As tears streamed down my cheeks, three faces stood looking at me with concern. The nurse, who had faithfully helped reposition me over and over again to help progress my labor in the passing hours, sticking her fingers inside me to help direct my pushing. My doctor, who had not once during my prenatal care said the word “c-section” and who now held my hand and told me the procedure did not mean I was a failure. And my husband, who for sixty hours had been by my side helping coach my breathing, hold me throughout bouts of uncontrollable shaking, and read scripture to remind me of God’s presence, and whose face now showed an undeniable mixture of fear and relief. I finally accepted the inevitable, recalling stories of friends who had tried to keep pushing only to find themselves dealing with additional complications.

I lay on the operating table, my arms stretched out and deep sorrow welling up in my soul. All of the questions about how I got there and whether it was really necessary came later. At the moment, all I felt was fear like I had never felt it before - and underneath it an emotional pain that made me completely passive. Undoubtedly the heavy doses of drugs were partially to answer for the utter surrender I found myself experiencing; but they did not explain it all. As I lay on the table, I realized I was truly and finally at the end of waiting for motherhood. My baby was going to arrive, but she would arrive in the most invasive and scary way I could imagine. And as the operating room chatter of doctors and nurses quickly indicated, even the details of my brightly lit, highly anesthetized delivery would not be easy. The baby was so stuck that normal procedure could not take place.

As the tugging and pulling commenced and continued, I closed my eyes. In my heart I reached out to God and he met me. Story after story of broken women flashed across my mind. Through scripture, God reminded me of his closeness to women who suffer. I thought about Sarah. I thought about Mary. I thought a lot about the woman healed of bleeding. Lying on the operating table I felt unbelievably small. But it was in that smallness that God fellowshipped with me and reminded me of the ways he has seen the small, hidden things of female existence. Now more than ever I understood the suffering of women described over and over again in the Bible and as I was ministered to by the Holy Spirit, I loved the God who condescends to see us.

The worst moment of the entire last nine months came at the very end. As they finally lifted the baby out of me, she did not cry. For an eternity I listened to doctors repeat questions and return answers about their efforts to invoke her cry. In reality this did not last longer than a minute, but that minute was fire through my brain. Everything about the last nine months snapped and all of my concerns about myself, about my identity, about my future were burned up with the overwhelming desire to know that my baby would breathe. In an instant I dropped every fear I had about what motherhood would do to me because all of those fears could not compete with the resounding thought that my baby was not okay. Until a kind nurse came to reassure him that our little girl had a good heartbeat despite the continued need for her to cry, my husband sat on the edge of insanity. But soon the cry came, and it came loudly.

Verity Ann was born at 12:53pm on Sunday, April 30, 2017. As the doctors continued to stitch and medicate me, she was brought to my chest and I said, “Hello, baby.” She couldn’t stay long, though, and it was my greatest relief to send her daddy to watch as the nurses cleaned and assisted her. She was not alone.

In the weeks since my daughter’s birth, I have dealt with myriad emotions. Against the backdrop of relief, I’ve doubted doctors, I’ve doubted myself, I’ve doubted the system - all to arrive back and back again at the belief that everyone did both what they could and what they should have done. In the end, what I have had to accept is not the I or someone else screwed myself over, but rather that I have a broken body. Despite everyone’s best efforts and even in the shadow of God’s providence, my daughter’s birth left scars on my body that will not be removed until the full redemption of all matter. My womb, which was not meant to be, was cut open and sewed back closed and this mark on my body that will not go away until the dust I’m a part of is remade again.

I’ve seen a lot of women online speak of pride in their “battle scars.” I understand why women speak this way. It helps to bring honor to a process that easily feels like your biggest failure as a woman. I too feel like I went through battle and was willing to do whatever necessary to win, even letting my flesh be cut, pulled, and sewn in order to ensure victory. I too feel as if the scars left behind are a badge of my experience. But this term - “battle scars” - only reminds me that things are not as they should be. It’s a term that speaks to the sacrifice made and the victory I had, but also that all was not right to begin with. Battle is only something we enter into when something is broken, flawed. Just as the wounds of the soldier will one day be erased along with all bloodshed and war, so too the scars left behind by the battles women have faced in birthing. The dust of our existence will be renewed. “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). God has not forgotten who we are.

Since her arrival, my daughter has brought me more joy than I could have possibly imagined. When I look into her eyes, when she smiles as she poops, when she sticks out her tongue in hunger, when her eyes finally close in sleep - all of these things are a new song for my soul. These and countless other things about her life and person. It amazes me how quickly this joy flooded my life. Almost from the moment she was born, her existence reduced the worry of other unhappy things going on. The long labor, the unfortunate c-section, the initial frustrations of nursing, the discomfort of the hospital, the sleepless nights all so easily and so quickly faded into the joy of life. Verity does not fulfill me. But her life makes me happy and it is something I love to celebrate every day.

