At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts Dear baby, I tried to write this letter last night, but couldn’t do it. It’s just so hard to put everything I want to say, everything I’ve thought about telling you, into words. There is so much I want to say to you and so much I want to teach you. Your name means “truth” and it is the deepest yearning of my heart that you grow up not only knowing, but believing and living the truth. You have been named in honor of our families. My parents started a tradition by giving their children virtues for middle names. Faith, Justice, Charity, and Valor. Now we add you to the family. From your father’s family, we chose A. for your middle name. This is your grandmother’s middle name and there have been many great women named A. Know what you believe in and understand where you have come from when you think about your name. By the time you read this, you will know well my many flaws. You will know that I am human and as such, am only a shadow of what God desires for me to be. You, perhaps more than anyone else, will have keen insight into the sins of your mother and this is likely to leave you just as confused as it has done with every woman before you. Most likely you will not know how to reconcile the love and admiration you feel towards your mother with the hurt and frustration I have caused you. Please know that you are not alone in this confusion – it is spans back as far as the chain of humanity exists. Know too that I seek to repent of the ways I sin against you, even when I don’t know how to do so. I bring you into the world and I parent you only by the grace of Jesus, and my only hope in this endeavor is that you will see him before you see me. Oh, if I could spare you from the ways I will sin against you by keeping you inside me forever, I would. But I can’t. Please forgive me for the things I will do and the ways I will hurt you that you may never explain to me or that I may never fully understand. Forgive me because Christ has forgiven me and because he forgives you. Your God, the God you will be taught to believe in, is a great and awesome God. Sometimes his goodness is outright terrifying. My greatest prayer for you is that you will know the terror of the Lord’s goodness, rather than the terror of his judgement. I don’t believe it is possible to approach God and not know one of those terrors. May you live in the light of the first. To know this terror is the beginning of true life and true freedom. The world will tell you all sorts of things about how to find freedom in life. But true freedom, real freedom starts with the holy fear that accompanies knowing and being loved by the God who created you, who owns your life. It is a beautiful terror and I pray you know the same overwhelming joy that I have found in this God’s embrace. You have already been the joy of my heart, baby. Feeling your kicks and squirms inside of me has been a trial, but more than that, it has been a time full of wonder and amazement. These days all I long for is to look into your eyes and meet the shadow I have felt growing inside of me. Your life has taught me, challenged me, and grown me already. This is it. This is the end of my motherhood project. You are due to arrive in one week, and who knows what day you will actually make your entry, but it is time to draw this recording of my thoughts and experiences to an end. It’s time to come to an end partially because I have little more to say, and partially because a new thing is beginning. I grow more and more aware every day that this story is no longer mine alone. With you here and our stories intertwined it is time to draw a veil onto this world. Motherhood is no longer an abstract, but a real thing with a real person involved. This is now your story, too, and as such it is time for me to step aside and protect your little world. Thank you for letting me write this. Thank you for helping me grow. “I know so much more than I did about the woman who wrote it. What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work… The change which the writing wrought in me… was only a beginning - only to prepare me for the gods’ surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.” – Orual in Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis
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At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Today has been a quiet, low kind of day. I’ve just been at home, working. It’s sunnier than it’s been all week, which of course makes so many things better. But I’ve been tired – physically tired, mentally tired, and emotionally tired. I don’t think it’s anything other than the tiredness everyone talks about experiencing this late in pregnancy. But I’ve been battling my demons in the midst of it nonetheless. The old and constant temptations have been on my mind – feeling like I’m not doing enough, feeling unsatisfied with what I am doing, worrying about whether I’ve missed and wasted my opportunities to do the things I do really love, etc. But I’m not giving into them. It’s too quiet and I’m too tired to give into them. It is ok if I am small. I don’t have to be great. God has been faithful to me over and over and over again, and he has directed my steps. Whenever I’ve experienced success in life it has come clearly from God’s direction, not my own. Even when I’ve worked hard for something, and received it, it has been clear that it was not my own doing, but God’s. So in this moment, when I’m tempted to believe that the dreams I have will never happen, that panic is the only option, I turn to Christ and remember that he has brought me this far – to unexpected places – and I can trust he will continue to take me where he wants. And it will be good. This will probably be one of my last entries and I wonder if I am any different today than I was when I started writing more than two years ago. Am I holier? Am I a better person? Am I more like Christ? Truthfully, I have to say no. I’m not and I know I’m not. The same sins of fear and doubt and selfishness that plagued me when I started continue to plague me today. I still fret and worry over who I am rather than living freely in my identity in Christ. I still flinch at any indication that I am not amazing, that I am not worthy of admiration. I am still vain and shallow and want things that are poison to my soul. I still need Jesus and I always will. But I do think I have learned something about peace. