Defining what’s important in life

THE PARENTS: Judith Bravis, 39, and Kevin Bravis, 42, of Academy Gardens

THE CHILD: Ronan, born May 2, 2022

A POST-BIRTH RITUAL: A week after Ronan arrived, they planted a juneberry tree, a native species, in their front yard, burying the placenta beneath its roots.

It felt, Judith remembers, as if a storm were coming on. And her job was not to fight the torrents, but to ride them.

That was her mind-set on May 1 when, right on schedule, she began early labor. Kevin timed her contractions. The birthing pool was ready, the midwife on call. For months, they’d been answering the reflexive question from strangers and relatives alike.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” people inevitably asked.

“It’s a BABY,” was always their answer.

“That struck me: another person who’s not even fully formed, and people already wanted to put them into boxes,” Judith says.

Their entire relationship had an out-of-the-box quality, from the day they met — a mutual friend’s urging — at Books of Wonder on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “We think of that as the spark, and that entire day as the date,” says Kevin. They call it Peach Day, because Judith had just passed through the farmers’ market in Union Square and was considering buying a fresh peach, “a symbol of life’s deliciousness.”

In the bookstore, she hungered for his attention. At the art shop they visited later, she couldn’t stop looking at his eyes. “For me,” Kevin recalls, “it was a feeling of open discovery: I want to find out more about this person.”

But Judith, who is from South Africa, had a visa that would soon expire. After dating for four months, she returned to her home country, and the pair conducted a long-distance relationship for the next two years.

“It’s a 19-hour plane flight,” Judith says. “It makes you evaluate: Is this worth it? If not, I’m wasting this person’s time and my time, so let’s be clear.”

Kevin lived with his parents to save money; then he moved to Cape Town, which “felt the most like New York that South Africa could offer. It was invigorating to put myself in different settings; it was a lot of learning about myself.”

He returned to Philadelphia in 2019 — they married first, in a private ceremony in Judith’s parents’ Johannesburg back yard — with a plan for her to follow in 2020. Then COVID-19 came.

“All flights were shut down. Borders closed. The information we had about coronavirus at the time was terrifying. I’m separated from this person I love, and there’s a deadly virus ripping around the world,” Judith says. It was another time of reckoning: “What is important in this life, what is important in the world? What do we want to focus on?”

Part of their answer was: a child. “Having a baby is an act of radical hope,” Kevin says. “It took me a while to have enough faith in the world, in my ability, to say, ‘I’m ready to have a kid now.’ ”

Judith had her own questions: “Would it be possible to continue to be creative and be a mother? How would we manage finances?”

Both were intent on defining the birth experience for themselves, just as they had contoured their relationship by writing their own marriage vows and combining their last names. They worked with the Philadelphia Midwife Collective and a doula, and the more they researched hospital births — the expense, the potential complications — the more committed they felt to giving birth at home.

Judith knew she was pregnant after their first month of trying. “What was extraordinary was that my body was being highly productive, but none of that was conscious. It’s not like I woke up and said, ‘Today I’m going to build lungs.’ It challenged me to rethink how I defined work and productivity.”

She has always loved water — after a stressful day, she gravitates toward the shower, a bath, or a swimming pool — so they planned to use a portable birthing tub. “Kevin could be there; we could do it on our own time, in our own way. There was nothing in my profile that suggested I was high-risk.”

After a day of mild labor at home, with frequent phone check-ins with the midwife, Judith was about to take a Benadryl and get some sleep when her contractions suddenly kicked into high gear.

She climbed into the birthing tub as soon as Kevin began to fill it. Outside, the thunderstorm rumbled. “In the mindfulness class we took, they said, on your clock, have the word ‘now.’ I couldn’t tell how dilated I was. There were very intense sensations; all I can do is make sounds through them and rest as much as I can between them.”

Kevin was pushing on Judith’s back when she felt a “strange, squishy thing.”

“Sure enough, there’s a head,” Kevin recalls. “I got out of the way to let the midwife do their thing. They said, ‘Do you want to catch the baby?’ I didn’t even know that was an option.

“The midwife said, ‘Judith, just one more push.’ And Ronan came swimming out. I picked him out of the water, and he started crying. I expected to be overwhelmed with emotion, but I was in such shock that time came down to a pinpoint: This is the thing that is happening to me right now. There is a baby in my arms.”

Judith had the same sensation: “There is no past, there is no future, there’s only right here.”

Before the birth, they’d brainstormed names inspired by nature or mythology, names “big enough that a child could grow into,” Judith says. They learned that Ronan means “little seal” in Celtic; they loved the legend of the selkie, a creature of Irish marine lore that is half-seal, half-human.

After Ronan’s birth, they held a ceremony in Lorimer Park with relatives, friends, and a few designated “guide-parents.” Judith and Kevin read a poem they’d written for their son. They invited blessings from guests. And they did not proffer a middle name. Ronan, they say, will have the space to select his own.