A Different Kind of Holy Night

I became a mother in the middle of a July heatwave. Summer days dawned with an intensity that made me squint when I opened the blinds, heat pressing onto my heavy body without relent. My due date came and went, womb squeezing with contractions that left me gasping, but without the movement that leads to birth. I knew my daughter was coming; she had to come, but until she did, I had to wait.

It was not until a week after my due date that labor began to progress. I dozed between the contractions that rocked me through the night, my world squeezing again and again into an exquisite pinpoint of pain. It was work to breathe. As labor quickened, my husband drove me to the birthing center. Despite the initial rush, I advanced slowly, which, my midwife explained, was due to my daughter’s posterior position. And, true to who she has always been, she entered the world in her own way, facing the light from her first wailing breath.

Even though I had thought through all the stages of giving birth during birthing class, the reality of having to deliver a placenta after 26 hours of natural labor caught me off guard. All I cared about had arrived, was slicked with vernix, curled in the center of my bare chest. And yet my midwife stood at my feet, tugging on the umbilical cord, acting like I was still in labor. This part wasn’t supposed to be hard. I was baffled. 

“Push, Amy. I mean it. Push!” she said. I tried, but nothing happened. Again.

“I can’t,” I said, voice cracking. “I mean, I’m trying.”

“You’re losing a lot of blood, and quickly. If you can’t deliver this placenta, I need to call for a transfer to the hospital. You’ve got one more try.” 

When nothing changed, she turned and left the room. I called out as she walked into the hall, but she didn’t listen. My daughter whimpered; my tears pooled near the crown of her head.

“Paramedics will be here in a few minutes,” she said, walking back in. 

My hands rested on this life that had grown in the hollow beneath my heart, now separate from my body. I held her gently against my chest until the medics filed in. They lifted my spent body onto a gurney. I was hemorrhaging, and I had to leave my daughter on my husband’s chest so someone could save my life. 

I continued to bleed so quickly they didn’t wait for a room, didn’t wait for anesthesia. I signed papers, giving permission for them to do things I barely understood, but there was no time for questions. The doctor introduced himself, then everyone began to hurry. I barely registered the words, nodding my assent to an unmedicated surgery that still lives beyond the shape of words. By the time the procedure was finished, I had lost nearly two liters of blood. I was alive; I was shook.

Sleepless nights unfolded, one after the other, as summer turned to fall. My daughter struggled to overcome the limitations of a tongue tie and failed revisions; my body struggled to heal. The calendar turned to Advent as fall deepened, in my fourth month of motherhood, but I was mostly just surviving. My daughter’s advent that year had taken me to the edge of myself.

One evening I sat alone near the Christmas tree, in a fog of exhaustion and grief. The lopsided tree was pretty, but there was no wonder. I felt the shame of my less-than-Christmas spirit like a noose around my neck, so I rose to go to bed. As I did, the words of the song playing in the background seemed to sharpen:

It was not a silent night

there was blood on the ground

You could hear a woman cry 

in the alleyway that night

on the streets of David’s town. 

And the stable was not clean

And the cobblestones were cold

And little Mary full of grace, 

with the tears upon her face, 

and no mother’s hand to hold. 

It was a labor of pain, 

it was a cold sky above,

But for the girl on the ground in the dark

Every beat of her beautiful heart

Was a labor of love.[1]

I sat back down, stunned. Could it be that there was room for my actual story inside the nativity? Not just the parts that had shattered me with joy, but my trauma that still hovered beyond words? This song grabbed and held me, pulling me up into a story bigger than my own. These words reframed a narrative that felt much truer than the Silent Night I’d grown up singing. Could it really be that when God entered the scene, there was blood and brokenness and love all mixed together? That it wasn’t just heaven breaking into earth, but all earthiness and pain drawn into the possibility of redemption that was central to the miracle of God-made-flesh? 

Motherhood broke me open. The moment I looked into the face of my daughter, I found my heart expanding in ways I didn’t know it could. And in the breaking, I found a path that led toward wholeness, toward becoming more myself. In the midst of my grief, I felt something stir, a thrill of hope, perhaps, that didn’t depend on me. I didn’t know it then. There was still so much to face that was broken, so much yet to wrestle, but this moment offered me the beginning of permission to no longer try to fit myself into Silent Night, where all is calm, all is bright. 

Birth is a messy, unpredictable thing. So is the life that follows. That holy night, I realized that my celebration of Christmas isn’t about ignoring this, or pretending otherwise. Instead, my celebration can be a choice to turn again to look for a God who chose birth as a means of entering creation. I can walk the dark Advent days feeling the exquisite ache again, waiting for a God who doesn’t arrive with answers, but through birth, in a body, as a baby. This God who sent a messenger from beyond to invite an ordinary girl to be his mother. A God who chose the vulnerability and mess of becoming human to give a face to Love. Who invites me into my own advent, again and again, to find a voice for things that would otherwise go unnamed. Because of the incarnation, I am no longer in the dark alone. I can raise my eyes to look for–to again risk hoping I will see–this incarnated God, even in the narrow places of my deepest pain.

[1]Phillips, Jill, and Andrew Peterson. 2004. Labor of Love Behold the Lamb of God. Nashville, TN: Dark Horse Recording, The Park and The Velvet Eagle: Ben Shive, Andrew Osenga, Andrew Peterson.

Featured image of Two Christmas Candles is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

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Amy Malskeit

Amy Malskeit is a lover of words and stories and people. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and Spanish, a secondary English teaching credential, and an MA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Lancaster University in Northwest England. Her years teaching middle and high school gave her a love for middle grade and young adult literature, and the awkward awesome that being a young adult means. She is a mother of two who plants her garden and makes her home in the foothills southwest of Denver with her best friend, Kevin. She loves the water, and feels most at home when she is near the Pacific Ocean. She reads broadly, and is passionate about exploring big questions and small moments through her poetry, essays, and stories.