Monday, September 21, was a day like any other. I was one day past my due date and fully convinced we still had a week to go. I felt nowhere close to impending labor. Despite a weekend of good spirits, we had absolutely nothing on the agenda for Monday: a dangerous setup for someone as prone to the grumpies as my very pregnant self. Joe was off work, the weather was gloomy, and we had pretty much expended all our energy (and a good portion of our fun budget) on “distraction endeavors” — hair, nail, and eyelash appointments, lots of eating out, milkshake and coffee runs, and doing as much as possible to ignore all the “are you still pregnant?” texts pinging my phone.
Around ten, my hero of a husband whisked our mower-loving son to Menards to marvel at the machinery. I seized the opportunity to power clean, curb walk, and call my dad — three surefire sources of comfort when discouragement threatens to rear its ugly head. While out on a curb-walking phone call with Dad, some dear neighbor friends drove by on their golf cart with fists pumping and spirits high: “Come on, baby House!” I tried to match their zeal, but truly felt deep down like we still had a long road ahead. In fact, I was adamant that this baby wasn’t coming anytime soon. Bitterness began to seethe as I came to fully expect another long labor, late delivery, and full-Pitocin push party. I was sure I knew what was going to happen.
Luke slept mercifully long that afternoon, allowing me to piddle from project to project and bounce on a ball during breaks. I felt a bit crampy, but chalked it up to weird weather, too much coffee, and that woeful state of the torso when you’re forty weeks along. I didn’t even tell Joe about the aches, just counted them as another thing to be grouchy about. I had given up on asking God to send this baby soon.
We went on a walk once the Lukester awoke, somewhere just shy of five, and I felt almost as if those aforementioned cramps were coming intermittently. More seasoned moms might recognize this as early labor, but my cynical self brushed it off as constipation. We continued our walk unhurriedly. Joe had a chili in the crock pot that still needed warming, so we took the long way around the block and basked in a sweet final sunset of summer.
But it was then, no later than 6:00 pm, just inches inside our entryway, that I doubled over in what could officially be deemed the first crippling contraction. I insisted to Joe that they were still just cramps, but he shook his head while somehow spooning out chili, calling our midwives, applying counter pressure massages, and striving to keep our rough-houser son from sitting on my head as I groaned on the floor.
The midwife told us to call back in an hour, and when Joe asked if it might be wise to get childcare, she said it certainly couldn’t hurt. He phoned his parents and told them they didn’t need to leave right away, but maybe consider having a bag ready in case these cramp-tractions intensified. Fortunately, my in-laws — far wiser than I — hopped in the van right away.
The hour that followed was a painful blur of rapidly increasing contractions, fighting for relief in a tub of hot water, falling to the floor nearly every two minutes, and begging God to pull me through the next breathtaking squeeze. Joe’s parents barely set foot in the door when I brushed by them and climbed into the trunk of our van, the only place I could think of to stay doubled over on our hospital commute.
In a fifteen-minute frenzy, I was hooked up to an IV and monitors, plopped in a wheelchair, and pushed through double doors to the delivery wing. I absolutely couldn’t believe what was happening. I arrived measuring a six, had my water broken and rapidly dilated to a nine. Much unlike my labor with Luke, the nurses and midwife did not leave the room. There was no firing up my labor playlist. No time to dig for the birthing comb. No pain management tools or Pitocin in sight: only the terrifying words, “push when you’re ready.”
Ten minutes later, I was ready. It took five guttural shrieks before a beautiful baby girl cozied up on my chest. I looked at Joe, then at our child, and said, “What in the world just happened?” He shrugged, stroked the back of our baby, and said, “I guess we should probably text our family.”
Because unlike my previous two-day labor, I hadn’t even had time to text that I was contracting. If not for the ol’ faithful Find My Friends app, not a soul would’ve suspected us to be anywhere but home. The texts in response were a hilarious mix of, “Is this AI?” “WHAT?” and “Woah… that was fast!”
Not only fast, but hemorrhage-free. Not a single complication. No tearing, less bleeding, arriving at the hospital and having a baby in an hour. It was a delivery beyond my wildest dreams — a beautiful, blissful blur of my hustling husband and night-shift nurses racing like rabbits to catch this baby. As I marveled at the magic of a two-hour labor — free of Pitocin and just five pushes long — I came to see all the ways I thought I had known better than God.
I had told so many people that there was no way I’d go into labor naturally. I convinced everyone of an October birthday despite a September 20th due date. I figured I’d certainly hemorrhage, and while my labor might be shorter, I still banked on a good fifteen hours. Call it arrogance or self-preservation — I spoke with a confidence that I knew what was going to happen (spoiler: The Bible calls it arrogance). I even prematurely started resenting people who had easier labors because, “I’m never going to get that.” (Actual journal entry: September 2026).
It’s here that I’m forced to weave my own prideful proclamations into a passage like James 4:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow [or in another miserable week] we will travel to [the hospital only to labor for hours, have to be induced, suffer another catastrophic hemorrhage and endure months of postpartum trauma]. Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.
15Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
I’m humbled once again by my own sinful heart — the ways I feigned omniscience and acted like I knew exactly what would happen. I felt I had figured out how my future would unfold. I clamored so confidently, so convinced of a day I had not seen and did not write. I really am ashamed of my arrogance — my pregnant propensity to project my plans on an all-knowing God — and lament the little faith that kept me grounded in the grumpies.
Because the reality is that this birth — for reasons I’ll never understand — was an answer to the prayers I was too scared to pray. It was a brilliant display of the God who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine.
Maybe (with God’s help), should He will another child for us, I’ll put a little more trust in His timing rather than parading around my pessimistic predictions. Maybe I’ll learn to just sit back and say, “I don’t have any idea how this will go, but I know (and love!) (and fully trust!) the One who has written every one of my days.”
Maybe I’ll finally let God be God.
But until then, I am praising our perfect Provider for a mountaintop birth when all I assumed was the valley of death. I am rejoicing that His ways are not my ways, and that He wrote every one of my days and didn’t let my prideful self snatch the pen. To Him be the glory again and again!
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