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I am a more peaceful person. I still yearn to grow in this area. But perhaps I have learned something about peace – what it is and what it means. Peace isn’t happiness, and it isn’t a feeling. It isn’t optimism. Rather I think peace is a cessation of our striving. A knowledge that with God’s hand resting in benediction upon our heads, we can stop moving and be still. When I understand it this way, I know I am at peace with becoming a mother. I will continue to struggle with many things about being a woman and a mom, and I will surely repent again and again as I grow in grace. But the restlessness with which I started writing – the sense that I could only overcome my fears through a mighty exertion of myself upon the world – that is gone. Peace today, in this quietness, is an open-handed acceptance of where God has brought me and a cessation of my striving in the light of his blessing upon my head. Perhaps I will produce nothing more in my life and motherhood will be an end as much as it is a beginning. Perhaps God will continue to bless and utilize the gifts he has given me, giving me joy in my heart. Regardless, I will be still under his hand. I will accept the smallness such stillness requires. For he has been good to me. Always good to me. At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts
The last couple of days have been so hard. I’ve been having a lot of pain in my pelvis and last week it finally got so bad that I could barely walk more than 5 minutes without pretty severe pain. I finally went to the doctor on Wednesday. Everything is ok, thankfully, but the pain I’m experiencing is because the baby has already dropped and is sitting low. The nurse was tight lipped about whether it meant she might come early or not – until right at the very end of our appointment. Then she mentioned that often, labor starts within two weeks of the baby dropping for first time mothers. But, of course we shouldn’t plan on it. Once we got home, though, I started to go into panic mode. Two weeks! Literally nothing in our lives is ready for this baby to possibly come in two weeks. Nothing with work is lined up or wrapped up, my thesis defense isn’t even scheduled until two weeks from now, the house is still not unpacked, the hospital bag isn’t packed, Trey would be wrapping up his semester after she comes, trying to write papers in the midst of a screaming baby. It would be chaos. I’ve had a difficult time not feeling totally overwhelmed by this possibility. And defeated. One can make all of the best plans, I guess, and in the end it just might not matter at all. Maybe like Icarus I’ve flown too near the sun and my wings are now melting. Added to all of this, my hormones are just raging and I’ve cried more in the last 48 hours than I did in the last month. It’s an emotional time of life. It feels like all of the divergent threads I’ve been weaving are quickly, perhaps more rapidly than anticipated, coming to a point. I’m being pulled along and can’t stop the tide. Half the time I want it to just happen, because I’m so ready to meet this little girl and be done with her constant kneeing of my ribs. But the other half of the time I just want it all to slow down so I can catch my breath and make sure all of the boxes are checked and I get my final quiet moments with Trey. But God’s ways are bigger than ours and perhaps this is his way of keeping me from getting too comfortable. Once again I am learning to grab onto him from out of the discomfort of what feels like a storm. And in the midst of it, he is reminding me that though everything from the world may tell me it is a problem, the arrival of our child is not an inconvenience. Life and its beginning are always unpredictable, but despite what our mechanized and timetabled culture says, it is not an inconvenience. It is not something to be controlled. One day my daughter may read these words. If she comes early, her birth story will probably involve jokes about all of the chaos she brought with her for a few fleeting weeks. But, my child, you must know that your life and your birth were not an inconvenience to us. You came according to God’s will and we embrace it, excitedly looking forward to first moment we look into your eyes. At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts I want you to be my love I want you to be my love 'Neath the moon and the stars above I want you to be my love I want you to know me now I want you to know me now Break a promise make a vow I know, you want me now Like I want you Like I want you I want you to be my love I want you to be my love 'Neath the moon and the stars above I want you to be my love 'Cause I want you 'Cause I want you I know all you All you've been through - Over the Rhine Dear Trey, We’re getting to the end of this. Very soon, maybe sooner than we anticipated, we will no longer be just the two of us. We will be three, a change we will never go back on. I’m crying as I write this, not because I don’t want us to be three, and not just because of the hormones that seem to rage through me these days, but because the last five years have truly been better and more beautiful than I could ever have hoped for or imagined. Our first dance song is playing right now and all I can think about is how afraid I was, even during that first dance. You have put up with so much fear. I hope I have not driven you crazy. But you have been my rock again and again. And you have been my truest friend. I am ready for this next step and more than excited to take it with you, but I also mourn the passing of this particular time we’ve had together. Our special little world is expanding, and though it is for the better good, I will always miss this world we have lived in for that past five years. I know you will be a good father, just as you have been a wonderful husband. It may be years, most likely decades, before our little girl truly understands what she has in you. But I will know, and I will encourage her to see and understand it. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for hearing me. Thank you rolling your eyes at me when I need them to be rolled. Thank you for laughing at me the way you do. Thank you giving me joy. Thank you telling me all about the weird, nerdy things you tell me about. Thank you for your stubbornness. Thank you for kind, sensitive heart. Thank you for being mine. Let’s do this. At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Recently a friend sent me a recommendation for a book written against the natural child birth movement. I haven’t read it, but whenever in life I actually have time to do so I want to read it along with the book I keep hearing about from the woman who started the natural childbirth movement on a farm. I’ve become pretty intrigued at trying to understand how these women come up with their philosophical positions concerning childbirth. On the one hand, the natural childbirth movement argues that the process is totally natural and should be left alone. On the other hand, the doctor writing the book my friend recommended argues that pain is not natural, nor is it considered a human good; therefore, the pain of childbirth should not be considered natural and something to leave unmedicated. Suffering is not something people should view as “normal” or “natural,” and we should attempt to alleviate the suffering a woman experiences in childbirth. I find this ideological divide fascinating, particularly for what it says about the secular world we live in. Apart from an understanding of creation that maintains it was designed to be good, and apart from a belief in the fall and resulting curse of that which was designed to be good, I’m not sure how you would navigate the conundrum of childbirth. Apart from the seemingly Biblical idea that pain in childbirth is not natural, I think the natural birthers have the philosophical upper hand. Totally apart from the fact that the natural birthers only get to focus on the experience and believe the things they believe due to historical privilege (natural childbirth can only be romanticized the way it is given the availability of medical intervention for situations that go wrong and our dramatically low mortality rates compared with the rest of history), I think they are at least ideologically consistent in promoting the idea that women should not be afraid of something that is at its most basic level natural to their bodies. And yet, the natural childbirth movement is inconsistent in their idea of pain. Where else in life do people glorify natural pain – as opposed to chosen pain in order to achieve such as an athlete would endure – and make it meaningful and transcendent? To believe that everything about childbirth is totally natural, and therefore totally good, you are pretty much left with concluding that either women are the most screwed over biological entities on the face of the planet evolutionarily speaking, or that pain and suffering in childbirth is somehow the only place in the world we believe physical pain to be a holy, meaningful experience. If the pain and threat of childbirth is truly natural, then women are the biggest losers of the evolutionary game. If not, and we still want to maintain that childbirth should be left unmedicated for the natural spiritual experience it provides, might we not call it masochistic? Pain seems to be a reality that neither side of this debate really knows how to adequately grapple with. The natural childbirthers make it integral to the identity and substance of womanhood, accepting evolution’s luck of the draw and attempting to bequeath it with meaning. The medical system rightly understands that suffering should not be inherent to anyone’s identity and that in order to protect the dignity of women, it is good to prevent or limit the pain which can so easily reduce women to vulnerability and misery. Yet in the process, the medical world so often forgets and overlooks what is good and beautiful about childbirth – that in some shape or form it is what women were created to do. The medical profession, as represented by the doctor writing this book, equivocates childbirth and a broken arm in order to suggest we are foolish not to offer women medical intervention; but arms don’t naturally break and women’s bodies do naturally produce babies. Only the Biblical idea of fallenness seems really adequate to hold both realities together – that women’s bodies are made to do this thing and should be given room to make it work (natural childbirth) and that along with so many other things about our physical existence, childbirth is fallen and can do real, serious, and lasting harm to women, which we should try to prevent (medical intervention). More than anything else I can think of, childbirth stands at the crossroads between the glory and the shame of humanity. Only in childbirth do we catch such a crystal clear glimpse of what was meant to be – the power and strength of humanity exerting, maintaining, and producing life. And only in childbirth are we confronted with the futility and misery of life severed from fellowship with God, smashed into the fragmented remains of his image. For both woman and child, birth is a beautiful, glorious, God-imaging moment that cannot escape from the confines of suffering and death, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves