Untamed - Glennon Doyle Page 0,39

up on a chair, barefoot. She was wearing a charcoal T-shirt, sky-blue jeans, and a necklace that looked like dog tags.

My first thought: There she is. That’s my person.

She’d later tell me that her first thought had been: There she is. That’s my wife.

She smiled. It was not a casual smile. It was a smile that said: There you are and here we are, finally. She stood up and walked toward me. I let the door shut behind me, my bags still out in the hallway. She wrapped her arms around me. We melted, my head into her chest, her heart beating through her T-shirt onto my skin. She was shaking and I was shaking, and we both, for a long while, stood there and breathed each other in and held each other and shook together.

Then she pulled away and looked into my eyes. That was the moment we locked.

Then

The kiss.

The wall.

The bed.

White dress on the floor.

Naked, unafraid.

The original plan.

On Earth as it is in heaven.

I never looked away from her. Not once.

The longer we’ve been together, the more naked and unafraid I’ve become. I don’t act anymore. I just want.

Fifteen years ago, when I got pregnant with my second child, I decided to wait to find out the biological sex of the baby.

I learned the sex of my firstborn before his birth, but now I was a parenting veteran, so I was vastly more mature and disciplined. At what would have been the reveal sonogram, I lay on the examination table and looked back and forth between the small green screen and the technician’s face. Both were indecipherable. When the technician left and the doctor arrived, I had to trust what she told me—that there was, in fact, a human being inside me and that this being seemed, in her words, “Fine, so far.”

A fine, so far human being was exactly what I’d been hoping for. A fine, so far human being is what I have continued hoping for throughout my parenting career.

With that news—and only that news—I left the doctor’s office. When I got home, I sat on the family room couch, stared at the wall, and thought about how far I’d come from the controlling, dramatic, first-time mother I used to be.

Look at me, I thought, patiently letting the universe unfold as it should.

Then I picked up the phone and called the doctor’s office. When the receptionist answered I said, “Hello. This is Glennon. I was just there.”

“Oh. Did you leave something here?”

“Yes. I left extremely important information there. Let’s just say, hypothetically, that I changed my mind. Could I still find out the sex of my baby?”

She said, “Hold on, please.”

I held on please. She came back and said, “It’s a girl. You’re having a girl.”

* * *

One of my favorite words is selah.

Selah is found in the Hebrew Bible seventy-four times. Scholars believe that when it appears in the text, it is a direction to the reader to stop reading and be still for a moment, because the previous idea is important enough to consider deeply. The poetry in scripture is meant to transform, and the scribes knew that change begins through reading but can be completed only in quiet contemplation. Selah appears in Hebrew music, too. It’s believed to be a signal to the music director to silence the choir for a long moment, to hold space between notes. The silence, of course, is when the music sinks in.

Selah is the holy silence when the recipient of transformational words, music, and sketchily acquired information from radiology receptionists pauses long enough to be changed forever.

Selah is the nothingness just before the big bang of a woman exploding into a new universe.

You’re having a girl. My eyes widened like a camera lens adjusting to a blast of light. I sat on the couch, phone still in hand, wordless, motionless.

“Thank you,” I finally said to the receptionist. “Thank you. I love you. Bye.”

I hung up and called my sister.

“Sister, we’re having a girl. We are having a girl.”

“Wait,” she said. “What? How did you find out? Did they accidentally tell you?”

“Yes. After I accidentally asked.”

She said, “Holy shit. This is the best day of our lives. Another one of us. We are going to have a third. A third sister.”

“I know. Do not ever tell Craig that I called you first.”

“Obviously,” she said.

Just then I heard my two-year-old son, Chase, waking up from his nap, hollering from his crib his usual announcement, “I AWAKE GWENNON!”

I hung