Our brave little baby

Our baby was still an unborn mystery of kicks and rolled sonogram images two weeks ago when I wrote her a note right next to the Star Wars ticket stub I taped into my notebook. “Star Wars is here, Bravery Grace,” I wrote, having seen the film’s premiere the night before. “But where are you?”

I guessed that, at the time of writing, the baby resembled her hobbit-like parents in their reluctance to leave cozy, warm spaces. Every day that week my husband had bent down close to my abdomen and tried to talk her into coming home. I, however, did not feel so eager for the event. I was afraid of childbirth. I knew it would demand more courage and endurance than I had ever mustered before. In other words, in order to have Bravery I would have to have bravery.

We chose to name our baby Bravery because of a sermon on Ruth we heard last winter at our church in Virginia. Our pastor made the point that the cultivation of bravery, the virtue, doesn’t belong just to boys—even though we’re sometimes tempted to believe so. We see bravery in Ruth, the woman who lay down at Boaz’s feet, saved her mother-in-law Naomi, and restored the family’s joy by giving birth to Obed. I loved the way Ruth’s bravery freed her to take risks in relationship. I could think of no lovelier quality than this to pass on to my child.

The day after I taped the stub into my notebook and wrote the note, the baby finally listened to her father’s voice and decided to start coming home. By that point I had dreaded childbirth so long, expecting the worst, that I began to feel a glimmer of hope that life would surprise me by letting me off easy with one of those semi-smooth labors you hear certain women talking about.

But that was not the case. Bravery completed her entrance on Dec. 21 at 2:12 a.m. after 30-plus hours of difficult labor, which I spent being poked with needles, fuming at Eve for getting me into this, and blessing the anesthesiologist for—kind of—getting me out of it. After worrying day and night in the maternity waiting room, my mother told me I should give the baby my name and keep the name Bravery for myself.

But God gave me the name Chelsea—a name meaning “harbor,” or safe place. My delivery experience and all my subsequent experiences in motherhood are part of me living that meaning out. Bravery, on the other hand, belongs to the baby. It’s one of those slippery virtues people struggle to define before settling at “doing something even if you’re scared.” It’s the kind of name she will have to live up to—in what circumstances, we have yet to see.

We wonder whether Bravery will hate or love her name, and we guess she will have seasons of both. Considering her December birth, we wish for her the words from Gail Mazur’s poem, “Young Apple Tree, December”: “that she prepare for the hungry world / (the fallen world, the loony world) / something shapely, useful, new, delicious.”