Stop and Go
By Sara Koert
@sarakoert
There is an intersection on the route to the grocery store in my West-Michigan city that allows me to turn left on a yellow blinking light. On the way home, I can turn right on a solid red. The center of the intersection is littered with pulverized pieces of car. Every time a person pulls up to the light, they must trust their own perception of the speed of oncoming traffic. They have to act on their own judgement.
I look at the scattered car parts and freeze.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, I sit there at either light, waiting for the signal to turn green before I go. I ignore impatient honking behind me.
***
On the day my grandfather died, I found out I was pregnant for the first time. It was just before our two-year wedding anniversary, and not only was I on birth control, my husband and I hadn’t had one serious conversation about if or when to start a family. An antibiotic taken the month prior removed the need for that conversation. It caused my cycle to reset, and soon after my child was growing in my womb.
I felt like I was hearing screeching of tires as the direction I thought my life was going took a sudden turn. The competing news of death and life created a dizzying dissonance in my heart. Fear and sadness, disillusionment and dread, all covered the way to peace in a thick fog.
I had exactly one week to process the news of my pregnancy before I sat in the car line to enter the cemetery for my grandfather’s military funeral. My uterus started cramping as we drove in, blood spread through the pores of my cotton underwear. I bolted from the car and ran to the bathroom. I sat on the frigid cemetery toilet and swallowed my terror, gulp after gulp of air pushing it down. After some help from my sisters–who quickly found out the news after meeting me in the bathroom—I had a coat to conceal my stained pants and a plan to head to the hospital with my husband, Michael, between the service and the luncheon. A funeral and sunglasses were the perfect cover-up for my tears.
There, I sat in the ER on a sterile, paper-covered bed behind a curtain vacillating between distraught and dazed as I waited for the news about the child I both hadn’t planned for and now desperately wanted. We met our son on the screen that day, alive and well, the size of a bean, dancing next to the blood clot draining into my pants.
***
There is another intersection I stop at on the way home from school and work that has a sign, not a light. This intersection is an exit off of a draw bridge over a river and is directly across an on ramp to the highway. Multiple times a day I have to stop my car, look both ways, and judge the right moment to accelerate across traffic going in both directions.
Every time, my stomach tightens. I turn down the music so I can see better.
There is no green light or arrow to wait for. It's just me and my imperfect eyes judging distance and timing. It’s just me deciding when it’s time to go. Getting in the car and driving is an act of faith every time. There is so little to be in control of.
***
At thirty weeks pregnant, I woke up at 4 a.m. to get ready for work and met the gaze of two grossly swollen eyes in the mirror. I drove to the 24-hour Walgreens down the street and coerced a pharmacist into taking my blood pressure. The word preeclampsia pulsed in my mind. The word that was scrawled on the pages of those pregnancy books. A condition that came with a serious warning.
The pharmacist said my blood pressure was dangerously high.
Red light. Stop what you’re doing.
Green light. Go to the hospital immediately.
“The thing we weigh,” the maternal fetal medicine doctors explained to me later, looming over my hospital bed, “is whether the baby is safer continuing to grow in the womb, or out of it. Whether mom’s body is responding to medication or is getting worse.”
I picked at the tape glue around my IV site, the place where they had pulled blood from multiple times a day to see how my liver and kidneys were functioning. The nurse silenced the monitor. Stay calm. I thought to myself. This is out of your control. Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes and blurred my vision. I picked at the glue harder while my chest tightened and sweat speckled my brow.
“We have determined it is no longer safe.”
I sucked air into my lungs in short spurts, my eyes darting between Michael and the doctor.
“We can take better care of you both with him on the outside.”
Red light. Stop hoping to get better.
Green light. Consent to an induction.
***
Due to astigmatisms, my eyes, even with proper prescription glasses, struggle to focus when headlights and street lights are spidering in my vision. I am terribly night-blind. I avoid driving at night when I can, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
In order to cope, I try to focus on the side of the road. It’s challenging to stare straight forward all of the time, that’s where the headlights are. I need to take breaks and fix my eyes on one, solid thing. If I remember to fix my eyes on something solid, I make it safely home.
***
During my twenty-four hours of induced labor, the nurses laid frozen washcloths on my feet to soothe the burning sensation I felt from the magnesium coursing through my veins—the drug standing between a healthy delivery and one with potential seizures. The doctors had a habit of taking my husband, Michael, out of the room to talk to him about what was happening in my body, my mind too delirious to take the information in. Some of what happened to me, I’ll never fully remember, but the moment just before my son was born is as bright in my memory as the blazing summer sun.
I am on the operating room table, my body numb from the waist-down, my hand gripping Michael’s with the force of a new driver white-knuckling the steering wheel. I have the feeling of all agency being ripped from my grasp. I am free falling into a dark abyss, spinning, completely unmoored. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut, trying to maintain mental control over the fear spidering through my mind, blinding me. Words memorized long ago take shape in my thoughts, “I lift my eyes to the mountains,” I cry out, right there in the operating room. “To the Lord, the maker of heaven and Earth.”
The only solid truth I could fix my eyes on.
