My oldest child is three years old, so in terms of parenting advice, I’m your basic punch-line. My friends and I talk about raising our children every time we’re together, but most of us are early on in the journey, babes in the woods with nothing but our flashlights and instincts to guide us. And by instincts I mean parenting books, research articles, and stories we heard from other people. I laugh when someone asks me for advice because I know I’m about 40 years away from having any real perspective on all of this, but I also love to engage in the fray with other parents, wincing and climbing our way through the trees right in front of us and the mountains up ahead.

It’s all quite daunting if you let yourself think about it too much. But it’s easier when you know everyone else feels just as crazy. Which is why I love to talk about this business of being a parent.

Three years in, with our third baby on the way, all I have to offer at any given moment is a list of my mistakes and a tiny handful of tremendous minutes of success. Yes. Minutes. That is the most accurate way I can imagine measuring my successes.

And yet.

And yet! When I see parents pregnant with their first child, there is such a momentary disdain for their plans and dreams that I have to catch myself before the moment becomes an actual remark. Me, the punch-line of parenting advice, young mother with exactly 2 minutes of successful child-rearing under my belt, has the audacity to scoff at those dreamers, those planners, those “my baby won’t do this” and “my house won’t look like that” and “we’ll never” and “we’ll always,” those people inebriated with anticipation over their first child.

They’re a sack full of sugar that I’d like to unceremoniously dump out and sweep away. They’re annoying.

But really, they’re not. It’s natural. We all did it. We all said we wouldn’t have a house full of toys, and that our kids would never talk to us like that, and that our babies would sleep because we would create the perfect sleeping environment, and our kids would work around our schedules, and oh my gosh, remember saying that crap? Do you remember how dumb we were?

You cannot know how insanely out of touch your parenting “style” is until you are actually parenting. Until you have not slept a full night in a month or two. Until the baby hates the expensive pacifiers you bought, and the one year old throws his first fit, and the two year old runs away from you in public, and vacations are a practical joke in which you actually sleep less and have more to do, and you are just so tired and just so outside of yourself: and then you know your parenting “style.” It’s called, “I love my baby, but this is really hard, and I have no idea what I’m doing, and I wish did, but I’ll keep trying, because I love my baby.”

There are no parenting books with that title. Because it’s long, and because new parents would never believe that about themselves enough to buy the book.

So, I’ve been thinking about all of this, and wondering if there is anything at ALL that you could ever share with a non-parent about what is coming their way. Surprise! There isn’t. But I want to try. If only to remind myself of these very things I’m writing, and to scratch the words deep into the bark of the trees that I’m currently passing, not only as a message for those who will follow, but as a mile marker for myself. A roughly hewn inscription etched onto this snap of a second in my life when yes, I am a parenting punch-line, but I am also still reveling in the newness and goodness of what it is to be mother. 

Brand new parents, 

Hi. Hey there. Congratulations! In one way or another, you have a child joining your life. This is big. This is HUGE. You probably know that. But wait: do you know that? It might not seem huge at first. When Sam and I were waiting for Clara to be born, the only baby item in our living room was a little bouncy bunny chair that sat lonesome in an empty corner. It looked like an art piece. So “huge” didn’t seem like an appropriate term for what was coming. It all seemed quite manageable, before she arrived. All of her clothes were always clean in her drawers. She never cried. She never fussed. She slept and ate just fine. Because she was in my womb. That detail somehow gets lost among all the daydreaming and chit-chatting about how wonderful the baby will be and how happy you will be when they arrive. A living, breathing, helpless baby will soon join you. That’s huge.

I can’t tell you how hard it will be. You won’t believe me. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because you’ll know soon enough. Just like I have no idea what three kids will be like, or how my son will act when he’s 13, or how it feels to watch my daughter be crushed by disappointment: we can’t know. And we shouldn’t know. The knowledge can’t come without the experience, because it would kill us. The experience, the grinding decisions of parenting, the pain of our missteps coiling in our bellies; we can’t know until we’re there. We need to experience the long days and the short nights in order to know anything at all, because with the knowing comes the love. 

