Snowy gloves pounded the window while the kids played outside. I overheard Vince yell, “We don’t hit windows!” and someone’s answering protest, “I wasn’t hitting, I was knocking!”

And here, friends, is the irony: We survived a 7.2 earthquake with no major structural damage, only to almost lose windows to children beating on them with Gortex mittens.

Local schools shut down for a while from all the damage, but the earthquake happened on a Friday morning and our homeschooled kids fretted all day about finishing their assignments for the week. I tried to talk to them about priorities – we were all alive, people were working to get the power back on, and everyone we knew was safe. As we waded through debris I kept telling them, for crying out loud, earthquakes are educational – you might forget half the stuff you read last week, but you’ll never forget living through this. You never forget learning that your shelters and safe places can be shaken.

I’ll never forget the feeling of being sifted as the house shook east-west, hearing the ground rumble and the walls rattle and glass and pottery shattering everywhere. I’ll never forget jumping out of bed, racing upstairs to find five of the kids on their beds, then running back down two flights of stairs to check on the other two kids, only one of whom was there. I have no idea how I made it up and down all the stairs while nine months pregnant and the house was still shaking. I’ll never forget seeing the entire west wall of library shelving slanted across the room, books smeared knee-high and spilling across stairs and entryway, and wondering if a cat was buried underneath.

We found the cats, all safe, all hiding under the kids’ beds. We found the kid who was missing; he ran outside when the shaking started. And we found the toilet upstairs, our only significant damage, cracked off its bolts on the tile floor — though the antique mirror and framed prints in the same bathroom were still hanging on the walls, just fine.

Early labor (which can last for weeks) started here around the same time as the earthquake. And it’s weird going into labor as aftershocks diminish; it’s like the earthquake in reverse. Contractions increase in intensity to the final, long-expected big event, while the earthquake shocked us in its suddenness and then decrescendoed to these little shakers that we mostly don’t even feel anymore.

Just in time, we officially decided on spelling Kavanagh with no U, in spite of the overwhelming results in our highly scientific polls on social media.  I almost had it – with a U, I mean – arguing with Vince that this isn’t the first baby we’ve given a last name as a first name to, and we didn’t arbitrarily remove vowels for Chamberlain or Reagan just because they seemed extraneous. And since the man is already familiar with Google, Wiki, and Justice Kavanaugh, I went to the next highest authority on the name I could think of: The Mitford series.

It’s the main character’s last name, and I thought, This will prove the spelling without a doubt, no contest. I’ve read this series all the way through twice – once when Vincent was a baby and again when I was pregnant with Afton – and then blew through some of the books again this year as comfort reading during the gruesome months of morning sickness. I know these stories and characters; this series remains the only modern fiction that I truly love.

So I grabbed one of the books off the shelf, confident of winning my case. Turned the pages. Skimmed the lines. Looked for it…hold on just a minute…lo and behold:

Kavanagh. No U.

WHAT.

Well, I’ll be et fer a tater.

I wanted to put more effort into walking him out in those weeks of early labor but a round-ligament-snappy-action prevented it, in league with a hip socket on strike that kept sending me in a slow melt to the floor without warning. (Yay forties!) So instead of causing alarming scenes in public, I made myself useful by staying home for two weeks and making pitiful requests to people around me: Can you bring me water? Can I have the orange yarn and the blue tape measure? Can you put on my socks?

Vin came over, picked up the pair of socks I brought with me, and briefly inspected them before he threw one of them back on the couch and started putting the other one on my foot.

“What, you don’t like that other sock?” I asked him.

“It’s the wrong one,” he answered, wrestling this one up my ankle, angling the heel just right and straightening the toes.

I know where he’s going with this; it’s one of our oldest arguments. For 22 years, since our college days when we first shacked up in Anchorage, he’s tried to convince me that Socks Are Not Interchangeable. Socks, he says, go on certain feet.

“See?” He holds the other one up. “The big toe is longer on this one, so it goes on this foot.” He commences wrestling that one, too, and I can see that he’s sort of, kind of, maybe a little bit right, though I’d never admit it to his face.

But this neediness and confinement also shook my safe places. I know labor and birth; this is our sixth delivery. We like to think that experience prepares us for what to expect. And sometimes it does.

But other times, it deceives us – not because our expectations are wrong, but because, however much it is, our experience still isn’t enough. Our expectations might not be big enough. Our endeavors might be too safe, or our safe places might be too small. Our priorities might be too narrow, focused on marking tasks off our lists and missing the fact that we can do truly hard things; we can live through and thrive in far more than we give ourselves credit for.

God has been preparing us for familiarity to take a flying leap for a long time. Last Christmas, when we didn’t know where He was sending us, He said, When you find yourself where you never thought you’d be, I’m positioning you for something you never could have planned. He kept saying, It’s a surprise, Love. Sometimes the surprise starts off with a shaking.

And then in April when we knew big changes were ahead but didn’t know Kavanagh was one of them, He said, You know how to do this, you’ve done it before. You’ve just never seen it like this. And we’ve been trying to roll with all of the surprises ever since.

So at 3am one morning, when early labor suddenly looked less like aftershocks and more like the big event, and the prospect of waking seven kids up to go to two different places in the middle of the night seemed so much harder than just having a friend come over and letting everyone else sleep, we rolled with that, too. After months of planning on a homebirth at the lighthouse, we threw out that plan and drove to the birth center in the wee hours of the morning. Just like we did for our last two babies.

The highway was snowy, the sky was dark; the midwives had the tub running when we got there because they knew how fast it went last time. And they knew the story of the one kid who was supposed to be a waterbirth but ended up being delivered on the bed while the tub was still filling, before the assistant arrived.

That, too, was the end of familiarity, because no matter how many times you’ve done this or what patterns you’ve come to expect, there’s no guarantee you won’t get your cage rattled. And I did. All our birth experiences have gotten easier and faster, except this one.

And “labor” doesn’t come close to expressing the amount of work and travail put into birthing a human…or anything else. We use the word so much that it has lost its impact as we gloss over the clawing, writhing pain of turning yourself inside out to do the work of bringing something (or someone) into the world.

The heat was terrible. She felt scorched to the bone, but it did not touch her strength. It grew hotter and hotter. She said, “I can bear it no longer.” Yet she went on.

– George MacDonald, The Golden Key

He is our stability, with us, among us, upon us in the heat and the friction and the shaking, regardless of what everything looks like around us or feels like within us.

After twenty-three hours of off-and-on that eventually progressed to hours of hard labor, we met the one we’ve been waiting for. And he is so worth it.

So often we give up on opportunity or calling because we think, I could never do that. That is for other people, stronger people, bigger people, people who are different from me. But what we really mean is, I don’t want my world to be shaken. Our excuse is our inadequacy but what really stops us is fear, or laziness, or a combination of the two.

Because labor is work, and shaking, and life-changing. We pooh-pooh ourselves while putting those who do bigger, harder things on a pedestal, while God wants us to see what we are really made of. We want a simple to-do list, a school chart of basic assignments to check off. But God calls many of us to the earthquake and the aftermath, saying, Hey Love, you have no idea what you’re capable of.

You’ll never forget living through this.

______

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