Ready for Air–and a give-away
It wasn’t lost on me that I read Kate Hopper’s lovely memoir, Ready for Air, earlier this month, while in the air myself.
Beside me, squeezed into the too-small middle seat, my 6’1″ son Jack was reading his own book. I kept glancing over at him, aware that this was the last trip the two of us would take together for quite a while. Aware, too, that I was already preparing myself for the moment when I would bid him goodbye in Atlanta, leave him to his new life as a student there, and fly home without him.
Kate’s subtitle is “A Journey through Premature Motherhood.” It sounds specific, and it is. This is a story about a baby girl born too soon, about a young woman’s struggle to be strong and brave in the face of one terrifying complication after another, of a marriage that is tested and ultimately strengthened by adversity, of a baby whose struggle to survive offers both a compelling read and something better: a reminder that, in the largest sense, our human stories are all variations on a theme. For isn’t the real journey — through motherhood, through every relationship we ever have, through life itself — really about learning to work with things as they are rather than as we wish they could be?
It’s ridiculous how careful I was during my pregnancy,” Kate writes. “I didn’t use synthetic cleaners; I drank only filtered water; I ate pounds of broccoli and cheese and yogurt—calcium in any form; I bought only organic fruit; I avoided fish because of the mercury. But it didn’t matter. None of it could make her stay inside me and keep growing until she was full term. I followed the rules, I did what I was told, and it didn’t matter.”
Coming upon these words at an altitude of 10,000 feet, I suddenly realized why it was entirely appropriate for me to be reading a harrowing birth story at the very moment that my own “baby” was leaving the nest. There, buckled into my window seat and twenty-one years out from my own blissfully uneventful final month of pregnancy, I found myself absorbed by Kate’s intimate, profoundly personal account of her daughter’s rocky arrival on this earth.
It wasn’t just the narrative that engaged me, although Kate writes vividly of the unfolding drama in which she suddenly finds herself: the severe preeclampsia and skyrocketing blood pressure that leads to an emergency C-section, her two-pound baby’s fight to survive, oxygen tents and tube feedings and breast-pump miseries, a raging, life-threatening sepsis infection just when things are looking up, and Stella’s long, slow pilgrimage from her tiny isolette in the NICU to her own bed in her own home.
What struck me even more, and made me grateful for this raw, uncensored account of a birth story gone awry, was its powerful reminder that motherhood – and indeed, life itself — at any age and at any stage is about surrender and acceptance, and that love and loss are always inextricably intertwined.
“We raise our children to let them go,” the old grandmothers remind us. But of course the letting go isn’t just about children growing up and leaving home; it begins at once and it continues for as long as we are parents.
Day by day, from the moment our babies are delivered out of our bodies and into our arms, we are reminded that we aren’t in control. We can mourn for what we wanted and didn’t have, or we can begin to trust in the rightness of the challenges we’re handed and in our own ability to weather the unknown.
“Live the questions now,” a wise friend suggests, quoting Rilke in a note to Kate after she leaves the hospital without her newborn. “And perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into the answers.”
This, I think, is what Ready for Air is really about and why, in an odd way, it turned out to be exactly the right book at the right time. For me, the raising part was relatively easy. I’ve loved being a mom, loved having my two sons at the very center of my life for so many years. It’s the letting go part that’s always been hard.
And now, as my second son makes his way in the world as an adult far from home, I find myself living the questions all over again. There are no assurances for his future, any more than there are for mine or yours. I want to know that he’ll be fine, that he’s made the right choice, that all will be well. I can’t know any of that, of course. Instead, I try for patience. I attempt to abide quietly with the unknowns. I promise myself to live the questions, just as both my sons are doing.
Ready for Air drew me in deep and delivered the message I seem to need to hear again and again: our children’s destinies are not ours to decide, their lives not ours to live or shape. We may put everything we have into the work of being a mother or a father. We may love our children with all our hearts. But we don’t get to call the shots. We can’t choose their paths for them. And we don’t get to decide how the story unfolds.
For Kate and her husband, the work of letting go begins with a pregnancy that goes overnight from difficult to high-risk, with a two-pound infant fighting for her life in the netherworld of a neonatal intensive care unit, and with a string of unforeseen challenges and setbacks.