New parents? You have no idea how demanding this will be. But you also can’t begin to understand the love. You know, of course: You know that most people love their kids. Or at least, according to their facebook feeds and their conversation topics, they are slightly obsessed with their kids. I used to roll my eyes when people would talk about their children, wondering if they were talking about the same kid I had just seen screaming about bed time. I knew they loved their kids, but what I didn’t know was that the love I could see was merely a faint echo of how they truly felt. I know this now because I’m staring at my daughter as she sleeps beside me, hands behind her head like she’s laying on the beach, curls matted against the pillow, her cheeks still round with babyhood that has not completely left; and I’m crying. I am crying! Because I can’t believe she’s mine. Because I can’t believe the luck in my blood to call Clara my daughter and Sam, my son.

When they call my name in their sleep,
when they stroke my hair while I hold them,
when they kiss their little sister in my belly,
when they were infants drinking milk at my breast,
when their fevers run high and they melt in my arms,
when they learn a new word,
when they sing a new song,
when they are kind,
when they are strong,
when through the lens of their youth we are allowed some glimpse of their future selves, of their shining gifts or their deepest struggle,

I cry with love.
I pull them to me, I smell their hair, I kiss constellations across their skin,  I am wrecked and resurrected with love once more.

This, you cannot know. This love, it is a secret and unreachable well within me, so deep I know it will drown me, today and all the days that follow.

The pain of parenting is also an unknowable force until you are inside it, shoulder deep in rising waters, questioning and fighting and treading for your life.

This is what we can’t tell you, new parents. This is what we can’t explain. It’s more than lost sleep. It’s beyond messy kitchen counters and cancelled plans. It’s bigger than your ideals, more grand than your dreams, more devastating than your nightmares. It’s fuller than the ocean. It’s harder to count than the stars. It’s every story you’ve ever heard about anything, translated in every language, injected into your heart.

You won’t believe us until you’re there. And we’re so excited for you- a little bit because we want to see your hair get messed up and your assumptions knocked out from under you. That’s the bad, slightly delirious part of us talking (we haven’t slept in years). But mostly because we know that pain, and we know that love, and we know it will change you. It will make you into you.

It will make you better. Stronger, and somehow softer. It will humiliate you and restore you in the same breath. I know this won’t make sense now, but remember this for later: the heartache doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means your heart is actually growing.  

If I could make a line of greeting cards for new parents, I would make one that said on the outside,”Congratulations on a lifetime of heartache!” And then on the inside, “This will be the bravest love you’ve ever known.”

Now go stare at your nursery and pretend like your baby is going to sleep in there. And congratulations!
This is going to be amazing.

I wrote this poem for my little brother and his bride, and read it at their wedding this summer. A few people have asked to see it, so I thought I would just post it here for convenience. I was nervous about this piece, because you know, someone’s wedding, but also honored that they asked me to read anything at all. And as it turned out, their wedding took place on a gorgeous summer evening in a gorgeous hilltop vineyard, and the poem felt like a good fit to the setting. Wind whispered through the neat and even rows of orchards and vines. I got to stand under a mighty tree and read about a sapling, and for a few minutes everything seemed at peace.

Here’s the poem, and more cheers to Richard and Rebecca and their new love!

Once there stood a sapling.
by Jessie Horney

Once there stood a sapling.
Planted beside a river.
Thin whips of branches,
sturdy but unsteady,
shallow spread of roots,
digging and pushing with the fast and foolish energy of youth.

Seasons seeped across the sky.
The spare cold of winter emptied the sapling,
laid bare the bark to the
biting cold,
the desperate nights.

Spring rose,
uncertain, wild,
renewed.
Buds thickened,
life beginning
again and again.

Summer perched on the crown of greens,
settled into the soil,
lingering twilights
taught the sapling
to rest,
to be.

It withstood the snap of fall,
the moods of autumn rains,
it learned to let go of dying leaves as their color bled out,
learned to be bare once more.

The sapling grew.
Trunk widened,
canopy unfolded,
the roots expanded in a slow and hidden subterranean dance.

Drought tightened the land.
Storms cracked through the air.
Some years,
it rained and rained and rained.

After each season, after each storm,
the sapling emerged.
Taller.
More beautiful.
Embattled.
Scarred.
Mighty.

A source of strength for all who came
to sit amongst its shade and moss,
to dream beneath its wisdom and courage.

There is a time for everything.
Today it’s time to turn towards the river.

We uproot.
We begin again,
together.
We plant ourselves in the shade of a vow,
nourished by a steadfast promise,
and we pray that the foolish energy of our love,
so unknown, so untested,
would radiate through our roots,
would become our strength.

