Kai’s Birth Story
A gentle note
Some of what lives in these words may touch tender places. You are invited to move slowly, to stay in choice, and to engage only to the depth that feels supportive today. If anything feels like too much, you may pause, orient to your surroundings, or return another time.
This post is offered as companionship, not instruction or replacement for personalised care.
Take what serves you. Leave the rest.
May these words meet you gently.
To me, the decision to plan a homebirth began quietly, in the body.
Homebirth
Women should plan to give birth where they feel safe.
It came from a deep wish to offer my baby a gentle arrival into this world, and to offer myself a birth held in safety, tenderness, and respect. As close as possible to the rhythms of the body, to the way life has always known how to begin.
Throughout pregnancy I felt present in a way I had never known before. Listening. Choosing. Attuning. As my belly grew, so did my trust. Trust in my body. Trust in my baby. Trust in the unfolding.
And even though Kai’s birth eventually asked us to change the shape of the journey, I will always carry the days we spent at home as some of the most profound of my life — days that taught me patience, presence, intuition, surrender, and fierce love.
Intense days. Days that required time to heal and integrate. Lifelong teachings.
This is our story.
A gentle note before you begin: This story includes detailed reflections on pregnancy, birth, and the early moments after birth. Some parts may feel emotionally tender. Please read in your own time and pause or stop whenever your body needs. This is my personal experience, shared with care — not advice, instruction, or expectation. You are gently held as you read.
I have carried these words for a long time. I have returned again and again to the timeline I created, to the video of Kai arriving earthside, and still I struggle to find language wide enough for what this was, and for what it continues to be inside me.
It was not a simple birth. It will take time to fully integrate its layers. But each time I write it, speak it, hold it — something in me softens. Something heals. This is just how I find sense in this experience.
𝗛𝗼𝗺𝗲
05th May
As we approached forty weeks (my due date was the 6th), we were both convinced our baby would take his time. I imagined the 9th. Honza imagined the 16th. Kai, it seems, had his own calendar.
Early labour began around 7:30pm on Thursday evening.
That week feels luminous in my memory — swimming, yoga, dancing, resting, nesting in my body. That afternoon I felt a quiet nudge to take more photos of my belly, as if some part of me already knew that this chapter was about to close.
We had dinner. I wasn’t hungry. And then the familiar Braxton Hicks sensations — which I had known for weeks — shifted into something sharper, deeper, unmistakable.
Something was happening.
I messaged Kira, our private midwife, and Virginia, our doula, as contractions began settling into a rhythm. While I worked through the waves, Honza prepared the space — steady, loving, present.
By 9:30pm I asked Virginia to come. When she arrived I was on my knees, arms wrapped around the pouf, breathing with everything I had.
Kira soon followed.
Around 10:30pm nausea arrived. My body releasing, clearing, opening. We set up the TENS machine — which helped for a while — and from there the night blurred into a long river of sensation and time.
I laboured through that night, the following day, and the night again.
On hands and knees. In the shower. In the pool. On the toilet. Standing wherever my body needed to be when the next wave came.
Kai seemed to be finding his way slowly, and we explored many positioning techniques together — supportive, hopeful, demanding of the body. Some brought moments of movement. Some asked more than I had words for at the time.
They were among the most intense experiences of my life. Not wrong. Not without care. Just… immense.
06th May
Sometime during the day, the rhythm shifted again. I cannot fully remember the hours — only the feeling of being inside something vast. By the second night, things gathered once more and hope surged with them. I entered the pool, turning inward, listening.
Time passed. I grew tired. My body was dehydrated. I had been vomiting. I could no longer pass urine — my bladder compressed and weary.
When I asked how far we had come, Kira gently told me: 7cm.
07th May
As dawn approached, urinary retention meant catheterisation. At the same time, a powerful surge arrived. My nervous system felt overwhelmed. My mind whispered the oldest message of all:
Please… make this stop.
Not because I did not believe in myself. But because I was empty. And exhaustion makes everything feel heavier.
Kai’s heart remained steady and strong throughout. He was safe. He was simply taking his time.
But after all that time, after so much effort, so many shifts, so much opening and releasing, I felt I had reached the edge of my capacity.
We sat together — the four of us — and I chose to transfer to hospital.
I knew I wanted rest.
I thought I needed a change in environment.
A change of plans
Packing for hospital, after believing so deeply that we would stay home, carried its own quiet grief. I was at peace with my decision — and at the same time, tender with the part of me that was letting go of the birth I had imagined.
I saw the same tenderness in Honza’s eyes.
𝗛𝗼𝘀𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹
On the way to hospital, around 7:30am, contractions gathered again. Kira stayed with us until the very end of that chapter — a presence I will forever hold with gratitude.
At the hospital I was given fluids and gas. My body softened. My breath found rhythm. Energy returned.
For a time, everything felt possible again. I cancelled the epidural. I entered the work once more. The room felt right. The midwife’s care felt safe. My body remembered its strength.
And then, later that morning, while I was inside a powerful surge, a doctor entered quickly, speaking loudly, urgently, naming my labour as unsafe, abnormal, too long.
The words landed heavily.
I remember clearly saying I did not consent to my waters being broken. And Honza, steady and fierce in his love, asked for the conversation to stop.
That interruption shifted something inside me. It took time to find my rhythm again.
