family life

(Part 1 here)

Where were we? Oh yes, induction by house cat.

After an animated 20 minute drive to the hospital, we arrived around 1 am and were swiftly checked in to the natural delivery suite.

Apparently I was so calm the nursing staff assumed I must be in want of the Cadillac of birthing tubs, and was offered that luxury upgrade frequently during my stay in hotel hospital. To which I replied calmly, between contractions: LOLOLOL.

I was so sure when we sidled up to the nurses’ station that I’d be sent home, with my advanced-maternal-age tail tucked between my legs, but lo and behold, I was escorted directly to a delivery room, and the midnight cat calisthenics I’d performed in the street had progressed me to “7, maybe 8 centimeters.”

What the whaaaaat?

Anyone who is familiar with the entrances of the older 4 of the Uebbing crew knows that this is not a normal pattern of labor for me, and since I had thus far only cursed at the cat and was not attempting to strangle anyone with my IV line, I couldn’t imagine that this was “real” labor. I just could not.

In fact, here’s how sure I was that I wasn’t really anywhere near baby time: I SENT THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST AWAY (never never do this) because I wasn’t “sure” what I wanted to do in terms of pain relief. In retrospect this seems foolhardy at best and…I won’t say what, at worst. But I really did need a little time to process what was happening: namely, that I was in active labor (apparently late in the game, too) and I wasn’t in excruciating, universe-ending pain.

That, my dear readers, turns out to be the difference between posterior and “normal” or anterior presentation of le babe. Because, unlike her siblings, this little piggy was facing the right way, mommy wasn’t teetering on the precipice of a psychotic break.

It was a really wonderful and peaceful departure from my previous 4 childbirth experiences, and I am profoundly grateful to have had this particular aspect of my motherhood redeemed.

That alone makes going for an unwieldy number of children “worth it,” on some level.

Once I’d sent away the magic doctor, I spent a few minutes alternating between prayer and repeatedly asking Dave “What is happening? Why is this happening? Is this really happening?” and received a very clear invitation from the Lord to go ahead and get the epidural if I wanted to. I was struggling a bit with feeling like this was a test I was somehow failing: as if by resorting to meds I was forgoing the opportunity to have a beautiful, unmedicated birth experience. And maybe I was. But I spent a few minutes in conversation with Him and here is what He said to me:

“I just wanted you to know it could be like this. I love you. You’re free to choose.”

That’s all.

He wanted to tell me a different story about bringing new life into the world. And I was convicted in these precious moments of labor/prayer that this more peaceful birthing process, cat corralling notwithstanding, was His gift to me. No strings attached. Meaning, I didn’t have to be a hero and try to go au natural.

I am forever mistaking my own efforts and willpower for God’s grace. Imagine my surprise when they give out again and again, and I realize that without Him I am nothing.

He was offering me a beautiful gift: a labor experience saturated with peace and the supernatural grace to remain present, in the moment. It was honestly the best thing I could have asked for, and the last thing I would have thought to ask for. Because I knew how labor “went.” I knew my story: fear, pain, suffering, and trauma. That’s all I believed giving birth could be, and I would have taken that knowledge to my grave before sweet Zelie’s birth.

Now I think of the gift I can give to my younger sisters and, one day, my own daughters, whispering to them an alternative narrative, and I am so overwhelmed by the beauty of it.

At one point during my moderate travail, Dave leaned over and whispered to me: “If it’s a girl, we should use Grace in her name, because there is so much of it here.”

And there was. There was so much grace.

And there was a profound feeling of freedom, too. I really felt invited by the Lord to choose the path of least resistance and to let Him write a new story with this delivery, and so I did.

I took the drugs, no regrets. And in God’s providential design, that anesthesiologist I sent away in a moment of uncertainty was only able to come back once I was teetering on the brink of 9 centimeters, barely before I passed the deadline of the point of no return. Once the drugs were locked and loaded, I rested for a bit and resisted a couple offers of “if you let us break your water, baby will be here in 10 minutes.” Thinking back, the first few offers were made pre-epidural, and the entire nursing staff was very eager to help me achieve a natural birth, which I give them major props for.

Those gals wanted to see a natural birth, gosh darn it, and they’d given me the primo natural birthing suite to prove it – and I was sorry to disappoint those lovely ladies, but having personally experienced the last few centimeters of labor a time or two, I was certainly not about to attempt round 5 in a hot tub.