But I am not very good at writing about my joys. Words are hard for me when I turn to describing the things that make me happy. I wish so badly that I could find better ways to describe the joy I find in being Verity’s mother and in embracing her as my daughter. And I wish that I had known more of this joy during my pregnancy. Now that I know how happy it can be to have a child I wish I had celebrated her preparation every day. 

In the end, it is a matter of love. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). How can I be afraid of motherhood when I love my child so much? How can I be afraid of change when God has given me so much? There is no punishment for me. I am free to love, and it is love that makes me brave.
 
During one of our nights in the hospital I got up to go to the bathroom. It was the first night without the catheter, so I had to make myself walk despite the very painful incision and my abs that could barely support sitting on the toilet. I stood in the bathroom and thought about my beat up body. It made me feel very very small. I hadn’t felt that way since I lived in China. The only other time I have ever felt that small was during a bus ride across the vast expanse of a Chinese megalopolis. I sat by the window, looking out at thousands of people passing by, knowing they were only a small portion of China's billion, and I and my problems became small. I was lost among these people, invisible. And the small sufferings I faced living in their country were small indeed. But as I rode on the bus, I knew that while smallness most often means vulnerability, it can also mean hiddenness.  On that ride I knew myself to be hidden in God’s hand. To be small can be frightening, but only if you are exposed, abandoned. When something small is hidden within something large, when it is sheltered and protected, it is not a terrifying position.

Since becoming a mother, I have felt very small. But I am learning that is ok, because throughout scripture it is the small to whom the Lord promises to be near. The weak, the vulnerable, the scared, the hurt, the uncertain - these are the people who receive the promises of God. In the recent weeks, the birth of my daughter has given me the privilege of knowing myself included.

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

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
 
Life is crazy. We moved into Harvard student housing last week and it was a zoo. By God’s mercy my mom came into town and helped us pack. I seriously don’t think we would have made it without her help. She pretty much got into town and power housed her way through our apartment. The only downside to having her pack was how excessively she tapes boxes. It’s given us a lot of laughter as we unpack.
 
Now that we’re in the new place, I feel both deeply grateful and am dealing with a lot of anxiety. The place is really great, all things considered, and will be great with a kid. It’s much more accessible to campus, there is a washer and dryer, and tons of areas for children to play in – as well as tons of children themselves. Baby V definitely won’t lack for playmates.
 
With that said, though, I’m struggling with my pride, my limitations, my doubts, and my worth in this move. My pride is rearing up because this place is just so small and so unglamorous. While everyone else is buying houses and moving on in the world, we’re choosing to live in cramped student housing. I find myself worrying not about the apartment itself so much as I worry about what other people will think of it and of us in it. I’m facing my limitations because I am working a ton in order to live here rather than a half an hour away, and I feel overwhelmed wondering if it’s really sustainable with a baby. Can I really work as many hours as I’m committed to working in a week and can Trey really get through his PhD excellently with a baby on the way?
 
This is the most I feel doubt about it. I know a lot the emotions involved have to do with the fact that I just moved, the house is still a disaster, and I’m really, really behind on my thesis. But nonetheless, I’m starting to better imagine the realities of adding a baby to our lives and am trying to reckon what I foresee with everything I’ve committed to. Lord, please let this child be a good sleeper! And of course, with it all, as with any time I feel emotionally overwhelmed or stressed, I am really struggling with my self worth and the decisions I’ve made. Am I making the wrong decision by not trying to do a PhD myself right now? Are we insane for continuing with school through our 30s? If I can’t have as much academic success this year as I think I need to be in a good position for applying to programs later was this whole degree a waste? Is all of this pure drivel and instead I should be thinking only and solely of my kids?
 
I just want the answers to life and more often than not, answers are the most difficult thing to find in the world.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
It's become so hard to write. Not because there isn't anything to write about, but because there is too much to write about. Every day is filled with so much to process, so much to try to understand. Most days I just don't know where to begin.
 
Christmas was both a very good and a very strange time. For some reason a lot of people seem to think that it's particularly special to be pregnant at Christmas. This is so bizarre to me. Why would it be more special to be pregnant at Christmas than at any other time of the year? I guess the insinuation is that somehow it brings you closer to Mary's experience. That I understand. But shouldn't pregnancy bring any woman at any time closer to Mary's experience and the mystery of the incarnation? Christmas is simply a yearly reminder of what we should know to be true year round. The whole idea that it's more special to be pregnant at Christmas just feels to me like part of our romanticization of maternity.
 
