My 3 birth experiences were wildly different and not what I'd wanted. My children taught me they are in control, not me.

• I've had four kids with very different births.
• I had dreamed of the "perfect" empowering birth, but I wasn't able to achieve that with any of mine.

I've watched plenty of birthing videos with mothers humming softly in a candlelit room, draped over a yoga ball or the side of a birthing pool.

I hoped that someday I would be one of those women — calm, confident, strong, and in control — when I brought my children into the world.

I've given birth three times, all in different settings, and none of them looked like what I wanted. However, I've learned to let go of the "perfect birth" and learn from what my newborns were teaching me.

All my births were different

My first birth was a routine hospital birth. It was safe and healthy and an overall positive experience. Laboring without pain medication, I delivered my first daughter, Ramona, and felt exhilarated. I felt like an endurance runner at the end of a long race.

I was not the serene, candlelit woman in the videos. The delivery felt messy, bewildering, and animal. I became exhausted pushing. I needed oxygen and a gruff pep talk from my nurse-midwife, lest the attending OB bring out the forceps.

I think it was all normal for someone who had never given birth before, but there were things I wish I had done differently.

I wished that more had been in my control — that I had been more comfortable and relaxed. So when I was pregnant with my second daughter, I chose to deliver at a standalone birth center that promised a more personalized, less "medical" experience.

The birth center was spa-like, with white sheets on queen beds and a deep porcelain bathtub in the middle of the room. It had speakers to play mothers' birth playlists and essential-oil diffusers to fill the room with soothing scents.

During my pregnancy I made watercolor birth cards that said "DIG DEEP" and "YOUR BODY WAS MADE TO DO HARD THINGS" to help me stay present during labor.

I would never use the birth cards. In fact, I would never make it to the birth center. Maia was born within an hour of me realizing I was in labor, on my living-room floor, during a windstorm that had knocked out our street's power.

She was born by the light of an emergency flashlight that my husband had to crank to keep on. When I gathered her into my cardigan and pulled her to my chest, my husband and I looked at each other and laughed in shock and delight.

Maia and I were both fine, and now I have a great story to tell. I felt strong and capable, delivering a healthy baby by myself in an emergency situation. But it was hardly the birth I'd planned. I felt that my body had done something to me, instead of feeling like an active participant.

When I became pregnant for the third time and learned it was twins, I realized I may never have the birth I imagined.

Even if I delivered vaginally, my twins would be delivered in a sterile, brightly lit operating room. We would have a large medical team standing by waiting for something to go wrong.

I thought hard about how I could make it a positive and empowering experience — but in the end, it was my worst-case scenario: an emergency C-section at 29 weeks.

It was a painful and traumatic birth. Though it was necessary and life-saving, it was the opposite of my hopes.

I learned a valuable lesson about parenting

I am not planning on giving birth again, and it certainly feels like a loss that I won't get the experience I imagined having. My birth cards will go unused in a box, maybe until one of my daughters has children.

But I am learning to appreciate the way that control slipped through my fingers. Three wildly different births all managed to defy me and my plans in good ways and bad, perhaps teaching me a necessary lesson about parenting from the very start of my children's lives: They are in control, not me.