***
I didn’t have a car during my son’s first year of life. The world was small for us both because of the lack of transportation, and his prematurity heightened my fear of him getting sick. The only way we left the house when Michael was at work was with him in a stroller or strapped to me in a carrier.
The quiet, lonely days we spent together drew me across the street to the grocery store for the casual human interaction I could get while shopping for vegetables and cheese sticks.
My blue-eyed baby was a magnet for elderly women. They swooped in with their coos and comments in every aisle. “When will there be more?” they inquired, but instead of an answer, I simply offered a laugh. The pain of bearing my first child was too fresh to imagine going through it all over again.
I would only buy a few items, just enough to hold in one bag. I had to walk back over the street with a 45 mph speed limit with no crosswalk to get home with my baby. Watching the traffic whizz by, timing when it was safe, I instinctually held his head to my chest as I scurried across the road. Each time I sighed in relief that we made it safely to the other side, wondering how I could ever handle this trip with more than what I was already carrying.
***
The first time I intentionally tried to get pregnant was with my second child. Also, by choice, it was the last.
My second-born came at thirty-seven weeks, and I had a scheduled c-section at a small hospital down the road. I was diagnosed with regular preeclampsia, not the severe kind this time. I didn't have to wait twenty-four hours to hold him like I did with his brother. He was laid on my chest moments after being pulled from my womb. Everything about his entrance into the world is a redemption.
Six months later though, my body began to melt down. In what felt like a matter of days, I went from feeling vibrant and healthy to unable to raise my arm to brush my teeth.
One evening, while breastfeeding my son to sleep, he kept unlatching and screaming. I tried to squeeze out milk, but none would come. I started to cry and when Michael heard my sobs, he came to my side in the rocking chair and took our child from my frail arms. He called his mom to help, and drove me to the hospital. The doctors found out that my thyroid was completely nonfunctional. Left untreated for even a little while longer, it could have impacted my brain, heart, or other organs long-term. But a small pill taken daily for the rest of my life would “fix” the problem.
Conversations about having more kids came up between Michael and I as soon as my health began to stabilize. I talked to my doctor and he laid out the risks but ultimately said, “The choice to have more children is up to you.” But I was tired of weighing risks. I was tired of having to navigate when it was safe to stop and to go.
“I don’t want to put your body through carrying another child. “ Michael said to me one day on the couch after the kids were in bed. His brow furrowed, eyes pleading, mirroring my trauma back to me. Relief washed over my shoulders, releasing a long held tension. I didn’t want to put my body through it either. “I just want you alive so we can raise the two we have together.” After all, he was the one with a front row seat to my suffering, both times. He is the one the doctors whispered to in the hall.
***
One warm spring afternoon, after picking the boys up from school, I stopped at the three way stop near our house. As I accelerated, my car engine shut off mid-turn and coasted to a stop. Panicked, I attempted to turn the key over and over again, to no avail.
In a matter of minutes, observant firemen from the fire station on the corner came out and pushed my vehicle safely out of the road. Relieved, I got the boys and our stuff out of the car, waited for the tow truck to arrive, and began the half mile trek home in the sunlight.
I walked with my head held high, hand in hand with my two beautiful little boys chatting about how the big tow truck pulled our car up onto its bed, the awareness of God’s kindness toward me warming my face along with the radiating sun.
***
In the ten years since we decided to stop growing our family, I’ve watched many families around me continue to grow with full tables, full schedules, high stress, and full hearts. I’m not jealous of them, but I do feel the stark contrast between my life and theirs. Sometimes I wonder: Did I not risk enough? Did I give up too easily? But motherhood isn’t a test of how much I can handle. God isn’t grading me on how long I can hold my hand in the fire before it begins to burn.
Michael and I talk about what it will look like being forty-five year old empty nesters when our youngest graduates from high school. We don’t let the conversation go on too long, because it isn’t healthy to project certainty on an uncertain future. But we do occasionally brainstorm. We throw out ideas like trekking across the U.S. to National Parks or going back to school to get advanced degrees. We consider mentoring more young couples at church, or volunteering to teach classes at the library. One thing is certain, if God has more life for us to live after our kids grow up, he will also have more for us to do.
The choice of whether to stop or whether to go wasn’t as important as the choice to trust in God’s goodness and faithfulness in my life in spite of my choices. God’s sovereignty reigns above my choices, and my first, precious baby boy will always be proof of that to me.
In just a couple years, that precious baby boy will start driver's training.
We have begun car shopping to upgrade our family vehicle, with the plan that my current car will still have enough life in it to pass on to my son. I’m tempted to fear that future day when I hand over the car keys. All those intersections. All those decisions.
I will warn him to take extra care when he sees scattered car parts. But I'm already teaching him about the God who is always with him. There's no need to freeze, I'll tell him. We’re only meant to take it one stop and one go at a time.
Guest essay written by Sara Koert. Sara is from West Michigan where she lives with her husband, Michael and their two sons. She is a believer, nature lover, and creative who enjoys the crafts of writing, watercolor illustration, and flower gardening. Her favorite thing to write about is how God shows up in her ordinary life in extraordinary ways. Follow her writing via her Instagram and Substack, This Joy is Mine.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.