I dove into Kate Hopper’s Ready for Air eagerly, knowing already that I love her voice and fascinated to read about her experience delivering and mothering a preemie, and I was not disappointed. The fact that Kate makes so specific a story universally relatable speaks to her power as a writer. She uses her personal story to illuminate the grand pageant of motherhood and in so doing had me nodding, giggling, and crying more than once.
Ready for Air opens as Kate’s pregnancy turns from uncomfortable to threatened. Within the first few pages she is admitted to the hospital with preeclampsia and, quickly, induced. Her daughter, Stella, is born at 3 pounds, 6 ounces. Under the flourescent lights of an operating room, disoriented by an array of drugs, scared but grateful, Kate’s journey as a mother begins.
Early in my pregnancy, people told me that when I first saw my baby, I would experience a love that called into question all the other loves in my life … And I’m ready for that, for the love to pour out of me when I see Stella.
I was told this, also, and though my experience was worlds different from Kate’s, I similarly did not feel the wave of incredible love and identification I’d been told to anticipate. I stared at Grace and thought: who are you? Kate looks at her baby, alone on a table in the NICU, and thinks “This cannot be my baby. This is not how it’s supposed to happen.” This moment in the NICU, when Kate falls into the lacuna between expectation and experience, introduces one of the main themes in the book. There are as many roads to motherhood as there are mothers, and to overly emphasize the myth of an immediate, all-encompassing love disenfranchises, or, worse, terrifies, women for whom the experience is different.
“I could never have imagined a place that contains at once so much hope and so much fear,” Kate writes of the NICU, but it is an apt description of her first weeks of motherhood more broadly. Stella’s time in the NICU is not without setbacks and challenges, and many days hold tears. Even so, love takes hold. At one point, when Stella has taken a turn for the worse and developed an infection, Kate stands by her isolette and watches as her chest “rises and falls, rises and falls. There is an ache in my own chest, and I realize that this is how it feels to have my heart break…. I had started to fall in love with my daughter.”
Fear swirls throughout Ready for Air, animating and defining the first weeks and months of Stella’s life. Just as she describes the NICU as a place of hope and fear, Kate notes when Stella is a month old that “fear and gratitude seem to coexist for me in a way they never have before.” Bringing Stella home, which Donny and Kate had anticipated would be the beginning of a peaceful, joyful time, instead ushers in another, even more difficult phase of parenthood. There is exhaustion and depression and loss of identity and more and more fear.
The most successful memoirs make of deeply personal, highly granular stories large statements about being human. Ready for Air accomplishes this. Through the tiniest details of her experience and of Stella’s new life, Kate expresses the universal. At one point she notices Stella’s “tiny nose, her ears, thin as paper, each the shape of a continent. In the coil of one ear is Africa and in the other, South America.” Later, as she and a nurse feel the unevenness of Stella’s skull they observe that the bones are “like tectonic plates.” The world itself is contained in the face and bones of this three-pound premature baby. Even in days fraught with ambiguity and peril, when their bond seems both tenuous and attenuated, Kate feels wonder while gazing at her daughter. It is this strand of awe that pulls her through all the long and difficult first months of Stella’s life.
Fear beats through Kate’s first months as a mother like a pulse, but it is uncertainty that she learns to breathe like oxygen. One of the central lessons of Ready for Air is that nothing is ever guaranteed. As I read I remembered my own disorienting, destabilizing first months of motherhood, felt again that exhaustion so deep it seemed like I had sand in my eyes and vague, constant thrum of an inchoate panic. But I also remembered the way I gradually fell in love with my daughter, the intoxicating smell of her baby head, the waves of peace that sometimes – only sometimes – swept over me as I rocked her in the middle of the night in the nightlight-lit twilight of her room.
So much of Ready for Air is universal. Though Kate speaks of an experience I cannot image, she plays chords I know by heart. Motherhood is profoundly individual, and we need to honor the myriad colors in which it comes, but it is also shot through with emotions as essential as the air of the title. Ready for Air powerfully evokes the fear and ambiguity of one woman’s difficult season, but it is also full of a parent’s abiding love, and the deep, bewildering wonder that is at the heart of motherhood.
I have a giveaway copy of Kate’s marvelous book to give to a lucky reader! Just leave a comment here and I will choose one at random on Friday evening this week. You will love Ready for Air.
University of Minnesota press is going to donate 15 copies of Read for Air to neonatal intensive care units in the US and Canada. We would welcome suggestions of hospitals that you think should be considered. Please put the details in the comments, including an address and to whom the book should be sent. When Kate’s blog tour is over, she will draw 15 hospitals and send each a signed copy of her book. You can read more about this giveaway here.
Wow. In my organizational quest, I recently discovered the journal I kept when my twins were in the NICU for the two months following their birth. They were born at 30 weeks, 2 pounds 5oz and 2 pounds 11 oz respectfully. It was the most harrowing time of my life. I was shocked at how the journal read more like a medical text, than a personal diary. But I remember the fear, especially the fear I had to fall in love with those little boys, who didn’t even look human. It’s still so hard to reflect on that time.
I nominate the NICU at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, GA. Words cannot express the gratitude I feel for those doctors and nurses, they’re angels on Earth. Many of these professionals bounce back and forth between Northside and Children’s Health Care of Atlanta, which is across the street. The care they give the children of our area is extraordinary.
