Birth stories aren't something you process once.

Immediately after the birth of my daughter, I started writing about my experience in labor and delivery. It was nothing short of eventful. The way it unfolded was not at all what I was hoping for. I expected my daughter to be born peacefully in our bedroom at home. But after 50+ hours of labor, 36+ hours with broken water, and nothing more than a centimeter of cervical dilation, my husband and I went to the hospital to help labor move forward. 

It was not the plan. I was nervous at the idea of going to the hospital, but I was insistent upon surrendering to the process of birth, whatever it looked like. 

She was finally born in the hospital, and before we were even discharged, I started writing out bullet points on my phone of things that I remembered from labor. One week later, I had a full-detail, ~20 page slide story written depicting the details of my birth story ready to post on Instagram.

Friends in my comment section said, “Kailyn, this is so amazing that you have processed all of this.” And I beamed with pride assuming that all of the processing for my birth story was done, and now I could check that off my list. I was crushing postpartum already. 

However, something I have learned time and time again in the last seven months is that the birth experience has its way of coming up again and again. Sometimes I remember details that I forgot in the experience, and other times it’s less tangible, but I simply experience feelings that I conceptually know are related to my birthing experience, but it feels far away and unclear. 

What I do know though is that that experience changed me. I am grateful that in the moment I felt empowered in the process of delivering my daughter. I am constantly surprised by every detail, like the way I felt when I held my daughter for the first time, or even smaller things like the way that I advocated for myself when a nurse wasn’t as communicative with me as I would’ve liked during labor. 

Whenever I hold my daughter now, I am taken back to those moments. And there was a time recently when I felt taken advantage of by a business partner, and I was taken back to that moment when I felt empowered to advocate for myself. My birth story is intertwined into these “regular life moments,” and I think it will continue to show up again and again.