The time has come,
to gather.
to laugh and to dance,
to be known,
to be planted.
to be loved.

  

Once there stood a sapling,
and the whole world watched as it grew.

I live 450 miles from the Pacific Ocean, in a house that is mine, in a neighborhood that is clean, in a nation that is democratic. I went to school, all the way through a university, even, so I know how to read and think and deduce and reason, and the news of the world is easily accessible to me through every screen within my reach. I live in a first world democratic nation and I live 450 miles from an ocean, so the news I read about millions of refugees protesting in front of train tracks and drowning in the ocean and risking their children’s lives to leave a home where their children have no lives:
This news causes me little harm.

It is upsetting in the way that a car crash with victims I did not know is upsetting. It is upsetting in a way that says, yes, this is all bad, this is very sad. But those are people far away from me and I have problems here, too, and there’s nothing I can do to change a corrupt system run by evil people, so I’m gonna concentrate on my own kids and my own problems and wistfully recall the days when things didn’t seem quite so bad.

Or maybe I will rail against the evil people and feel sorry for the victims, for a little while, and then when the news cycle changes, I will go back to forgetting all of the oceans and all of the people, and hope that something changes, someday.

This is all easy to do. And it is tempting to do, because I am lazy and fearful and nervous about my place in the world. But as a Christian, as someone who claims that Jesus is real and that my life is not my own, as someone who says I believe what Jesus said? I cannot merely acknowledge wrongdoing and wring my hands in worry, or start exhorting the importance of a judicial and bureaucratic response to crisis.

Instead? I have to start moving.

You know what bothers me about a guarded or apathetic response from Christians concerning the tortuous existence of war-torn people? It’s the fact that in order to be flippant, dismissive, or even just choose to be ignorant concerning the facts, we must first forget our own desperate need. If we want to close ranks, murmuring with righteous indignation,

“But they have to do it legally,” or, “This isn’t our problem,”

we must first tuck away the notion that we are nothing without Jesus.

What fools we are to imagine ourselves anything but refugees, clinging to the side of a boat in a desperate search for home. When we see the pictures and hear the stories of these refugees, we ought to absorb the wild plea in their eyes and recognize that plea in ourselves. We ought to cry out for justice, wail with grief for the plight of those without a home, because we are they. We ought to come alongside them as fellow travelers. Fellow sufferers.

We ought to grasp the reality that the physicality of their situation is an outward expression of the desolation and longing in each one of us, and consider the fleeing ones not as other but as ourselves.

Because we all long for home.

We are all desperate for permanence.

We are all willing to climb aboard a flimsy boat without worrying about a life jacket, a boat by many different names:

More money.
More friends. 
More love. 
More sex. 
More fame.
More safety.
More comfort. 

We are all willing to climb aboard our own useless dinghy because we don’t think there is any other choice.  So how can we believe anything about ourselves besides the fundamental truth that we are just as far from home as those who cross the wild waves?

The gospel is the answer for every refugee. Those who are drowning in the Mediterannean and those who are drowning in sorrow. Those who have nothing and those who have everything. The Gospel lets us all walk on water. The Gospel parts the sea. The Gospel says, You are not yet home. You feel displaced, desolate. But listen! Hope has come. God has set eternity on the hearts of man so that we can live in peace amidst the chaos, knowing our true home awaits. I can have peace in this place because I know who I am and Who loves me.

We are all refugees wandering this life-

but we are not without hope.

I pray that I will never forget the truth of my situation. May I never let the comforts of my walls and my floor, my paycheck and my mobility, erase the pulsing memory of who I am. I am a refugee. I cannot look at any other refugee with anything but solidarity and a quickening need to take action.

But also: I am a refugee with hope, because I know that home is coming.

Be careful to examine your response to the visceral images and ugly realities of the broken and abused, those who seek refuge:

Do you respond as a fellow refuge seeker,
a brother or sister who knows the longing for
life and hope?

Or do you respond from the padded throne of those kings
who have forgotten their own humanity,
their own great need,
have rewritten their prosperity as a construct of their own hands rather than
a gamble
based on birthplace and significant social imbalance?