Anywhoo, the drugs kicked in, my doctor came in with his icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe and propped it opposite the end of my bed, and then we chilled out for a somewhat uneventful 45 minutes, at which point I consented to AROM and felt some serious “pressure” which confirmed me in my drug-seeking decision because either that epidural was on the lighter side, or this baby was huge.

(Spoiler alert: baby was not huge, and I walked from the delivery room to recovery, so epi-lite it was)

Finally it was show time. And after 8(!) excruciating minutes (sure beats 4 hours!), during which I may or may not have vocalized glory to God for pharmaceuticals, little Elizabeth Grace Uebbing was born.

As happens not infrequently in high-altitude deliveries, our beautiful little 7 lb, 11 oz princess was pretty blue and needed some blow-by oxygen assistance to get things rolling. Less typical was her being whisked fairly quickly off my chest and carried over for inspection by the neonatal team. I watched in mounting anxiety as the room filled up with doctors and nurses, a small crowd forming around her bassinet across the room.

I was yelling out to her from my hospital bed “Elizabeth, mommy loves you,” because I’m pretty sure I read in the scary chapter of What to Expect When You’re Expecting that you should do that, and at some point in so doing, I looked over at Dave and said “that’s not her name. I don’t think that’s her name.” He nodded in agreement from his post at her crib side, trying his best to look unconcerned for my sake. As the minutes ticked by and more doctors filled the room – now the respiratory team had been called in, I heard the announcement – I grew more and more concerned.

I began praying aloud while my doctor stitched me up, asking the Holy Spirit to fill her lungs, pleading with her to breathe, breathe, baby girl.

At one point I started praying fervently for the intercession of St. Zelie Martin. “Zelie” was on our short list of names, but I wasn’t sure Dave was fully convinced, and I didn’t want to force a name he didn’t love. I began asking St. Zelie to plead my girl’s case in heaven, begging that her oxygen levels would come up and that she wouldn’t be headed to the NICU. 

Looking back, I don’t recall thinking she was actually going to die, but I was very worried that she was going to be intubated, and that something might be wrong with her lungs, because 20 minutes in, she hadn’t made a sound other than gasping a couple times. I remember specifically choosing to petition St. Zelie because she had lost so many of her own babies, and because she could sympathize with my aching mama heart to have my girl whole and in my arms. I also recall being unbelievably at peace despite the circumstances, which is a miracle in itself considering my temperament.

Finally just before the 30-minute mark we head the most beautiful sound in the world: our baby girl’s cry. Soft and undemanding (as it is still, for the most part) but very much alive and well. I shed a few tears of relief as they wheeled her, not to the NICU, but back to my arms, and we re-named her Zelie Grace Uebbing.

And she has brought nothing but grace to our family since the moment she arrived.

She is the fruition of my motherhood in a powerful way that I wouldn’t have expected from a fifth baby. So few people go this far, as I am reminded on a daily basis when we’re out and about, and honestly, were it not for the Church’s teachings on contraception and openness to life, neither would we have done so. 

Zelie was not in our plan.

But she was in His.

And we are so thankful.

Exhausted, overwhelmed, and occasionally weepy. But so very grateful.

St. Zelie Martin and holy Mother Mary, full of grace, pray for us.

(P.s. a great read for pregnant mamas/birth professionals of every stripe)

It has been almost 3 months since little Z made her debut earth-side, but it feels like a lifetime ago. (And, for the record, I have been writing this post for more than 3 weeks, so that bodes well for the future.) Partly because I have never taken this long of a break from blogging in all the 11(!) years I’ve been tapping away, and partly because kid number 5 has utterly transformed our family – and my motherhood – from “yeah, I guess we do have our hands full but it’s pretty manageable” to “why is my coffee so cold?/I’m in a Jim Gaffigan level of aquatic distress here.”

Don’t get me wrong, she is a good, good baby. (I’d tell you how well she’s sleeping but I don’t want to inflict pain on parents of typical newborns who might be reading this.) But we’ve finally scaled beyond what I can handle under my own power, and I am at last fully dependent upon God’s grace to survive the day by day.

And on the days I don’t tap into that? Hoo boy.

