The Gift: The Birth of my Sixth Child

how do we deserve what we're given?

Last year I gave birth to my sixth child, and the experience was so incredibly healing. I’ve never written out a birth story, and I can’t say if I ever will again; but here is my humble retelling of a beautiful event. A gift received, a gift given. I am leaving this free to read for one week after it’s publishing.

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I have been blessed in bearing children.

I have never had a miscarriage, or experienced difficulty in conceiving. I’ve had six non-Caesarian (natural) births, with minimal physical trauma. My children were all born healthy and I’ve recovered decently well each time, although some births took years to mentally recover from due to their difficulty and intensity. And yet the birth of my sixth child has been a greater blessing and healing experience than I could have ever imagined. With this birth I felt a profound sensation of having received a divine gift. I haven’t found a way to adequately explain our experience to anyone yet, haven’t found the right words, haven’t been able to talk about it without welling emotions threatening to stifle my words.

I’m publishing this on my baby girl’s first birthday (already?) and I want to get this down as a way to share our beautiful experience. A very personal, vulnerable story only because it describes a birth which I truly felt was given to me, to us, by God. Why? I do not know. We are not particularly special people to be worthy of such a gift. Its unexpected and undeserved nature has rendered it even more precious to us.

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Mothers with difficult childbirth experiences: I see you. I have been there. I have other stories I could write, from other births, of the trials we experienced. My heart goes out to you in your struggle, in your heartbreak, in your trauma. My hope is that no one reads this birth story and consequently feels as if their birth was “less than” because theirs did not go according to plan, or was traumatizing, or had an undesired outcome. All things happen for a reason, even if that reason remains unknown to us. Perhaps my story can offer a glimpse of hope - for no two births are the same. I never expected to have such a beautiful experience. We truly cannot know what life holds for us, especially in the way of something as divinely linked as childbirth.

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Sitting on the steps of my front porch, I smiled a tearful goodbye to my children as they headed to their grandmother’s house to spend the day. They waved fiercely, hollering their goodbyes, and the inevitability of the forthcoming event fell heavily upon me. Bidding my children a temporary goodbye at the beginning of labor is always a marked turning point at the very end of my pregnancy: the moment when labor and birth arrive to be faced down, inescapable and looming. Another contraction - it was definitely the beginnings of labor. The midwife would be here soon. My thoughts flitted back to the past summer before this baby was conceived, and how transient time seemed to be over the course of nine months…

On a warm, close June evening, I sat on my couch with my arms curled around my empty womb, contemplating what it would really be like to not bear any more children.