My security comes from God alone. Every breath. Every movement. Every heart beat. The table I am typing on and the children who call me mother: none of it belongs to me. I am a wanderer who aches for home, and I ache with those who wander beside me. Break my heart again and again, Jesus, for those who are chased and those who are lost. My fellow travelers. My people in the room next door and my people across the sea. May I exist in the reality of my condition and reach out beyond myself to those whom the world considers least.

Remember, remember, wanderers. Let the pain rise up in you like a bile as you consider what evil has done, and let Hope triumph one day at a time in your response. Remember the frantic poverty of your own humanity, and be courageous in the face of scandalous apathy.

The world makes us all wanderers;
the Gospel welcomes all home. 

 

Three tangible, immediate, realistic means to help: 

1. International-  http://wewelcomerefugees.com/
2. Local-  http://www.gatesofhope.net/
3. Local-  http://www.anaidaho.org/

*All images linked to original source

Every day, without an ounce of irony, Clara Horney holds my face and tells me that I am her “most special mama in the whole wide world.”
And every day, I try to bottle that sincerity and tuck it into my own heart. This may actually be the whole point of spending every day with toddlers. It’s hard to marinate in that kind of love and not be a more sincere version of yourself.
Life is hard.
Love keeps us tender.

Hold someone’s face and tell them you love them. Let yourself be sincere. It’s scary; it will probably seem cheesy; they might not respond. But it’s worth it. ‘Cause it keeps you soft. And since nobody likes a big scary world full of scary hard people, I’m gonna join Clara, and hold a few faces every day.

Love,
jessie

My house lays still with asleep, of course, because it’s midnight and our children are young and we live a life of early mornings and quiet nights. I am awake because I watched a good movie and painted my nails, ate a few Oreos and drank a glass of freezing cold milk. Now all of the lights are off. I have whispered I love you over my sleeping son and daughter, tucked his feet away from the crib slats and adjusted his blankets, turned off her night-light and brushed back her curls with my fingers. Sam is asleep too, our duvet already kicked off the bed, his body warm with sleep. It’s cool outside, so our windows are open and the ceiling fans are on, each turn of the blades pulling in the night air and making the house smell more and more like outside, like grass mulch and smashed plums dried to the warm sidewalk, like clean water, like summer air that heats up so quickly each morning.

My house lays still with sleep and I want to remember this moment, so I’m writing it. Here is a moment, I say to myself. When Clara is still two. When Sammy is still one. When our house is still small. When our lives have not yet shifted with a new season, when we are still here, together, the four of us under one roof and one starry summer night, our lives tightly wound around each other like string on a spool. Things will change; I know that. The kids will grow up. We will buy a different house. Tragedies will come, healing will follow. I can’t help but think of all this because I am a person who feels very much, very deeply, and the pain of this world has an easy way with making me panic. I worry, you know? I worry about my kids, I worry about your kids, I worry about our parents, I worry about my friends, I worry about my future. I worry about tragedy. I worry about injustice. I worry about what people think about me, what my face is doing as I age, what my work will mean in the end.
And all of these feelings, so constant and close to the surface, often paralyze me. I don’t write. I don’t answer my phone. The anxiety consumes me. I told my friend Cassidy the other day that in my most irrational moments, I wish I never had children because if for some terrible reason they die, I will die a thousand deaths after.

It is scary to love.

It is scary to be known.

The most effective maneuver I know, in this life of pain and worry, is to pray. There is a simple kind of prayer that I am learning, lately, and it is merely to pay attention.

The bad stuff is loud. It is frightening. It is real.

But the good stuff is too.
The good stuff is real. And it’s happening. All the time. 

This moment, right here? With three hearts beating in three sleeping bodies, three dreamers just a few steps away from me, three people I love in such an expansive manner that it actually changes my very being?

This is the good stuff.
I pray by paying attention and saying thank you. I pray by opening my eyes and letting the good shine like it should, letting the light wash over me and through me, and saying thank you. I will remember this. 

Fresh air settles around me as I write by this open window. The ceiling fan clicks with each rotation, a breezy rhythm above. I am tired, and pressed to pay attention, insistent with myself that I remember this moment of good. And quiet. Full with midnight wonderings, full with contentment and full with an ache that knows
not all will always be well, 
yet may all be well with my soul. 

pay attention, jessie.

amen. 

