January 13, 2026
Dear Sophia,
At about 1:30am on January 10, early Saturday morning, your mom awoke me and said she thought her water might have broken. She tried a test swab but didn’t use it right, apparently, so we couldn’t tell. The midwife, Sam, sounded awake and alert at 2:30am. “It sounds like your water broke.”
That’s thrilling and a little scary, because if you ever want to have a home birth it means you have about 24 hours to get things moving. Once the amniotic sac breaks (and if it doesn’t replenish itself) the risk of infection can increase such that you can’t delay birth any longer. At that point, doctors will induce your labor and any dream of a natural birth at home will evaporate.
I really didn’t think we would be able to get back to sleep after all this, but somehow we did. And the contractions did not resume.
And then came morning, and ten minutes ago, the bloody show showed up. No fanfare, just your mother announcing the appearance of the unfortunately named mucous plug.
The game is on. You will be a January 11 baby.
Hours of attempting to get contractions to come quick and last long and now by 1:40pm on Sunday, 36 hours after your mother’s water broke, the contractions have stayed under 50 seconds in duration for three hours or so. She’s been on the birthing ball, on the stairs, rocking and swaying, the doula has used the reboso, and she chugged an enormous amount of castor oil and tea and apricot juice and almond butter and fizzy probiotic in place of champagne. She puked it right back up.
I began to worry. I have absorbed her desire not to give birth in a hospital. Each merely 45-second contraction hits me with concern. We are running out of time.
3:06pm Now the contractions are 1 minute 17 seconds long and 2 minutes 30 seconds apart. Your mother’s had 147 contractions. Two midwives have arrived. They’re not checking her dilation yet so as not to increase the risk of infection. Your mom’s blood pressure is 110/68. She’s tired. But has expressed confidence. 20 minutes ago I posted to the WhatsApp birth group made up of your mom’s relatives and close friends and my sister, Candace, and friends Tedd and Jeanne:
We have been in active labor for about half an hour. The contractions are only about 60 seconds long but they are more intense and they are coming every 2 1/2 minutes.
This goes on for hours. Sometimes I can’t tell if your mom is having a mini contraction or you are just moving. I start timing for a contraction and your mother says it’s a false alarm. You’re just kicking furiously, again.
“You’re throwing off my stats,” I tell your mother, pretending to be bothered.
Your grandma Froncé, Auntie Prudence, and Fronce’s partner, Joe, arrive with hugs and prayers and split-pea soup. Your Pop-pop Mike and his wife Angelique drop by too. They come in to say hi to your mother, but they seem to intuit that she’d rather not have them seeing her go through contractions, or distracting her. They go back out into the living and dining area.
“I feel a lot of energy and I’m also exhausted,” your mother says, at about 3:45pm.
The midwives at Sage Midwifery had told us that when she averaged 1-minute contractions no more than five minutes apart for over an hour, we should call them. Your mother was very close to that for several hours, and by mid-afternoon we’d seen enough of a trend to call in Sharon, the midwife who would work with us today.
“Your cervix is paper thin,” Sharon tells her, soon after arriving.
Does she not want to give us the number? Your mother knows there are numbers that say how thin, or the degree of dilation. 0 through 10. “What’s the number, honey?” she says, drowsily.
We laugh at how direct she is.
She is not effing around.
The number, the midwife says, is 4.
Leah hadn’t wanted to know, earlier, in part because she didn’t want to hear a number lower than she expected. But that’s what happened when she heard the four. She felt discouraged. All that work and she had yet to go through 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
More contractions. We were getting close to 200.
At one point your mother cried:
“Get them out of here! Everybody out!”
Erin and the doula and midwives and I began to leave.
“Not you!” she said. “My family!”
The doula, Stacy, said she would go out and tell them.
Your mother was making less sound now. She seemed to have found a way to absorb the contractions silently. My sister had told her that being very vocal would tire her out, but I think your mother thought that sounded like emotional repression and was reflexively against it. She’d changed her mind.
After 20 more increasingly painful contractions, the midwife said, “You’ve gone from a 4 to a 6. You’re 90% effaced. This work that you’re doing is successful.”
11:19pm Over 7 hours later . . .
In the end, we decided to go to the hospital. I had been leaning that way by around 6:30 or earlier, but Leah still wanted to try at home. The increased risk of a C-section if we got to the hospital too late and the ability to more closely monitor the baby with her still irregular heartbeat are what convinced me. And when the midwife, Jackie, explained the latter, Leah agreed.
