There is a particular birth story medicine available to us around our child’s birthday ~ a medicine we can retrieve for ourselves, for them and for our parent-child relationship.
We’re about to celebrate our daughter’s birthday and with it 3 years of breastfeeding also! As I approach the sacred window of 3 years since giving birth, I notice how my perception of our birth and the telling of our birth story is changing over time.
I notice how I no longer see our birth story as a medical story (8 hours of active labour etc), a relational story (who did/said what etc) or an internal story of ‘what’s ifs’ or ‘why did that happen’.
I understand our birth story on mythic terms these days ~ as our medicine story. And it’s a medicine I draw upon regularly for my own healing and my parenting journey – especially when things feel hard.
Our birth story lives somewhere in me now and somewhere also in the relational space between my daughter and I.
As our birth stories mature and become integrated as medicine and myth, there is less of a story to tell. Or rather, less of a need to tell it. Fresh insight and meaning continue to reveal themselves until there is no story left to tell.
Something new I notice about our birth story this year is understanding more deeply the significance, privilege and context of being able to stay pregnant to 42 weeks (2 weeks post ‘due date’). I see now how that enabled our birth story to be what it is. And it’s not what you might think – it wasn’t because it made the birth easier or more ‘natural’ … it was that it enabled a specific set of circumstances to unfold that led to something very strange/hilarious and particular happening. It was something that spoke deeply to my deepest core wound. Our story is expanding and contracting all at once.
And that’s what birth stories do ~ deepen yet shrink & contract over time … kinda like sand through a timer. Our perception of what happened and the way we tell our birth story continually evolves.
The old idea is that a birth story gets fixed at 7 years postpartum but until then it is still malleable; our story shaping us as we shape it.
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Are you interested in exploring your birth story together? You can find out about the birth story medicine sessions I offer here.