The Author
Noah Jenks
Husband. Father of four. Boiler of water. And probably the last person you'd expect to write a book about home birth.
About Noah
Noah Jenks is a husband, a father of four, and a former home birth skeptic. He's the author of Go Boil the Water: A Partner's Guide to Supporting Homebirth.
Noah and his wife, Katie, came to parenthood three very different ways: an adoption, two hospital births, and one home birth. The hospital births went fine, but Noah spent both of them unsure what was happening or what he was supposed to be doing. Their youngest daughter, Amani Rose, was born in a warm tub in their bedroom, and it was the first time he understood what people mean when they say birth is beautiful.
Before writing the book, Noah worked in education as a Head of School and spent six years teaching middle school humanities. Today he, Katie, and their four kids live nomadically, traveling slowly through new countries and communities as a family.
Why I wrote this book
"I was standing there holding my wife's hand as she was pushing a watermelon out of her body. Helpless and clueless on what I was supposed to be doing."
That was me at our first hospital birth. Nobody told me what my role was, and I didn't know enough to ask. By our fourth, at home, I finally understood what the room needed from me, and it wasn't what I'd assumed.
When I went looking for a book written for the man in that room, I found almost nothing. Plenty of books for mothers, a few for dads in general, and nothing for a husband whose wife had just said, "I want a homebirth." So I wrote the one I wish someone had handed me. It isn't a medical guide. It's a presence guide: how to show up before labor, during the birth, and in the quiet hours after.
How the book was made
Go Boil the Water draws on more than one family's story. Noah sent questionnaires to husbands, birth mothers, midwives, and doulas who had been through home births, asking what happened, what helped, and what they wished the next partner knew. Their answers run through the whole book, and Chapter 10 is built entirely around them.
Find Noah elsewhere
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