The other day I was pissed at Sam. I stood in my bathroom brushing my teeth in a fury, replaying all the ways he was wrong about a parenting discussion we had just blown up over. For the most part, we agree or can come to an agreement about how we are raising our children, but every once in a while our opinions clash like plaid on stripes and then his temper and my sensitivity send us to different rooms with fire in our eyes. Sometime I wonder how we are going to do this for, you know, forever – raise kids with someone we think is an absolute idiot from time to time – but then I remember how much I love him and how much he loves me and I just pray that we don’t kill each other before we die.

Anyway, I anger-brushed , toothpaste foaming on my lips as I glared into the mirror thinking about leaving town for a few months, the mint film on my mouth not helping clean up the curse words in my head. I cupped my hands to drink water from the faucet so I didn’t have to get a cup from the kitchen and face the dummy on the couch. Then I started thinking about what Sam was trying to do. Why he had gotten angry at me in the first place. It was stupid, our fight, but it was also real. Parenting is not a joke to us. We both take our roles seriously, as guardians to these kids, and when one of us questions the other guy’s method, feelings get hurt pretty fast.

Why can’t we just always be on the same page? I wondered. I obviously know more about this than he does- he should at least listen to me.  This is a crux of MANY of our parenting fights. I think I know more, because I’ve worked with kids my whole life and continually read lots of parenting books and articles: He thinks we should trust our instincts and work with the kids we have, not the ones people think they’re writing books about. I’m wrong. He’s wrong. He’s right, and I’m right too. We should trust ourselves and remember that our family is our family; we should also take it seriously enough to invest in ourselves as parents and learn from those who have gone before us. It’s all, it’s both, it’s a crap shoot, not a formula, and the only person we will ever answer to about our parenting is God. Not each other. Not our kids. Not the experts. Just their Creator, the One who gave them to us in the first place.

While I considered where Sam was coming from, and why our discussion had turned so angry so fast, I remembered something else. Sam is a great dad. Better than most, dare I say. There are a LOT of people I would NEVER want to share kids with, but Sam Horney isn’t one of them. Sam is one of the most involved and loving dads I’ve ever met. There are very few men who come into fatherhood so naturally. He never questioned his position in our kids’ lives, and his comfort as “Da-Da” is striking.

He held our newborns with confidence, loved them with abandon. When he didn’t attach to Sammy as quickly as he did with Clara, I questioned him about it. “You don’t even like him,” I accused in a hormonal rush of tears. He took that seriously, and from that day on I saw an intentional effort to bond with his baby son, which was difficult because Sammy was small and dependent on me those first few months. But he didn’t give up. And I was so proud of him.

He disciplines our toddlers with a firm hand and laughs with joy at their burgeoning personalities, all from one moment to the next. Sam is not a patient person, nor does he thrive in chaos or mess. Which is basically our entire life with a one year old and a two year old. But he adapts. He cleans their messes. He rejoices when they climb in bed with him for a snuggle. He and Clara have an on-going game of hide and go seek, going on 2 years now, and he never passes up a chance to play with her. He doesn’t worry about making mistakes, or not knowing the exact right thing to do in every situation- he is just himself. Through the weary hours. Through the hilarity. Through the moments when we look at each other in rapture, smiling over the small heads between us, filled with absolute pleasure to be their mom and dad. He parents with so much less fear than I do, bringing a consistency and steadiness to our home that we all need.

Sam might drive me crazy sometimes. He won’t read the parenting books I suggest, he complains I’m going to make our kids too liberal, he buys cheesy sports gear for our babies to wear, and he refuses to have lengthy discussions with me about how to cut and style Sammy’s hair. There are times that neither us can believe we have to parent together. But if the world was full of dads like him – dads who approach their job with a sense of purpose and gravity – dads who take their kids with a grain of salt and a large dose of adoration –  we would be in better shape. We would feel more loved. And we would know how to love well.

I love you, Sam Horney. And even when I’m being an idiot, and even when you’re being an idiot, there’s no one else I would rather call husband, or father to my kids. I’ve loved you since I was 19 years old and I will keep choosing to love you until the day I die. Thank you for giving me grace as I learn to be a mom. And for letting me dress our kids in skinny jeans. That’s very big of you and I think you’re pretty great. Happy Father’s Day, buddy bear. We love you!

I used to see a woman gynecologist, and she was great- your basic feminine icon. Smart, pretty, capable: Everything I look for in the people who stare into my nethers. But after she delivered my first baby, I decided to look for a new doctor. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her, I just felt like we weren’t connecting. I got pregnant again fast, just 8 months after our daughter was born, so we had to decide on a new medical practice pretty quickly.