of its transcendence. Oh the beautiful, breathtaking mystery of the incarnation and the redemption it ushered in. The glorious marvel of Jesus is not only that the incarnated Son of God suffered death, but also that he suffered birth! How often do we contemplate the mysteries of the incarnation, marveling at Christ’s embodiment without thinking about his birth. His birth was not romantic and transcendent for Mary; and this is not because it was in a manger, but rather because it was just like every other birth. It involved the same mundane, banal pain that every woman and every baby has felt since Eve. The mystery of the incarnation not only involves the mystery of Jesus’ smallness; it involves the mystery of the God of the universe experiencing the banality of birth itself, since what was intended for glory can only ever offer pale reflections of the original design once it is fallen. In the cross Christ paid for sin. In the resurrection Christ finished death. And in his birth Christ redeemed the very idea of life itself. At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Yesterday the women in my life in Boston gave me a baby shower. It was wonderful. Sweet L. has been such a faithful and thoughtful friend and I don’t know what the last five years would have been like without her. She is definitely a better friend than I have deserved. This morning as I was getting ready for church, I was thinking about the community that I’m a part of here and thinking about just how incredibly lonely it must be to not have a community like the church in one’s life. I guess women without a religious community do often find community somehow, but I also guess that it is often much riskier. Sometimes when I think about the loneliness of urban, secular America, it makes me want to cry it seems so big and deep and overwhelming. I can’t imagine any time in life in which I would feel more lonely than preparing for childbirth if I did not have a serious community to be part of. On the T, Red Line, Massachusetts
I waddle along like a walrus. At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts Last night I woke up with painful Braxton Hicks. For a while I thought maybe I was even starting labor since I contracted four or five times. It was a huge wake up call to what lies ahead. I’m sure they weren’t nearly as painful as they will be and all I could do was think “stop stop stop.” The pain was very real. Even though it did obviously stop (no baby so far today!) my body was still so sore and uncomfortable all night long. I rarely wake up feeling rested these days. Even though I’m dealing with so much discomfort, I’ve been thinking a lot about the prenatal life of my baby. What is it like in there? All of the ultrasound pictures people share show these little babies laughing, frowning, sleeping, smiling. How much emotion does she feel? And what causes that emotion? She surely isn’t aware of another person or of herself. So where does her laughter come from? Does she feel joy? Is joy so inherent to human reality that my barely cognizant baby who has never interacted with another human can feel it as she flips and kicks and dives around my uterus? How is this possible? And if she feels joy, does she also feel sadness or fear? A few days ago I was using the paper shredder and every time it turned on, the baby moved abruptly inside of me. I can’t think of any more physical, tangible display of the way fear operates in humanity – it is the complete inability to understand the world around us and trust that all is ok. Oh, I just wanted to hug her and hold her and tell her it was ok. I think it must be God’s mercy that we don’t remember our lives in the womb or our births. Birth is a dangerous experience for a woman, but how much more so for the baby? What little comfort she has found in life so far is taken away in the process. Of course, the greater joy of life outside the womb awaits; but in the moment, birth must surely feel like a threat. “You must be born again.” How much have we lost a true understanding of these words? Just as we have lost our understanding of the Bible’s agricultural metaphors, so too have we lost the power of Christ’s words about spiritual rebirth. Christ did not speak of birth according to our medicalized experiences. He did not speak of rebirth with the safety and hope of 21st century expectations for a transformative and beautiful experience. He spoke of birth with all of the offense and threat that it involved in first century Judea. Birth was not transcendent, romantic, or beautiful. It was a bloody, broken, sweaty experience – and it was full of threat. Birth in the ancient world was a moment of life or death. Likewise, spiritual rebirth involves life or death. To become a child of God does not involve prettiness and peacefulness. It involves what amounts to a traumatic and laborious process by which we are removed from our dark and shadowy comforts and put into the light of God’s embrace, slapped alive to our first real breath. (Image by Mark Chadwick, "Abstract Acrylic Fluid Painting Detail.") At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts God is near to the weak. I will let this comfort me, give me joy, and renew me. I hit a new pregnancy low last night. I had a pretty good day actually. Slept in, walked a lot, didn’t eat too much. We assembled the crib which was so much fun. But I woke up at 1am and it was horrible. I had terrible reflux. Truly, truly terrible. And that triggered my asthma. I couldn’t sleep at all. My restlessness was keeping Trey up, so he decided to sleep on the couch, but I made him stay in bed. He doesn’t really fit on the couch and I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping for a while anyway, so at least one of should actually sleep. I watched TV and shopped for bed skirt for the crib until 3am. At 3am I just broke down sobbing. I had already eaten four tums and used my inhaler, but