Being home while pregnant was also weird, but in a totally different way. It felt similar to the first time I stayed in my parents' house after getting married. It was a marked reminder of the changes that happen in life – the dreams of an adolescent Hannah about marriage and family are no longer dreams, but reality. After marriage the physical presence of this man in my childhood bedroom marked change in ways I could touch and smell. With pregnancy, my own physical space within my parents' home is changing. I'm not just bringing another body into this space, but my body itself no longer exists the same way. I literally no longer move around the house in the same way I once did and that will intensify once this baby is born. My very movement is now marked by another and the space I inhabit changes as I change.
 
I had my first "stranger touches the belly" experience over Christmas. It was awkward. It was after church and I was catching up with an old friend. Her brother, who I've never met, came over and we all started chatting about the baby. He asked me if people touch my belly and as he asked, he reached over and touched it himself. I don't think he even thought about what he was doing, but it was quite a shocker.
 
The belly is definitely taking on a life of its own. Baby V moves around all night long. It seriously is like she's having a party in there. Sometimes I wake up and she is thudding against the walls of my uterus. Not kicking, not punching – full body slamming. I love her so much.
 
The aches and pains are definitely on the rise, too. Driving ten hours to Pittsburgh was a beast. Everything ached when we arrived and it took a few days for my muscles to loosen up again. I've started getting this pain in my left butt cheek, and my lower abdomen gets sore. Sometimes it seems like the baby is balled up in one area of my uterus, either down low or the side I'm sleeping on and then it hurts. I move to my back and she seems to move to a more central area and the relief is wonderful. We have three more months to go, so I can only imagine her love of curling up right on my bladder is only a foretaste of the discomfort due to arrive when she's so big there is nowhere else for her to go. I probably need to be doing more stretching, and I definitely need to be walking more. I tried to dance at Debbie's wedding and that was telling. Everything was so tight I could only make it through a song or two before needing to sit down for a break.
 
I just can't wait to meet this little girl. Every time I think about holding her and laughing with her, smiling into her eyes, I feel like I have a high school crush all over again. We started registering for baby items over Christmas and that was the worst. I hated just about everything having to do with deciphering and picking out things we want for the baby. There is just so much crap in the world to buy for a baby. Even now I can feel my blood pressure rise thinking about the baby registry. But when I think about the baby itself, I don't feel anxious. I know there is so much that I could be anxious about, but all I want to do is hug her. It's hard to feel anxious and afraid when you just can't stop thinking about meeting the person you've been feeling inside of you for months.

(Whitney Waller, "Pregnant.")

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
I have been feeling so much affection for my baby in recent days. It seems like all of the warm, glowy feelings people kept asking me about are finally here. I'm sure a lot of it is feeling the baby move so much. I feel it move enough now that I do not feel anxious about whether it is still alive. When I first started to feel it move, it was infrequent enough that I had a hard time not having anxiety when days passed without feeling it. Now I feel it just about every day. It's like a little goldfish swimming around in there. Sometimes it makes my heart want to burst. I've never been a big baby person generally speaking, but when I think about my own baby, and about kissing its little cheeks, my heart swarms with a million happy thoughts.
 
Anxiety is a funny thing. Throughout so much of this pregnancy, and really throughout so much of my life, I recognize in myself the thought that I should feel anxious. Sometimes it feels like all of modern life is conspiring to make sure you are informed about the thousand reasons why you should be anxious. Have I eaten the right things? Did I eat something that might hurt the baby? If this happens what does it mean? If they do all these tests, doesn't it mean this many things can go wrong? There are literally thousands of things to worry about in pregnancy if one chose to do so. And it's not even pregnancy itself as a medical condition. Parenthood is an even bigger landmine. Do we live in the right place? Do we make enough money? How can we guarantee our income? How can I work and still be the mother I want to be? Again, there are thousands of things to worry about it if one chooses to do so.
 
Oddly enough, I have felt less anxious, or at least less tempted to be anxious, during this pregnancy than maybe ever before in my life. I'm sure that will come and go – I'll have peaks and valleys as always – but being pregnant has made me have to just accept the flow of life and go with it. Sometimes it feels like I've stepped into a river and I have to put my feet up in order to let it move me forward. There's less anxiety in that than in trying to keep my feet stubbornly rooted. I don't know that we've made the best choices, I don't know that we will in the future. I don't know how to do everything I want to do. I don't know how to make it all work out. But I also can't pretend like God hasn't faithfully guided us already and will do so in the future. Our decisions very well could hurt us at some point in life, but God never will.
 
