“You know there’s no trophy, right?”

There is no trophy for having an unmedicated, natural birth.

There is no trophy for breastfeeding your baby.

Those words are part of our stock script around childbirth and mothering. And we deserve better.

First, I want to say that birth and breastfeeding decisions are deeply intimate matters, and they can activate our wounding and our defenses as fast as a match to kerosene.

This post is not meant to be flogging material for anyone. I honor the mother in you. We are women with complex histories before we become mothers, and our stories are way less simple than they are often made out to be. Motherhood is not a story of winners and losers.

“There is no trophy.” 

Those words can feel like another way to cut a woman down to size. To discredit her motives. To minimize her dreams. To not bother to truly hear her. To pit her in a false competition against other women. To disrespect her decision-making center. To make her ashamed of wanting something and pursuing it.

There is no trophy, but there is incredible satisfaction and life-shaping meaning in traveling the journey that feels integral to you.

Does this mean plans don’t change? Absolutely not. Does this mean a woman can’t reassess and change her approach if new information and unexpected situations present themselves? No. But let’s keep trophies out of the conversation and focus on supporting her.

I have experienced two very different kinds of birth: a cesarean birth and a home birth.

I want a trophy for neither one.

Each birth makes me fiercely proud of my strength. I hold each one with tenderness as part of my babies’ origin stories. Each birth has shaped who I am as a woman. My first birth was a natural birth-turned-cesarean birth. My second birth was a vaginal home birth. 

Each time I entered birth with thorough preparation of the body and spirit, knowing down to my bones:

“Whatever happens in these hours matters to me and will forevermore. This birth is important to my health and my family’s health. My body will hold imprints of these experiences for a lifetime. I will approach this birth passage with informed decisions, moment-to-moment awareness, sacred intention, and the best care available to me.” 

I could tell you all the reasons my birth choices made sense and were the safest, most appropriate plan for me and for my family, but that’s a story for another day.

What it had nothing to do with, however, was proving myself to anyone else. Maybe I did have something I wanted to prove to myself, and maybe even that was instructive and generative, shaping the woman I am today.

But I did not choose natural birth for a trophy. I wanted no prize. I did not feel the need to compete against other mothers and to rise up victorious above them. I wanted no gold star or special recognition.

Birth was the soul’s call.

Even before I was pregnant, I knew it was my path to experience the unaltered, uncontrolled, world-shaking force of a woman’s natural physiological birth process. Unmedicated birth and breastfeeding called me like the wild howl of my soul. It felt right to follow that call with passion and courage, with a clarity that few things in my life have brought. 

I was called to birth and breastfeeding by my aching body that had survived sexual trauma and by my hungering spirit. I longed for the enlivening intensity of birth the way I yearned for God and for something bigger than a story of pain and brokenness and numbness and suffering. I came to birth and breastfeeding knowing they held the medicine and power I needed.

Were they perfectly sweet and easy to swallow? No. They challenged me to my core. They were not what I expected. They disappointed. They shapeshifted. They transformed. And they healed.

But one thing is for sure: They will never be reduced to a trophy for me. Something to gather dust on the shelf. Something to remind me of my achievement and how I excel above others. Something to assure me of my former feats and glory.

Birth is not centered around any cheap prize or token.

We never wanted a trophy. We wanted birth with dignity. We wanted birth with full reverence of welcoming a new soul. We wanted birth with our whole picture of long-term wellness centered.

A trophy is a cheap thing that ends up in a box in an attic. A birth is not a cheap prize. Feeding a baby from your body is not a cheap prize and neither is needing to make another choice. We make our decisions with gravity, with privilege, and with necessity. We make our decisions with our individual sense of integrity, sanity, and wholeness.

We all navigate where we are willing to be flexible and where something deep within us is calling us to rise to unwavering courage. Sometimes that courage is pushing a baby out without medication, and sometimes that courage is having your baby cut from your belly in an operating room. 

I want no trophy that declares my victory over my friends who chose epidurals, over my repeat cesarean mamas, or over those who relied on formula. I would never accept a trophy above them.

To even mention a trophy disrespects all of us.

I’m not trying to be a birth or mothering unicorn, a magical being who glimmers with perfection. I am not writing to you from a high horse of plans gone perfectly and victory won by my heroic efforts alone.

I am a woman trying to live into the deepest expression of my humanity. Messy. Unpredictable. In the breath-by-breath revelation of this human journey. 

There is no trophy. That is true. Please don’t try to put one in my hand.

Photo Credits: Jess Bollaert Eddleman, Clementine Birth Services