everything still hurt and was uncomfortable. I finally climbed back into bed and it took about another hour to fall asleep. I tried to sleep in this morning, but wasn’t super successful. Even napping this afternoon hasn’t been so great. It’s like my body has decided it just can’t take it all anymore, and even though it’s so incredibly tired, it refuses to settle down. Jesus! Please, please help me. I have 10 weeks left in this pregnancy and I don’t know how I’m going to survive it. Yesterday a pastor’s wife I know in the area was telling me about how the minute she actually delivered her child, she could feel all of her organs take a breath. As everything immediately started to settle with the removal of seven pounds of child, she could once again catch her breath, breathing deeply for what felt like the first time in eternity. She said it was a spiritual experience, reminding her of what it’s like to finally find spiritual release from a burden. This is all I want right now – that degree of release. A deep breathe. The ability to fill my lungs with hope. I know it’s coming, but it’s going to be such a long and miserable two months until it does come. Just as the world is waiting to take a gasp of air with arrival of renewal, so I wait, breathing but restricted, for the arrival of this baby. At Home, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Pregnancy is just kind of a demoralizing experience. There is so much about it to love. I love feeling my baby move inside of me. I love the way it has opened my eyes to the realities of being a woman. I love the way pregnancy puts so much into perspective, not quite drowning out my goals and interests in life, but providing a reprimand to the ways I can obsess over them. I love the way I am being forced to consider my body and accept its power and limitations. But despite all of these things, there is still so much about pregnancy that I find to be humiliating and demoralizing. To start, there is the persistent physical discomfort. Even my second trimester was marked by it. My body aches and groans and at times it rears up against me in violent protest as it simultaneously stretches and squashes. Every night I go to bed with a whimpering body trying to digest what it needs but is unable to take in and process. I wake up in the middle of the night and my hips are sobbing as they try to slowly unhinge and loosen to make room. The walls of my belly exist in shocked protest as an ever bigger and bigger foot or elbow thrusts newfound weight against them. My body often can’t seem to decide if this is the best thing ever – because it is what it was made to do – or the most embarrassing, as it struggles to figure out how to make it all work. It doesn’t feel like failure – not at all. But it does feel like a slow, nine month long study in confusion and mayhem. And I feel this all the most when it comes to sex. My body seems to be so distracted by everything else it’s trying to figure out that sex is pretty much the last thing it wants. I often grieve over this reality for my husband, but in truth, it’s just as sorrowful for myself. I love sex, but I do not love it with a bowling ball strapped to my midsection and hips that scream when twisted. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t not feel beautiful; in fact I love my belly and the shape it’s given me. I just feel like my body doesn’t know what to do with itself. I remember thinking before we got pregnant that the whole experience would be so romantic. Sex to try to conceive would be so hot and we would have nine months of googly eyes before the baby came. Trey and I have had many wonderful moments throughout these months. We have had some beautifully intimate and special times, and I have never felt more protection, concern, and affection from my husband than during these months. He has served me sacrificially the whole way through. But it hasn’t necessarily been romantic – getting pregnant was more funny than anything else and my body has generally not been well disposed to food and late night activities. The idea of a babymoon sounds more exhausting than rewarding. Survival has been the goal more than anything else. I don’t want to complain. I really, really, really don’t want to complain. All of this is worth it and more than anything else in the world I can’t wait to meet my daughter. But I also just wish I could have better understood how much the sacrifices of motherhood would start with pregnancy, not birth. My expectations weren’t right. The challenge parenting presents to your sense of self starts at the very beginning, at conception. From that first moment, the call to give of yourself begins, and though the physical reality of my life will soon start to improve once again, the need to die to self has only just begun. (Image by Wolfgang Sterneck, "A Reality called Boom." |
About the ProjectThis is a very personal project. It tracks my growth and development as I journeyed toward motherhood over the recent years. It doesn't document every experience I had, and probably neglects my more joyful and peaceful moments in the frenzy of trying to communicate my fears, anxieties, and doubts. If you are a friend or loved one, please do not let anything you read here overshadow what you know of me personally. If you are a stranger, please remember that a living and flawed person stands behind these words. To all my guests here, please understand these are not political statements and try to extend me grace, even as I share my failures and foibles - I have repented of much of what I share. I don't share this journal as an exemplar, but rather out of the desire to share my hope that entrance to motherhood does not need to be a fearful thing - despite the very real fears I have fought against. Motherhood is simply a part of life and one through which I am discovering more of myself and my God. Archives
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