It’s hard to believe that this time over a year ago I was listening to techno/disco music thinking, “Am I really in labor?” I know, it’s not exactly what one would include in their dream of their perfect labor environment, but a dance party is actually quite common in my house. This is especially true on cold winter days when the little ones need to expend some energy other than “climbing the walls”, because it turns out that is a literal thing. We had already had a happy due date celebration and continued to wait for our third born child. For me, it was still unreal that I was having another one. With our daughter Hope, I found out that we were expecting her 3 months into my pregnancy and Ian, our second, was only 9 months old. Yeah, you do the math. My husband actually said, “But you don’t get pregnant easily!” Man, did I show him. Ha! The day I found out I was pregnant I was doing quarter mile interval training on a racetrack with my horse to prepare for riding competitively again. As it turns out, I was going to have one baby in 2017 and one in 2018. I just couldn’t believe it. As someone who had had 3 miscarriages in one year and thought that I may never have children…I. just. couldn’t. believe. it. One of the hard parts of having pregnancies so close together is that you’ve just done this, but the benefit is that you’ve just done this. That night during the dance party when I lay there listening to my children and husband laugh and dance wondering if I was going to have a baby soon…it still had not soaked in. However, I was determined not to have a baby in the car or in some other unexpected place. So I asked a dear friend of mine if her teenage daughter would spend the night in case we needed to go to the birth center. I let my midwife know that I might need her in the next few hours, but I wasn’t sure. You see, I have really long early labors…I mean weeks of it. I’ve been hooked up to machines to check and I really do walk around for 3-4 weeks having true labor contractions and being half-way dilated and effaced. So I ignore it as best as possible and get on with life. And then, wham, it all hits at once and a baby is coming…NOW. After our friend’s daughter arrived we all went to sleep. Around midnight I decided I mentally couldn’t sleep through it anymore and into the birth center we went. My greatest fear was making all these sweet people get up in the middle of the night and it not actually being time for me to have a baby. We went back to sleep until 2:30am, I woke up, and at 2:45am my water broke. It was game on, fill up the birthing tub, jump in, and let’s do this. When my water broke I remember saying, “I’m not ready!” Funny how you can know for 6 months that something is going to happen but then still not feel ready. I had an amazing birth with my second, but I was still afraid to do it all over again. It is hard work and there is no guarantee that one birth will be the same as the last. I kept telling myself that though there was fear, my hope was greater than my fear. Now I had an amazing set of midwives and one that especially understood my wishes to have a water birth and to get to deliver my daughter myself. She also knew how fast things could go since my last birth was 45 minutes. Transition was the part that I wanted “to do better” than my last birth and the part where I had felt out of control. But as with many things in life, the only way out was to go through it. My midwife looked at me after about 15 minutes in the tub and said, “This is it. This is your moment.” She was right and it took that statement, that call to the very present to remind me and help me focus on my goals. I held my husband’s hand, the calm, brave man that he is. A few pushes later and I brought my daughter up out of the water and held her close. I was laughing, saying, “Thank you, God!” and over and over I said to my daughter, “We did it!” She has been my smallest child at 7lbs14oz and 19inches long. It was 3:13am and we were home before 6am.
What greater gift is there than the gift of life? The gift to breathe, to see, to hear, to feel? I know this is not a popular belief these days, but God has completely changed my heart towards children, to the point where I really don’t care what anyone thinks. When I got and get comments in the grocery store or out in public, like “Do you know where babies come from?” and “You know how to prevent those, right?”, I might give a cheeky or brave response like, “Yeah I do, and it’s fun!” or “Tell me, which one of these kids would you have prevented?”, or my new favorite, “Kids, listen! This person is about to tell us where babies come from!”, but truly I am sad for those who don’t understand the joy of having children. We teach others what we value by what we are willing to sacrifice for. It was hard to tell God, “I trust you” when I thought I would never have children and though it is even harder now, it has been my hope that each day I will say “I trust you”. Each one of our stories is different, as it should be. And I’m not saying we need to all think the same thing and live our lives in the same way, but I do think that for me, claiming to believe in God and in Christ, that there has been no greater love in my life than when I have laid down my life to have these children. Their births have been the most empowering and incredible experiences of my life. I consider it a blessing to have co-created something eternal, to have done the hard work to get them here and to have the privilege to raise them.
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