joy bright and eager—but still the question presses: “What did we have? Boy or girl?”

Ten more minutes drift by. I trade places with the nurse, hands steady, guarding the baby’s body on its mother’s back.

There is something profoundly intimate about bonding without sight.

The mother does not yet know the baby’s face. The baby’s gender is a mystery. She is not imagining who this child will become. She is loving who this child is. Voice to ear. Breath to breath.

The love is boundless. Unfiltered. Unassigned.

“What did we have, a boy or a girl?” her husband asks again. “We had a sacred soul,” she answers simply. She is not mapping the child into a confined role or imagined future.

The baby is simply a pure being who has arrived—and this sacred moment is shaping their story.

We stand by silently. We protect this space—the quiet, unlabeled beginning.

The baby begins to suck her hand—a small mouth searching to nurse. A clear signal.

Do I tell the mother? Or would that fracture something rare—the baby’s own rite of passage, the depth of a bond still forming beyond sight, beyond name, beyond gender? They will never have this time again. Once she knows, she cannot unknow.

So I choose carefully.

I offer no instruction. No suggestion. I simply carry the information forward, gently, intact.

“The baby looks like she’s ready to nurse,” I whisper.

The moment shifts.

Immediately, the mother asks to hold her baby.

Time stands still—not frozen, but ripened. The moment has arrived.

We lift the baby from her back and place her into her arms. The mother peeks.

It is a girl.

The only one in a family long shaped by many boys. She glows.

The connection had already been forged—in the dim room, in mystery, in breath and voice and waiting. She gathers her daughter with a steady, rooted love—unshakable—the love was already whole long before she knew she was holding a girl.

I stand beside them, holding nothing now, needed for nothing. The work is done.

I have witnessed a beginning untouched by expectation—and it allowed everything else to follow.

This is the oldest story there is. We are worthy of love before the world defines us. n

Judy Ribner, DNP, CNM, is a doctorally prepared midwife and cofounder of Birthing Center NYC & Long Island, providing evidence-based, compassionate maternity care. She can be reached at 646-907-5515 ext. 3, [email protected] or on Instagram @birthingcenternyc.