You’ve never led me astray when it comes to books. 🙂 Would love to read this!
I cannot wait to read this book. My son was born only 3 weeks early but weighing 4 pounds 10 ounces. We were in the NICU for three long harrowing nights but thankfully he was released and sent home with me. We have been getting to know one another and falling in love this past month. Motherhood is like nothing else I’ve ever experience. I’m petrified and joyful at least 100 times a day.
I love Kate’s writing and love your description of it equally. What a beautiful description of those early days of motherhood and how it was so different, wonderful and terrifying for each of us.
I’d love to read this! It looks like a great book.
I would love to read this book! I am in dire need of a good read as I’m in a rut at the moment. My littest was born at 34 weeks, but weighing a mere 2lbs 12oz. Her entrance into this world was not without drama: an ambulance ride through a snow storm at rush hour, heart rate drops through contractions, and ultimately a middle of the night c-section. We spent 2 weeks in the NICU at the Brigham followed by a week in the NICU at NWH. I can’t say enough about both the Brigham and NWH – the nurses are tremendous!!! In the event you are bored and wanted to read more I actually blogged about Annie’s birth here you go:
http://mcdonaldteam.blogspot.com/
This book sounds amazing. It is so important for parents to share that pregnancy, birth and parenting are not always easy or perfect. I look forward to reading it!
Another title to put on my list…thank you. Both my kids were born early – but it was my son, 6 weeks early, who taught me so much about love, faith, and trust that all will be well. I remember being so grateful to the nurses who watched over him, who helped me hold him and made me feel safe. He grew big and strong and now you’d never know how amazing his entry into the world really was.
Thank you for your insightful review. I, too, can readily recall those “disorienting, destabilizing first months of motherhood.” Look forward to reading! xoxo
This is definitely on a list of my to-read and if I am chosen I will pass it along after I have finished it.
I, too, nominate the NICU at Northside in Atlanta. They have been a blessing to so many children and families who have been a blessing to my family.
“I realize that this is how it feels to have my heart break…. I had started to fall in love with my daughter.” Wow, that got to me. I know that ache. Would love to read her book.
My first grandchild is due in three weeks and though my daughter’s pregnancy has been perfect by all accounts, when I read this sentence “One of the central lessons of Ready for Air is that nothing is ever guaranteed,” it really took my breath away. So I will continue to hold hope and joy for this new arrival along with the reality that NOTHING is guaranteed. Thank you, Lindsey, for always sharing from your heart. I’d love to read this boo.
I loved your comments:
Though Kate speaks of an experience I cannot image, she plays chords I know by heart. Motherhood is profoundly individual, and we need to honor the myriad colors in which it comes, but it is also shot through with emotions as essential as the air of the title.
Thank you for a great review.
With almost two year old twins at home, I’m living the extremes of their joy, wonder, laughs, giggles, and, tantrums, boundary testing, biting, hair pulling, and screaming…at 5:30am…still. 🙂 Fascinated by the spiritual journey of motherhood and the deeply ingrained cultural beliefs about how motherhood should be, what makes a ‘good’ mother, etc. Love you reviews Lindsey! thank you!
Oh Lindsey, thank you so much for these words, for reading with such an open heart. I’m grateful!!
This sounds like an extraordinary book. I look forward to reading it. Thanks for this beautiful review.
What a beautiful review of a beautiful book!
Hi Lindsey,
I love how you reviewed this book – especially your highlighting the one thing Kate had to learn to live with: Uncertainty. This is a personal struggle for me as I tend to want things in my life “settled and decided” – which causes me lots of angst.
For my MSW thesis I held a workshop for people who were “considering parenthood.” At the time I didn’t fully realize my own ambivalence about motherhood. Raising my three sons continues to be one of the greatest joys and stresses of my life.
As I write this looking out the window above my desk, I see a doe and a fawn walk by! Google informs me that only fawns look after their offspring. As I wrote that last sentence, the fawn dashed by the window followed closely by her mother! Nature teaches us about Motherhood!
Thanks for sharing. I’d love to have a copy of this book!
Nicky Mendenhall
Wow, love your book reviews. Will have to pick this one up, even though I’m never had a preemie. Love memoir and looks like this one won’t disappoint.
I had two out of three pregnancies that I call “tentative” — that is, wrought with uncertainty and concern for my unborn children who had positive screening test results and needed further follow up, both in utero and after birth. My youngest, after a normal birth and seemingly uneventful first two weeks of life, spent his second month of life in the PICU, fighting to breathe, a result of two severe respiratory infections. It is an experience I share with difficulty and only amongst closest friends; hearing someone else’s experience would be healing.
This book sounds wonderful — definitely want to check it out. Thanks for the lovely review.
I cannot wait to read this book! My youngest son was born one month early and spent three in the NICU. We will forever feel profound gratitude for the doctors and nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who cared for us and for our son.
What a lovely review of beautiful writer.
How could I not want to read this book after your review??
Thank you so much for sharing this book. I have been through much of the same thing and am always amazed at how many of us out there suffer through pregnancy. I thought I was the only one at the time! I have since written down my story to preserve and share in the hope that one day it will inspire others out there.
http://oneadaygratitude.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-story-end-part-6-candida-and-beyond.html