TO CARRY WONDER

The travails and joys of pregnancy and early motherhood, both physical and spiritual, are explored in this luminous primer.

Parker, a nurse practitioner, brings her deep medical knowledge to bear on a week-by-week narrative of her first pregnancy. She begins with her and her husband’s elation over a positive pregnancy test and goes on to describe the rigors of gestation, including morning sickness (interspersed with cravings for Chinese takeout), exhaustion during physical tasks she once took in stride, the impossibility of finding a comfortable sleeping position with her swollen belly, hormonal crying jags over nothing and everything, and rapturous meditations on the new life inside. (“There it was,” she writes of her daughter’s first motions. “That strange little sensation. Like tiny butterflies fluttering around in me.”) Parker recounts an agonizing, protracted labor and delivery, followed by the first four months with her newborn, which were marked by the baby’s incessant crying and round-the-clock breastfeeding sessions before settling into a more bearable schedule. Accompanying Parker’s personal reminiscences are detailed discussions of the practical aspects of pregnancy, which are expanded upon in the book’s voluminous appendices, covering everything from diet and vitamin supplements to the pros and cons of cesarean sections to the niceties of baby names. Parker is cleareyed about the anguish and uncertainty of new motherhood, but her soothing, straightforward approach takes away much of the terror. She writes in an evocative style that’s by turns poetic (“Just as a drop of rain falling on a mountain doesn’t worry about its course to the sea, so, too, take one moment at a time in labor”), pungently down-to-earth (“It pretty much feels like you’re trying to poop out your baby,” she writes of the climactic pushing), or mordantly funny (“I scrutinized the image in the mirror, not quite believing my eyes. I have no waist”). Readers will find a wealth of invaluable information and advice here, brought to life by the author’s vivid account of her own pregnancy.

A warmly reassuring guide packed with useful wisdom for new mothers.