Froncé and Prudence came back to the house. Froncé had been texting me, begging me to take Leah to the hospital. Once upstairs, she appeared to be reciting the last rites over Leah. She was crying and praying out loud, like you would at an exorcism combined with last rites. Leah finally gently asked her to, in effect, go out and manage her feelings in the next room.
Leah was despondent for a while. She moved very slowly and with great pain and a lot of it was probably psychological. When we got out to the car it seemed that her water broke again. And she was in a lot of pain as we drove. She was very afraid. She asked me if I would protect her and take care of her, because people often didn’t treat you like you were a human being and black women often weren’t treated fairly. She said she never said anything like that before. “I know,” I said. I had read the research, much of it during my time as the co-founder of a startup company that had built a diagnostic tool to reduce human error — and there was a lot of it — in diagnosis.
Your Aunt Erin and the doula arrived and came to the hospital room. Pop-pop Mike and Angelique waited in a waiting room.
The contractions in the hospital were beyond anything she had felt. “I can’t do this,” she said. She was so afraid. “You can’t imagine the pain.”
“I know I can’t,” I said.
What would have happened if we had stayed home for the home birth? It might have been too much.
Two hours later, I posted this to our birth group text:
Leah has checked in, undergone all the questions, had all the vital statistics taken, and finally got an epidural. It was just in time because the most recent contractions were an excruciation. She is now starting to make jokes and thank everybody in sight
I’m now so exhausted physically and emotionally — and I got no epidural! — that it’s hard to feel ready for my child to be born in a matter of hours. And I had visualized you being born at home for so long, with me catching you, that I’m having a hard time adjusting to the idea of you being born in the bright room full of strangers and terrible furniture that your mother had wanted to avoid.
At around 12:35a.m., the epidural kicked in and the nurse began to call out when your mother was about to go into a contraction. She could see it on her monitor, but apparently they could feel it in your mother’s uterus, too. They’d put their hands on her and say, “She’s contracting.”
This was the cue. The nurse would have your mother get into some position with her legs up or on her side or on the other side, and once on all fours, or in stirrups, or holding her own knees, and tell her to push to her count of 1 to 10, like she was trying to poop, then to take in a breath, push again from 1 to 10, breathe, push again, then wait for the next contraction. I joined in the counting, as did Erin and Stacy now and then.
After a few repetitions I remembered I was pretty adept at counting, so I started to direct the counting myself, but added a lot more effortfulness and grit into my voice. It felt a lot like how I’d cheered on teammates in wrestling. “You gotta want it!” I’d shout, because I’d heard someone say that once and decided it was pretty cool.
But your mother pushed for several hours with little change that we could see.
“I feel like this isn’t that effective,” she said. “I’d like to squat. I think that would work better.”
The nurse shook her head. “You can’t feel your legs because of that epidural. You can’t even stand.”
“Really? I feel like I could stand.”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
She pushed and pushed.
Then she could feel your head.
She asked for a mirror.
Sometimes the push would make the top of your head peek above the surrounding flesh, then it would slip back in.
“I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere,” Leah said. “Is she moving down?”
They assured her she was. Then we tried a new position. Your mother had been pushing for three and a half hours. Dozens of tsunami-sized contractions on top of the 240 or so when I’d stopped counting.
At about 3:50am, the doctor came back in. “You’re almost there,” he said.
“Really?” your mother said.
“Yes. Just a few more big pushes.”
“Can my husband catch the baby?”
“I can let him put the baby on you,” he said. He turned to me. “Get some gloves on and come stand over here to my left.”
I did so. It was happening. Oh my god.
Push! we said, at 3:57am on January 12.
And the doctor tugged gently as your head came out, and as a magician will pull from his pocket more and more balloons all connected to the first, the doctor lifted you up and your shoulders and arms and chest and belly and legs all came out too.
I’ll never forget your tiny head and feral, black little eyes. You looked like a wild animal crossed with an alien, I’m not going to lie. A squirrel and an extraterrestrial.
The doctor handed you to me and gestured toward your mother’s chest. Perhaps he was using his own hands as guardrails, I don’t remember.
You were so tiny. Seven pounds, two ounces, we would learn. You had blood on your head, but not much vernex visible.
I placed you on your mother’s upper abdomen and chest. You began to push with your feet, just as you apparently had when the contractions hit, driven by primordial instinct, and you pushed yourself up your mother’s torso until you reached her breast.
Amazement. Wonder. Sleep.