So I’m learning to be more flexible, more resigned to bouts of insanity, and more desperately reliant on regular prayer – not just in-the-moment Hail Marys – including morning Scripture reading and a daily rosary (that nice little 4 am feeding session ensures that I finish any lingering decades). And even though I know how desperately I need prayer in order to function, I’m a miserably slow study and I keep trying to forge ahead under my own unimpressive power. Then something stops me in my tracks and flings the spiritual complacency back into my face like a rejected vegetable side dish, and I am made concretely aware, once again, that I am borderline incompetent apart from God’s grace.

One recent morning, for example, my darling 4 year-old threw a tantrum that, as I relayed to my siblings via our group chat, was of “Youtube viral video proportions.” In a Starbucks packed with no fewer than 5 dozen spandex legging-clad high schoolers, she flopped off her barstool, flung a bag of million-dollar organic potato chips on the floor and screamed all the screams that her tiny body was capable of producing because, I guess, someone touched her? Took a salt and vinegar chip without asking? I’m actually still not sure.

I blinked at her in mild annoyance and then proceeded to pack up the other 3 kids (biggest brother was at school) and schlepped our complaining procession out the door, Evie flopping like a wounded tuna on the floor as I gently tugged her along by one arm, which is thankfully still connected at the shoulder socket. Any of the horrified high schoolers who had been on the fence about eventual parenthood will hopefully make good choices and avoid the activity that oftentimes results in parenthood for a good while longer after witnessing our parade of chaos. For some of our adolescent observers, however, I fear the fracas may have pushed them firmly into Camp Dog-Mom, and for that I am truly sorry.

But where was I? Oh yes, the birth story. The longest lapse between “hello, baby” and “here you go, internet” that I’ve ever allowed. Mea culpa. But as you see from the above material, it was unavoidable.

(The fact that I’m almost 500 words into this bad boy tells me two things: first, I have lost neither the ability nor the desire (yay!) to write. Second, this will be at least a two-part saga, so consider yourself warned.)

Zelie’s pregnancy was pretty great. I was sick in the first trimester but only in a vague all-day-motion-sickness sort of way, not actually barfing. Which is great but also probably resulted in my all-time weight gain record (we’ll get to that later on). I stayed pretty active until Thanksgiving and then I think I just sort of gave up on life/ever being not pregnant again. She wasn’t due until New Year’s Eve, by the way, so that’s kind of a long slog of apathy and poor milkshake choices. We had a family wedding, 2 birthdays and Christmas to get through at the end of December, so I had been hoping to go either really early (like my oldest, a 37-weeker) or else maybe on Christmas night, once all the festivities had passed. Once the wedding was safely in the rearview the weekend before Christmas (and having unsuccessfully coaxed her out on the dance floor) I was even resigned to a Christmas baby, and in fact, had to depart from our family’s Christmas Eve festivities post-haste because I was contracting every 6 minutes and an hour from the hospital.

Alas, it was the stomach flu. A horrifying strain that ripped through every adult in our extended family during the week between Christmas and New Year’s (but spared the children, oddly and mercifully). As I was barfing and timing contractions (now 4 minutes apart) late into the night on what was now Christmas morning, I began to doubt that I was going to survive this labor. I’ll spare you greater detail, but it was a rough ride, and the contractions that just would not organize into any kind of pattern turned out to be the result of dehydration. My father-in-law and sister-in-law graciously stayed the night on Christmas Eve and got up with the kids to open stockings while mommy and daddy clung to life upstairs. By about 11 am we were able to open presents and the contractions were gone. Womp womp.

The next 3 days were rough. Really hard emotionally and physically. I almost went into the hospital just to get a bag of fluids but decided (with my doctor’s approval) to drink my weight in vitamin water and get my fluids the old fashioned way. I was exhausted by the prospect of a pre-delivery hospital visit and I didn’t want to be induced, so home we stayed. I was big, I was dehydrated, I was sore from days of constant contractions, and I was mentally exhausted from life itself. On December 28th my little sister came over with chocolate shakes from Chic-fil-a (I swear, I have no idea how I gained as much weight as I did) and we tried to watch a terrible Hallmark movie. I had to keep pausing it to reposition myself because I was so uncomfortable (foreshadowing) and eventually she raised her eyebrows and asked “should I go home and pack a bag?”

