Let's Stop Comparing Birth Stories

Once you have a baby, you enter a new community. Motherhood. When meeting another mom, you already have some common experiences. You have both taken on the challenging feat of bringing a child into the world and dedicating your life to that child. When meeting with people who share common experiences, it is natural to want to share those experiences with each other. Most mothers love to talk about their birth stories, but bringing up such an intimate experience can be damaging if done the wrong way. Having spoken to several other women about birth stories, I struggle to understand why it has to be a competition. Birth is a very personal and tender experience, not a competitive sport. While that statement might sound obvious, it's shocking how quickly women will put on their 'game face' as they dig into the details of their labor experience in comparison to another woman's.

I hate it when people ask if I had an easy labor. What even qualifies an easy labor? The only easy way of bringing a child into your family would be if a stork dropped your baby off on your doorstep. Even when a woman has a short labor and pushes out her baby without any complications, I doubt she would really consider that easy. It may seem easy in comparison, but nothing is easy about having a little person come out of your body. Every birth is at least a little bit challenging for the individual woman. What's hard for one woman may be easy for her friend, but that doesn't matter. All that matters is that a woman can overcome her own physical, mental, and emotional anguish to do what her body was designed to do.

If a woman feels that her birth experience was not as intense or beautiful as another's, it may cause her to feel like less of a woman or diminish the personal importance of that experience. No mother should feel the need to exaggerate the story of having her child, just so she that she can be validated for what she went through. Every birth story should be treated with the same amount of respect. Motherhood is a sisterhood of women who need to stand for and support each other.

As mothers, we're all warriors. Our birth stories are precious to us because they are evidence of our strength. How tragic that one woman would destroy another's badge of motherhood by saying, "Oh, that was nothing compared to what I went through." It doesn't matter. Let each woman revel in her identity as a woman and a mother by wearing the pride of her own experiences. Every birth story is valuable and every woman who has given birth is fierce, regardless of whether she had an epidural or a c-section. Motherhood is hard enough without us tearing each other down.