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Our little boy is four today. I blinked and now we’re fully enveloped by the preschool years and all the adorable (and wild!) moments that come with them. To celebrate this special day, I’m sharing an excerpt from my book Good Enough in which I wrote about Theo’s birth.
Happy May Day, sweet Theo. You are so deeply loved ❤️.
At forty-one weeks and two days pregnant, I was past ready for our son to be born. As I began to lift myself to a sitting position, I felt it, a sharp pop like a glow stick cracked to life inside of me. I cried out in pain and hobbled to the bathroom. My water had broken. Finally.
Within fifteen minutes, my contractions were coming about four minutes apart and I dialed the midwife on call. The hospital answering service promised to have her call me immediately but more than half an hour went by with no response. I called again. Another thirty minutes passed.
“You’re going to have to call your mom, babe,” I told Pierce, a bit frantic. She lived thirty minutes away. He did, and then I heard him tell her we’d “let her know” when she needed to start heading our way.
“No, no, no,” I said in disbelief, moaning through a contraction. “What do you mean ‘we’ll let her know?’ She needs to come right now!”
My contractions increased in length and intensity and still there was no call from the midwife. I breathed in deep lungfuls of air and paced back and forth across the living room, squatting through every contraction and working hard not to tense my body, knowing that the more I tensed the worse I would feel. I cried out with no concern for our sleeping 5-year-old in the next room and rocked from side-to-side, desperate for relief. Less than two hours after my water had broken, my contractions were coming two minutes apart and I was ready to throat punch someone.
“Wake up Lucy,” I said to Pierce. “She can come with us to the hospital. Your mom is just going to have to meet us there.”
Pierce rushed to gather our bags and my cell phone rang. It was my midwife, Angela.
“I’m so sorry,” she told me. “They paged the wrong person, twice.”
Out of breath, I groaned. “I feel like I need to push.”
I heard Angela’s sharp intake of air. “Okay. You need to come to the hospital now.”
Just as Pierce was about to go wake up Lucy, his mother called. She was a minute down the road. I bent over, hands on knees, by the front door. When she walked in, I said, “Thankyoubye!” and raced to the car. Squatting by the passenger door in the steel gray light of the early morning, I thought, “Please don’t give birth in the car.” It was a weekday in Atlanta, the Land of Terrible Traffic, and blessedly we made our way to the hospital just shy of the morning rush. The contractions were so strong and so painful now that all I could do was brace myself against the door and cry out in tears, every bump in the road like a dagger to my lower body.
We got to the hospital at 6:55 a.m. and I made it up the front stairs and into the lobby before I had to lean on Pierce’s shoulder and yell through a contraction. The guests waiting to our left leaned over to stare, pure delight on their faces as they watched a mother begin to welcome her child into the world.
“I’m so glad you’re enjoying this,” I wanted to snarl at them.
I was wheeled into the elevator and up to the third floor, where the Labor and Delivery nurses speedily directed us to a room. It was quiet and bathed in the warm glow of the incubator light, but it was filled with people, Angela among them.
“You need to strip off your shorts after this contraction,” she told me in a gentle voice, “so I can check you, okay?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
In the thirty seconds I had to spare between contractions, I took off my shorts and climbed onto the bed. Angela checked me.
“Well, my love,” she said with a smile. “You’re already dilated past a nine.”
“What?!” I shouted, panic rising up in my throat. This was what I’d wanted, an unmedicated delivery with the midwives I trusted in the same hospital where I’d met Lucy for the first time. But now that it was here, all I wanted was the blissed-out nothingness of an epidural. I knew there was no time for such luxuries, and I felt certain I’d die before I dilated another centimeter.
“I have to turn over,” I said, sweating and stripping off my shirt. On all fours, I suddenly remembered my husband, who had gone back to park the car and grab our insurance papers. “He’s not here,” I mumbled into the mattress. “He’s going to miss it.”
He didn’t miss it. Suddenly, Pierce was there next to me, wiping my face with a warm, damp washcloth. “You can do this, wifey,” he said, steady as ever.
As if his presence was permission, the need to bear down intensified and I gave myself over to it. I felt vast, as though my whole body had taken up all the space in the room and there was no one else but me and my pain, battling it out to see who would win. I could do nothing but obey the pressure and scream. I heard later that nurses up and down the hallway were chuckling to themselves, my vocalizing a familiar soundtrack over their lives.
“You’re almost there,” Angela told me as Pierce repeated affirmations in my ear.
“You have to say that to make me feel better,” I wept, exhausted.
“No, no, you’re almost there,” she said again.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
“You can do this,” Pierce repeated. “You’re so close.”
“I’m gonna die. I can’t. This is going to kill me.”