Afterwards, I chose to wait until 1:30pm, and if little had changed, I was open to having my waters broken with the midwife who had been holding us with such care — in the hope that Kai might find a new path forward.
1:30pm
When the time came, I was 7.5cm. My waters were gently broken, and with that came new information — that Kai had passed meconium. There was a possibility he might breathe it in, and so we were told a doctor would need to be present at birth.
I kept going.
The surges changed. The work shifted. And then, something new arrived — the unmistakable urge to push.
These waves felt different. Strangely more workable. More purposeful. I could meet them. I could move with them. And inside that movement, I felt progress. I felt hope.
Around 2pm, the hospital shift changed. A new midwife. A new doctor.
My bladder had still not released all day, and again we needed catheterisation — another layer of vulnerability, another moment of surrender.
By 4pm, the new doctor entered while I was deep in the work, sitting on the toilet, inside my body’s rhythm. They wanted to speak about “lack of progression.” They wanted the conversation in the bedroom. Again, the words and the timing landed heavily. The atmosphere changed.
The conversation carried urgency, fear, and little space for care. I could feel time tightening around us.
I agreed to an ultrasound — Kai was well positioned. I agreed to continuous monitoring — not because my body asked for it, but because I needed quiet, space, time, and fewer interruptions. His heartbeat was strong. He was safe.
But inside me, something collapsed.
The fear-based language seeped into my nervous system, and the work that had been flowing so beautifully… stopped.
I felt empty. Defeated. Done.
To the staff, I appeared steady. But with Honza and Kira, I whispered the truth of my exhaustion: “I can’t do this anymore.
I want a caesarean.”
In the shower, with water on my back, I let myself say it out loud.
Birth
“There is a tipping point in birth where you choose — whether you run from your body’s power
or dive into it.”
Honza never wavered. He held our knowing that Kai was well. He held our intention for the gentlest arrival possible. He held me —
my hands,
my back,
my breath,
my courage.
For nearly three days, he never let go. I have never felt love like that.
With the water pouring over my back, he reminded me — softly, steadily — that we were close. That our baby was near. That I was doing this.
And something inside me returned.
The fear loosened its grip. Oxytocin rose. I re-entered the work.
Around 5:30pm, back on the toilet, Kira gently invited me to check myself. When I reached down and touched Kai’s head — the shock, the joy, the disbelief in the room.
He was right there.
From that moment on, nothing else mattered.
The room grew busy, machines beeped, voices layered the air, but my body stayed inside its own ancient rhythm.
Honza knelt in front of me, eyes locked with mine, hands holding mine, anchoring me to the present.
Each push came with a sound — not of pain, but of power. A roar. A calling. The more I surrendered to it, the closer Kai felt.
Then to the bed, onto all fours, and suddenly — everything was real.
There were many people in the room. More than I expected. I noticed… and then let it go.
Kai’s head emerged. The focus it required was everything. Breath. Stillness. Trust. Honza beside me, his voice breaking with wonder as I reached down and touched our baby.
I waited for the next surge.
And then — 7:03pm. Almost seventy-two hours after this journey began, on hands and knees, I birthed our son.
The next sound I heard was Honza’s voice, full of tears and joy and disbelief:
“It’s a boy.”
The most beautiful surprise of my life.
We did it. Together.
𝗞𝗮𝗶
This part of the story has lived very close to my heart. It is the reason it took me so long to find the courage to return to it, to write it, to gently integrate it as part of our becoming.
Kira captured Kai’s birth on video — and also the moments that followed. I still find it hard to watch - it holds so much.
After Kai arrived, I turned and lay on my back to bring him into my arms. He felt very soft. Very still.
He was working to find his breath, I was calling for him, and the room around us became busy and urgent. I remember the hands rubbing him, the voices quickening, and me, from somewhere deep inside myself, repeating:
“Please… be gentle.”
His cord was clamped quickly. Honza was asked to cut it, and before I fully understood what was happening, Kai was being lifted away to the nearby table so they could help him breathe.
Soon after, Kai was taken to the nursery. Honza went with him. Kira stayed with me.
My body still needed care — a medication to help the placenta release, a few stitches for a second-degree tear.
All of it happened while my heart was somewhere else entirely.
I remember feeling… flat. Not numb. Just… empty.
I had just birthed my baby, and yet he was not in my arms. That space — between expectation and reality — was enormous.
It was only when Honza returned, his face full of relief and good news, telling me Kai was stable and doing well, that something inside me could finally soften.
Honza had never once believed anything would go wrong. His calm, steady faith carried me back to myself.
Soon it was just the three of us in the room — me, Honza, and Kira.
I remember holding their hands, tears finally finding their way out, and saying thank you, again and again.
We all cried together.
Kai was given antibiotics as a precaution, in case he had inhaled meconium. (The results came back days later — all clear.)
Later that night, around 11:30pm, Kai was transferred to a more specialised hospital for continued care. They din’t have a place for me to join him. He kept getting stronger.
And by 4pm the next day — my very first Mother’s Day — I finally held him in my arms, breastfeeding him, breathing him in, skin to skin, wrapped in the closeness I had been waiting and longing for.
We stayed in hospital three more days. On the night of May 10th, we brought our baby home.
When I look at Kai now, my heart melts. I feel endlessly grateful — for his strength, for his health, for the way he has chosen us.
Our beginning was not simple, to me. But it is filled with love.
And this story —
this is only the beginning.