I agreed that it probably would be wise, and she ran squealing out into the dark winter night. It was around 8pm, and I lumbered upstairs to add a few finishing touches to ye olde hospital bag (which I barely touched during our 30 hour stay) and attempted to get some sleep. At around 11pm I conceded to Dave that this was probably (at last) real labor, and that I wanted to take a shower before we headed out. Into the shower I jumped and apparently into action he sprang, because when I waddled back into our room 15 minutes later in my towel turban there he stood, fully dressed to the shoes, and holding our suitcase at the ready.

Ladies, the man is a professional labor companion at this stage in the game.

I, however, was not quite ready to actually go to the hospital, so I wept and begged that we try to sleep just a little longer. After about 20 minutes I finally allowed myself to be herded into the car, and this is where the real fun began. We’d driven about 5 minutes down the road when I frantically grasped Dave’s arm and barked to him “turn around!”

“What’s wrong?” he asked with some alarm, thinking we’d forgotten some essential item.

“They’re going to send me hooooooooome,” I wailed melodramatically, traumatized to envision myself as the shamefaced grandmultipara sent packing by L&D on a cold December night because she (snicker) didn’t know what real labor felt like.

So my sweet husband, bless his heart, he turned that car around and we trudged back up the driveway and onto the front porch. My sister threw the door open with some alarm as it was now going on midnight and she heard us bumping in the night, and out from between her legs shot our naughty, non-negotiably-indoor-at-night cat. I uttered a few choice words not suitable for general audiences and sprang off the porch in hot pursuit, cursing a blue streak that not only were the kids going to wake up to mommy and daddy gone (sob. But y so devastating every time?), but also their beloved cat was going to be eaten by the mangy coyotes whose goings-on had been blowing up my NextDoor feed as of late.

Not.on.my.watch. 

That cat was coming back inside, if all one billion contracting pounds of this angry pregnant woman had anything to do about it. Dave tried to coax me back into the house, cold and contracting and frantic as I was, but to no avail. I was beyond reason at this point in the evening (and well into labor, as it would turn out) and he recognized a losing battle when he saw one.

He gently allowed the storm door to swing shut, standing there for the better part of thirty minutes silently observing my late-night gymnastics in the street, watching and laughing (laughing!) as I crouched and tumbled beneath parked cars, darting in and out of our neighbors’ yards and chasing that damn cat from driveway to driveway, beseeching her to surrender herself into my desperate outstretched arms. Oh my gosh, nobody in my family is dramatic.

Tia told me later that she marched right back upstairs and crawled into bed because my bad cat-titude had confirmed for her that I was definitely in labor, and that she’d be safer in the guest room.

Well, she was right. And as soon as the bleeping cat was safely in my arms and in the house I realized that those disorganized contractions were now 3-4 minutes apart and coming on long and strong. Was I the first woman to ever employ a cat doula in the history of the human race? Maybe.

Stay tuned for part two, where my labor transitions from feline to human supervision and we accidentally give our daughter the wrong name for the first 15 minutes of her life.

And hey, guys?

It’s good to be back.

Lovely blog readers, I have a sweet little someone to introduce you to. After 9 long days of prodromal labor spanning Christmas and a multitude of other festivities, Miss Zelie (zay-lee) Grace Uebbing made her debut at 5:10 am on Friday, December 29^th. 7 lbs 11 oz and 20.5 inches long, she has ravishing dark hair like Evie did (though notably less of it) and dark, stormy blue eyes.

She takes her name from St. Zelie Martin, mother of St. Therese the little flower, who was canonized in 2015 along with her husband, St. Louis Martin, the first such occasion of a double canonization for a married couple in the Church’s history. Grace is a nod to Our Lady and to the extraordinarily different birth I had the fifth time around.

And speaking of birth stories, you know I can’t wait to write hers, and have been thanking God over and over again for how different her arrival into the world was compared with my previous births. She is sleeping and nursing like a champ (color me vv surprised by the latter) and is the absolute delight of each of her older siblings.

John Paul (5.5) immediately asked “when are we going to have another baby so she can have a younger sibling????” the first moment she was laid in his arms, which was almost impossibly sweet, but also, #toosoon.

We’re adjusting well to life as a family of 7 and I’m trying my hardest to postpartum like a boss, ala Blythe Fike, so I’ll be lying super low for the next few months. I’m posting a little bit on Instagram if you want to pop over and see baby pics, but am also mindful of how crazy fast the newborn phase goes, and am committed to trimming out as much social media as possible so that I can soak her up.

From the eve of the final day of Christmas, wishing you a beautiful finish to the season and the happiest 2018!