When she becomes a mother, it is as if a woman must go deep into the bowels of the earth, back to the elemental emotions and the power that makes life possible, losing herself in the darkness. She is like Eurydice in the underworld. She is pulled away from a world of choices, plans, and schedules, where time is kept, space cleared, commitments made, and goals attained, to the warm chaos of love, confusion, longing, anger, self-surrender, and intense pleasure that mothering entails---

Sheila Kitzinger, midwife, social anthropologist, and mother.