So there I am, pregnant with my second baby and looking for a new doctor, someone who will pull a squalling newborn out of my body, and despite some hesitation, I decide to try out a man doctor this time. My husband Sam and I started looking around for a new OBGYN practice and kept hearing near-cult like recommendations for this one guy in particular. So we attended the first appointment together to see if we liked him and to decide if we should stay for the whole pregnancy.

This new doctor comes into the exam room with a warm handshake and a gentle voice, a head full of blonde hair that is turning a pleasant shade of silver, and the physique of an early morning jogger. Sam and I spend the entire appointment falling in love with him and walk out enamored, melting over the charm of our new relationship; I mean, our new doctor. We tried to act casual but really we wanted to hold hands and squeal over how perfect he was, how smart we were to find him. We were so proud of ourselves for being grown ups who do things like “get recommendations,” and “meet doctors to see if we like them.” But even if he’d been a terrible doctor, we probably wouldn’t have known because the old adage is even more true when you’re pregnant and tired: love is blind, man. And we loved our new gynecologist.

This second baby, our son, gave me a complicated pregnancy. He measured small, way too small every time we checked, which mandated more appointments than a normal pregnancy would. Every week for a couple of months during that long winter, I got an ultrasound of our tiny baby and a few minutes with our doctor. He was always calm, always reassuring, and even though I worried about the baby, I trusted him implicitly,

You can only spend so much time trusting someone with the life of your child before you develop a certain attachment to that person. Like that friend in junior high whose cool status keeps you afloat the social pool, a good doctor feels like a fricking lifeline, like everything you need to survive is wrapped up in that one well-educated person, as long as you hold on tight and never let go, because you’re the best andiloveyousomuch and I’ll do anything you say, doctor, ok?

That’s what a good doctor feels like to me.

Our baby was falling further and further behind on his measurements, and at 37 weeks of pregnancy we decided to induce labor and make sure he was ok in there. So, on a Tuesday morning that January, the sky cold and dark and heavy with winter storm, we drove to the hospital and settled into our delivery room. It wasn’t daybreak yet when my doctor knocked on the door and came in to check on us, easing onto a chair and casually crossing his ankles in front of him. This demeanor was exactly what drew us to him in the first place, by the way: the laid back vibe of a surfer, the calm of a competent person, just a truly good man. He sat peacefully in that hard-backed hospital chair and talked quietly with us, answering questions and even asking to pray for us before we got started. His prayer felt like a quilt fresh out of the dryer, spreading warm and neat over the corners of the room.

Several painful hours later, I delivered my goldfish of a son, my Sammy, four and half pounds of boy squirming like a bundle of bones in my arms. I pressed his papery skin and dark hair against my lips in relief,  crying and kissing his furrowed brow. He was fine. Small, but healthy. My doctor grinned at everyone in the room as the baby howled and gulped at the fresh air, announcing that he was absolutely perfect.

He was, of course, he was perfect, but he was also too small to function properly on his own. After spending the afternoon and early evening holding our little Sam and drinking him in, he kept getting taken to the nursery again and again for testing and checks. He couldn’t regulate his temperature, he couldn’t regulate his blood sugar, and he was becoming lethargic as the minutes ticked by. In a whirl of decisions, our baby was suddenly being taken by nurses and doctors and escorted down to the intensive care unit for newborns. We stood behind his rolling crib in the elevator, down six flights of the hospital and two long hallways into the double automatic doors of the NICU, where he was admitted and hooked to IV’s and taken out of our care.

It was just past midnight when the NICU nurses told me to go back up to my room and get some rest. I had given birth just 12 hours earlier but I was rife with adrenaline, swinging wildly between unexplained rage and episodes of incomprehensible outbursts. Sam stretched out on the dad-bed in my recovery room and fell hard asleep, but I sat wide awake in a puddle of sobs, the room empty of our newborn and my body aching to hold my baby.

So I stood up, pulled a pair of sweats over the expanse of mesh underwear and post-delivery mess that was my lower body, gathered my hospital gown around me and marched back down to the NICU by myself at two in the morning. I sat in a rocking chair beside the baby warmer where Sammy slept and stared at him, blurry eyed and a little bit insane.