It begins in fear and in protest: This isn’t fair. This isn’t what we signed up for. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.
And then, slowly, This isn’t fair is transformed into This is how it is. Fear melts away, giving rise to acceptance. Faith is tested and redefined. Letting go becomes an act of surrender, of love, of trusting in the bigger picture and the greater forces at work in the universe. And in the softening, there is a realization: Here we are. And we aren’t alone.
There was a moment near the end of our flight when Jack looked over my shoulder. He couldn’t believe I’d read almost an entire book, barely looking up once. He was surprised to see I’d been reading about a baby, of all things. I flipped open my calendar (the leatherbound notebook I still use for everything, a handwritten extension of me). I showed him the photo I keep inside the front flap, of the two of us when he was about six months old. He is a wispy-haired, pudgy armful, snuggled up close under my chin, burrowing in and looking out at the world from the protection of my embrace. I am younger than seems possible, my skin still fair and smooth, my eyes wide with mother-wonder.
A lifetime ago. Just yesterday. Both. A different story entirely from the one I was in the midst of reading. And yet, in the way that matters most, perhaps not so different at all. For the lesson we are all here to learn is essentially the same. We arrive on the shores of adulthood with a white-knuckle grip on our own carefully honed vision of the way we think things ought to be. And then life has its way with us.
Growing up, it turns out, isn’t about realizing the vision after all. It’s about surrendering to the truth of what is. Is there a mother, anywhere, who hasn’t been shaken by loss or by some unforeseen reality that defies the best-laid plan? Who hasn’t found herself traveling in foreign territory, stumbling down a road that wasn’t on the map, with only love and instinct to guide her way? It may be, as it was for Kate, a hushed room in the NICU with a two-pound preemie. Or, it may be years later — a phone call from a stranded teenager in the middle of the night, the threshold of a rehab center, a plane ticket to join the Peace Corps, a choice that rocks a family to its core, a diagnosis that changes everything. We raise our children. We let them go.
And along the way, we share our stories with one another. Stories of our children growing, falling, learning, living, and sometimes even dying. And our own stories of growing right along with them, of loving and stumbling. Of reaching out for help, of holding on and letting go. And of finding our way, step by step, in the dark.
A teacher now, and the mother of two healthy daughters, Kate helps other women write the stories they need to tell. “Your stories matter,” she tells her students. “Putting them down on paper and crafting them matters.” This brave, beautiful book is a testament to that truth.
I have a giveaway copy of Ready for Air to share with a lucky reader. Just leave a comment below, and I will choose one winner at random on Saturday, Oct. 26. You can answer the question: When, in your own life did you find yourself lost, without a map, and thinking, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way!”? Or, if you’re feeling shy, just let me know you’d love to read this book!
University of Minnesota Press is going to donate 15 copies of Ready for Air to neonatal intensive care units in the US and Canada. Kate would welcome suggestions of hospitals that you wish to be considered. Put the details in the comments, including an address and to whom the book should be sent. In early November, she will draw 15 hospitals and send each a signed copy of her book. You can read more about this giveaway here.
A welcome, and a thank you
To all of you reading here for the very first (or second) time, welcome! I’m thrilled and grateful that my post last week about turning 55 inspired you to find your way to this website, my online “home.” I would love to hear from you.
It would be an understatement to say I was thrilled and moved by the response to “This is 55.” Watching my reflections go viral, seeing them shared thousands of times on Facebook, hearing from women from ages 30 to 80, and reading all the thoughtful comments here and elsewhere, just confirmed for me something I already suspected: we are all hungry for an intelligent, honest conversation about how things really are and how we really feel as we grow and change. My thoughts got the conversation started. The best thing was that you all continued it. I loved reading your responses and wish I could have answered every single one – although, as my husband pointed out, I would be 56 by the time I finished.
Fortunately, you responded to one another, you shared your own stories, you offered words of encouragement, and the ripples have continued to move outward from here – on Facebook, on Maria Shriver’s Architects of Change website, and even on Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls page. Exciting! And thought-provoking.
Thanks so much for reading and sharing. I’m glad you’re here!
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