Birth.

One of the most transformational — and miraculous — events of a woman’s life.

As the bluish baby takes his first breath and lets out a gusty cry it’s not uncommon for the tears to flow. But for Tzipporah now a proud grandmother who attended her first grandchild’s birth the tears came from a deeper place.

“I couldn’t stop crying” she recounts. “I helped my daughter take charge of her natural birth and then nurse her baby immediately afterwards holding him tight. This is my tikun I thought. This is the birth experience I never got to have.”

Some five decades ago recalls Tzipporah birth was a clinical sterile process. Heavily drugged and sedated — sometimes without prior consent — most mothers from her era have few joyful recollections of the experience. They describe condescending doctors counterintuitive birth positions and faulty anesthetic dosages that didn’t relieve the pain but caused hallucinations or utter confusion.

What’s more for that helpless doctor-does-it-all generation even the precious after-birth bonding experience was often denied. Nursing — currently recognized as one of the greatest gifts a mother can give her child — was pegged as a primitive bovine rite.

At birth dazed mothers were immediately separated from their hysterical newborns while discreetly-administered milk suppressants did their thing.

Today thankfully much has changed.

Birth has been recognized as a natural physical process of which the mother should be at the helm. Sedation has been replaced by localized pain relief and the downsides of using medication altogether have been spelled out allowing mothers to make informed choices.

In a striking change of attitude that is actually a throwback to pre-maternity ward days birth today is regarded as an elevated emotional experience — one that a mother deserves to experience in full with the support of loved ones in the background.

Perhaps that’s why in recent years a new trend is gaining steam: Women are inviting their mothers — those stalwart women who joyfully begot them decades earlier — to share the incredible moment.