Sam and I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before the induction, so at this point I had been awake for almost 48 hours. I was out of my mind with worry, in a state of delirium from lack of sleep, and had delivered a baby only hours earlier, hormones crashing through my body now like tiny train wrecks every five minutes.

If it sounds like I’m starting to build a case for myself right now: I am. I just feel like we need to have all the facts straight before the rest of this story is told.

So there I was, rocking back and forth like Rosemary in a hospital gown, waiting until it was time to feed Sammy again. Soon the nurse came in and helped me adjust all the monitors and tubing attached to the baby, and settled him in my arms to nurse. At some point during this breastfeeding I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to the sound of my name.

“Jess? Are you back here?”

It was him! My hero-doctor! But why is he here? What time is it? Am I actually awake? Why I am wearing snow boots and a hospital gown? Why do I smell so bad?

He whispered again. “Jessie, how are you? I looked for you upstairs but you weren’t in your room, so I thought I would check down here.”
He started to pull another chair close to mine and that’s when I realized that both of my breasts were hanging out of my hospital gown. One dangled precariously over my newborn’s face and one was slung over the nursing pillow like an over-ripe pear. Although this man had seen me completely naked only hours earlier, because for unknown reasons I prefer to deliver my children completely in the nude, I was horrified that he might have seen my boobs just now. I attempted a nonchalant repositioning of the baby’s blankets and pretended like I was completely coherent.

“Hi! I’m here, yeah, hey. Just holding the baby. We’re fine. He’s fine, right? We’re good. Yeah. How are you? What’s up?”

He sat there in his pristine white coat, the smell of his soap and aftershave wafting over me and filling the little room. The fact that I still hadn’t showered since giving birth settled on me like a dirty robe, and I wondered if he could smell the blood and sweat and tears and desperation that seemed to be rolling off my body in sheets.

The worst part of all this is that he was also chewing peppermint gum. He almost always has peppermint gum, and this time the sharp scent of his clean breath drove me to tears. I had never loved anyone more. He sat with me in my filth and delirium for a few minutes and then got up to go finish his rounds. He stepped towards me and gently touched the baby’s head, and leaned down to give me a hug. I breathed in his kindness and hygiene, clinging to him much longer than necessary or really appropriate, silently begging him to never leave. As he tried to stand up, I hugged him a little bit harder and then,

I kissed his neck. Right there, right above his collar, right on his pulse. The most intimate spot you could imagine kissing a professional who is merely trying to do his job; I clung to him like a fan about to get hauled off by security and then in moment of desperate gratefulness and love, probably even with my eyes closed, I gently kissed his neck.

He didn’t even react, of course, generous and wonderful person that he is. He just hugged me back and said he would check on us again soon.

He walked away and into the world, the outside world that existed beyond my insanity and my greasy hair, and I stared down at the bundle of blankets and baby in my arms. I died a thousand sweaty, disgusting, post-partum deaths all over that NICU room as he left, the scent of freshly showered hair, laundered white coat and minty breath trailing through the air like a world I would NEVER inhabit again. I knew I would probably never go back to my old self. I would never be clean again, never not be a person who develops frightening attachments to kind people and then kisses their doctors at six in the morning with their hospital gown hanging wide open. I was that girl now. There was no going back.

Except I did have to go back, many times since then, because he is my doctor. I had to see him 6 weeks later and ask him to insert an IUD, if only to give myself enough time before we had another kid for him to forget what had happened.

That’s why you don’t kiss your gynecologist – because you will have to see them again very soon. Unless you want to break up with your doctor, and start the search all over again for yet another worthy candidate of delivering your babies and checking you annually for any suspicious lumps: don’t kiss them.

It actually sounds really simple when I say it like this, like “don’t kiss your mailman,” or “don’t kiss your accountant;” why would that be hard to remember? But sometimes, when you are very tired, and you’ve just given birth to a brand new human, and you haven’t showered in days, and you are delirious with emotions, it can be harder than it sounds not to kiss your doctor. Ok? So lay off. And learn from me. They probably hug everybody who just had a baby- so don’t linger, and don’t cling. It won’t end well. You’ll have to see them again in 6 weeks for a check up, your face burning as you wonder if they’ve asked a nurse to accompany them in the exam room just in case you try to get fresh again. Don’t be that guy.

Don’t kiss your gynecologist.