An oft-repeated phrase came to me then, the rational side of my brain protecting me just when I needed it most.
When you think you’re going to die, it means you’re almost done.
“One more push!” Angela exclaimed. “One more push and his head will be out.”
Then, like a bodybuilder releasing a primal scream as he lifts the weight of his work in victory, I pushed my son out of my body with a glorious, earsplitting wail.
Panting hard, I asked, “Do you have him?”
“Yes, I’m holding his head right now,” Angela replied, a smile in her voice. “One more and he’s yours.”
Again, I pushed. Again, I screamed.
Then he was there, and I pulled him up from between my legs to my chest, both of us naked and warbling.
“I can’t believe it,” I sobbed to Pierce, clutching Theo as he cried. “I can’t believe I just did that.” My water had broken at 4:35 a.m. We arrived at the hospital at 6:55 a.m. Theo was born just seventeen minutes later. Fast and furious, my labor had looked nothing like the quiet, peaceful water birth I’d envisioned for myself over the last forty-one weeks. This was better. This had been an adventure.
My first thought when I saw Theo was how happy I was that he had my Scottish nose, just like his big sister. My second thought was how strange it was to see another child who looked like me and Pierce and, yet, was still so different from Lucy. They shared the same chin, nose, and eye shape, but Theo’s lips were thinner, his hair blonde at birth where Lucy’s had been black. Her full, heart-shaped face was reminiscent of her paternal grandmother and Theo’s long, oval one belonged to his mother and father. It was bewildering to look into the fresh, puffy eyes of another creature we had made and know that he was ours, too. I couldn’t wait for him to meet Lucy.
My pregnancies had been similar: low risk, past their estimated due dates, tended by midwives I had come to love. My births had only this similarity: vaginal deliveries that resulted in healthy, giant babies, each weighing in at over nine pounds. When Lucy was born, I had gone forty-two weeks and had enough. Hoping a short induction would get me started until my body took over on its own, I agreed to come into the hospital before dawn. Fourteen hours later, after laboring on Pitocin with just a few centimeters of success, I demanded an epidural through tears, feeling very much like a failure.
“Wendi, you’re about to have a baby!” the midwife exclaimed. “A baby you carried for over ten months. No matter how she’s born, there is no failure in that.”
I got the epidural and took an hour-long nap. When I woke up, I was at ten centimeters and ready to push. Lucy had been very comfortable, not content to make her way out into the world just yet, and it took almost two hours of pushing to deliver her. Just before midnight, she made her grand entrance. When I caught that first glimpse of our daughter, held aloft beneath the bright hospital lights like a chunky, delicious beacon of hope, I thought, “There you are!” and began to sob. She was even better than I had imagined.
Neither of my deliveries went according to plan. (This is a surprise to exactly none of you.) And I love to make plans; I live for a new journal and have about five hundred of them tucked away in a purse, on a shelf, under a bench, in my car, or in a drawer. I scribble grocery lists alongside prayers and never write in the same one for more than a couple of days in a row. My journals do not cover linear time, but whatever requires or captures my attention most that day. I make plans for our dinner and I make plans for my writing and I most certainly made plans for the birth of my children. God made other plans.
After Lucy was born, I couldn't tell the story of her birth without feeling the need to add disclaimers about how long I’d labored on Pitocin without an epidural. My closest people were well aware that I’d wanted a water birth and it was a sincere struggle for me to admit I hadn’t been able to go through with it. That I had gotten the painkillers, after all, because my body didn’t perform the way I wanted.
“Not because I couldn’t hack it, mind you!” I felt the need to say. (But didn’t.)
There wasn’t a single solitary person who made me feel like an epidural was a failure—either before or after Lucy’s birth—but an unmedicated delivery was the expectation I had set for myself. I had written it down in my birth plan. (To which all midwives and nurses say LOL, cool story, bro.) I had told anyone who’d listen how excited I was about laboring in water and doing this beautiful new thing all on my own. It was a gift being able to carry and bear a child and I longed to soak up every single lovely, painful second.
And here I was postpartum, allowing an idea of perfection to overshadow the powerful, holy reality that went down in that hospital room. The hard work of labor, medicated or not, that resulted in the birth of my wild girl, my bright and shining star. The weeks of recovery and eight stitches in my vagina and painful nipples and the exquisite wonder of her newborn smell as I nursed her to sleep. The birth plan had changed, but the truth about what she was—what we had done together—had not.
The temptation to feel like Theo’s birth redeemed my perceived failure the first time around came on strong a few days after he was born. And, to be honest, I had to fight it. The words of my midwife echoed in my head throughout my second pregnancy: “No matter how this baby is born, there is no failure in that.” As I went past my due date again, I grew more anxious in anticipation of a second induction, a second epidural. I was determined to do this my way. And I had. Kind of.
