Customer Reviews

Great with Child

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This book is wonderful! It hits home at so many levels in the journey of becoming a mother. I felt like I was sitting with a friend when I was reading it. At many points, I felt like saying, "PHEW, I'm not the only one who's feels that way." The book is a treasure.

Reinstra's Great with Child is a refreshing look at motherhood from a mother who is currently in the midst of having her third and last child. This book sees birth in a spiritual and soulful way and provides a new voice to be added to all the medical books you will probably also be reading. I am so glad I read this book. It changed the way I saw my pregnancy and made me even more confident of the awe that should be given to pregnany and motherhood. You will not be disappointed.

Obviously, many of Debra Rienstra's appreciative readers are women who have given birth, women who can closely identify with her story. But Great with Child is also a valuable book for men. When I first read it, even though I was already the father of two children, I began to understand the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum depression in ways that, dense as I am, I had not bothered to learn from my own wife. The book for me was a necessary cross-cultural journey, acquainting me with a foreign race that lives under my own roof.

A friend loaned me 'Great With Child' while I was expecting my own baby. I was immediately drawn to the author's thoughtful insight and beautiful prose. Rienstra reminds you, in the midst of the nausea and exhaustion, that you are participating in the creation of new life, which is an awesome priviledge and responsibility. Parts of the book were incredibly funny, and I found myself reading bits aloud to the amusement of my husband. Many of Rienstra's observations are so incredibly poignant that I would recommend 'Great With Child' even to non-pregnant friends.

"This is a fresh longing now for an experience I have lived before," writes Debra Rienstra, "First, the deep attentiveness of pregnancy, then the harrowing intensity of birth, then that surrender of the self to demands that press the boundaries of endurance and to a small person who, once here, will make any previous life seem impossibly incomplete." Great With Child: On Becoming a Mother is the true story of Rienstra's journey conceiving her third child, her pregnancy, birth, and postpartum depression. It is fresh, witty, and utterly charming.

Rienstra's memoir is powerful and compelling. There were numerous passages that were just so moving, I had to underline them so I could visit them again. Here are a few of my favorites:

"When marriage presses ahead past naiveté, each partner may be surprised to find that real intimacy takes work, and there will be betrayal, disappointment, and lonely journeys on the way to it."

"Cycles pass, the blood comes, and each time, it tears out the footings of another possible future." (On trying to conceive)

"The desire to gaze and gaze at the baby's every detail--who can resist this pleasure? For months we waited to see and hold this enigmatic creature, but now his eyelashes, his ears, his fingernails, his finely traced hairline are like smooth, intricate letters spelling out mysteries if we can read them. Genetic coding's infinite permutations, life's tenacity, the holiness of creation--these mysteries hush our distracted hearts to wonder."

As a mother of three, I connected with Rienstra's experiences. I felt the same disappointment every time the appearance of my period announced that another month had passed without conception. I felt immense joy and anticipation with my third child as much as my first, just as Rienstra did. Great With Child: On Becoming a Mother is a wonderful, emotional book about motherhood in all of its weak moments, as well as its glory.

by Jennifer Melville
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women