Unmedicated birth had certainly shown me the power of womanhood, had offered me a connection to all the women of the past who bore down in cottages and forests, in temples and palaces, and gave me a glimpse of the universality of birth, how it cares not one iota about who you are. The bloody, messy beauty of the experience is its hallmark, whether you have given birth once or five times, whether you are a queen in a castle or a suburban mom in a split-level.
Unmedicated birth also revealed my own prejudice. There were dozens of questions, and a bit of side-eye, from well-meaning family and friends who were curious about my departure from what they viewed as a safe and normal birth, but once they understood why I felt so strongly about it, they supported me. As I labored with Theo and cried out in pain, I felt a profound mixture of gratitude and empathy with my fellow women. Birth without fear? That looks different for me than it might look for someone else. An epidural, a failure? Praise the good Lord above for medicine that lets women deliver their children without being forced to experience pain they don’t want to or can’t endure, because the pain is coming later regardless. (As are the mesh underwear. Get ready for those beauties!) There is no such thing as the easy way out. This shit is tough.
It was a lie that my unmedicated second birth had redeemed my medicated first. The only thing that needed redemption was my faulty perspective. When I settled onto that hospital bed with Theo in my arms, I looked at Pierce and said, “That was incredible. And I never, ever want to do it again.” In the weeks that followed, I gained a new sense of awe, and sadness, as I imagined women being forced to give birth year after year, with no hope of painkillers or birth control options to reduce their pain or potential suffering. My unmedicated labor had simultaneously boosted my long-held belief that women can do this without intervention and also strengthened my resolve that they should be presented with options, not forced into thinking they have no choice about what kind of delivery is available to them. Birth is universal, but women are unique in their needs and wants.
Sometimes we get what we’re hoping for and it turns out to be an unexpected saving grace. Rather than the redemption we thought we needed, we gain open eyes and softened hearts. We learn to set our expectations aside for the sake of solidarity with others because the need to perform in even our most intimate moments runs deep, but it will never give us more space at the table. It will only prevent us from sitting down together and sharing our stories.
Women don’t need another reminder that they have more to prove. This is the reality we live with regardless of whether or not we are mothers. In the birthing room we have an opportunity to watch God move among us in the Spirit of unity, where our deepest longings are met with honor and our deepest fears and are met with compassion. Defining us by the way in which we birthed our children is to identify us according to what we do, not who we are, and to diminish us as co-creators with Christ and children of the living God.
We can carry our desires about what we need for childbearing, about what is good for our particular circumstance, and clasp hands in solidarity with another woman as she does the same. God is present in both. He is present in all.
Join Me for The Nook Summer Book Club! 📚
This month, we are gearing up to begin our summer book club! We will be doing three different read-alongs—one for each month of the summer, beginning in June—and you can vote on your selections below.
Every subscriber can participate in the book club! All you have to do is read along with each book and join in on the Substack chat feature whenever I post new discussions. (More on that below.) I’ll also be posting thoughts on each book here for you to read and share your comments.
The chat feature is a conversation space in the Substack app set up exclusively for my subscribers—kind of like a group chat. I’ll post short prompts, thoughts, and updates and you can jump into the discussion any time.
To join the book club chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss any of the book club conversations.
Alright, let’s vote! Take a look at the links and then make your selection below. The three books with the most votes will be our summer reads. I’ll send out an update once voting ends so you have time to grab your first book before the June read-along begins.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
All My Knotted-Up Life by Beth Moore
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
How to Use Substack Chat
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chats inside once I start posting book club discussions.
That’s it! If you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Reading in The Nook
Homecoming by Kate Morton — My favorite author of all time and the Queen of Gothic Fiction released a new novel in April and I devoured it like I do all her others. (And, for the first time ever in my reading of Morton, actually guessed two major surprises…maybe I’m getting good at plotting?) If you’re into dense, historical family mysteries that delve into secrets from the past and present (and always have a fabulous, unexpected twist!) then you’ll want to check her out.
The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner — Another favorite author of mine (whose debut novel The Lost Apothecary was my top read of 2022) released her latest novel in March. While not as satisfying as her first book, I thoroughly enjoyed the mildly creepy trek through magical, mysterious Victorian London and what seems to be Penner’s ever-present theme of wronged women getting their long-awaited revenge.
The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams — I can’t help it. I’m an Anglophile (as evidenced by all of these book selections), so any novel about London or the UK, written by a Brit, is gonna find its way to my shelf, especially if it’s a book about books. While I’m not a big fan of multiple POVs (by which I mean more than two) that bounce from character to character, this sweet story about how a mysterious list of must-read books brought life back into a hurting community was really quite charming.
Links Lately
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