The best antidote I've found in recent weeks to the temptation to worry is that of thankfulness. I'm sure to a million people wiser than me that seems like an obvious statement. But it's something I am only really experiencing now. I am so deeply thankful to God for the life I have. I am thankful for his material provision in our lives. I'm thankful for how easy it was to get pregnant after all of my fretting. I'm thankful for my work and the jobs he's given me. I'm thankful for the brain he has given me and the education I've received. I'm thankful for my friends and for my family. I'm thankful for Trey. These are all things I worry about so much, but when I stop and reflect with a thankful heart, I truly feel differently. At times I'm overwhelmed with the goodness God has given us. He has even given me a washer and dryer in the new apartment – something so small and trifling and yet so big in my mind as a blessing. There are times in my life when I can't help but consider the ways in which God not only blesses, but blesses abundantly through the little trifles which can seem so important.
 
Tomorrow we find out the baby's gender. I can't wait. It feels like our first introduction to a new friend. I am so thankful for this little life and I pray that God will protect and bless it, just as he has done for me.

(Erik Cleves Kristensen, "Painting of a Madonna.")

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Well. I'm pregnant. After years of complaining, processing, and thinking about this, here it is. I'm not even sure I comprehend it. Out of nowhere, with no expectations, I'm pregnant.
 
Last week, before I knew it to be a reality and only suspected it, I was peeking around the corner at awe. But this week, now that it is reality, all I feel is the physicality of it. My head hurts, my stomach is weird, and I have never ever felt more fatigued in my life. It's hard to think about awe when your body feels like it's crumpling from within.
 
It is an awe-full thing.
 
It ended up being so easy and so natural – not hard at all. Life taking its course in the most literal of meanings. And that is terrifying. Most of all, I simply find myself once again being scandalized and terrorized by the goodness of God demonstrated in it. God does not scare me when I believe him to be stern or demanding; but, I find him to be absolutely harrowing when he blesses me abundantly. How can such a great God deign to see me? Why would he do such a thing? It is his goodness that slaps the defiance off of my face and leaves me feeling naked and afraid. A God who withholds seems to give me space to raise a fist. A God who freely gives can only be met by my complete submission.
 
For more than two years, I have believed that I was doomed. Maybe I still will be. Maybe I will miscarry and will get the woe I so often believe is rightfully mine. But right now, as new life begins to grow inside my tummy, I feel God laughing at me. Not mocking me, not spiting me, not even shaking his head at me. Just laughing for the joyful mirth of proving my countless wayward doubts wrong. Laughing as a Father laughs with joy over the blunders of his child. Laughing in love.
 
The last three weeks have been some of the most chaotic and miserable of my life. But it feels as if a note has been struck, and its ringing in the air both creates and demands a silence within my heart. Be quiet. Be quiet now. The ripples of this moment will spread forth in waves, but this is a moment of silence. This is a moment to let life lie as it is, to stop, to let be.
 
The Lord is good. And he sits on his throne in heaven. Amen.

(Image by Percy French, "Mayo Mermaids.") 

National Quemoy University, Kinmen Island, Taiwan
 
It is my birthday and I have only fully realized it because I wrote out the date just now. I am 32 years old and the past two weeks have been some of the most eye opening to my life that I've ever had. I am realizing that I am exactly what I never thought I would be – a successful, childless workaholic. I know I constantly worry about not doing something with my life and about having to give up my interests to have kids. But it has literally never crossed my mind what my life looks like to the outside world until this month.
 
It started during a phone conversation with my mom. She asked me if we were trying to get pregnant and I was floored. I assumed that would just be obvious to everyone since I am turning 32. Even my mom didn't think it was an obvious thing.
 
Then I actually heard myself speaking in some of my conversations with people – I was preparing to travel internationally for my job while also finishing up my school semester while considering applying to Harvard while publishing a paper while joining staff at a church. While living in the third most expensive city in the United States. I've been so focused on figuring out how to not lose my goals that I have been totally blind to my success in them and again, how I must look to the people around me. I have been addicted to success and work. I also have been legitimately trying to figure out how I am supposed to use my gifts and talents.
 
Right now I have a choice before me – I cannot use all of my gifts and talents to their full extent without burning myself out. I cannot have a family while using all of my gifts and talents. So which ones will I use? I am 32 years old, have been working like a mad woman for four years, and am burnt out. It is time that I get my shit in order and stop trying to do it all and instead focus on how to live while using the gifts I care about the most and have the most peace about.
 
I grew up hearing yuppies referred to in only negative terms. Good Christians had children early and valued their families more than anything else. I have had no paradigm for seeing myself as a thirty-something, successful urbanite because I was trying very very hard to not be selfish in my decisions and I grew up thinking that yuppies were simply the result of selfish, immature motivations. I constantly heard yuppies referred to as the result of never being willing to grow up and be an adult, and I have tried very hard to work against that.
 
And yet, here I am. The very definition of a childless thirty-something-year-old woman who is doing well in her work. I am more the product of my society than I could ever have imagined myself being. I couldn't have imagined it because I never thought I valued the things yuppies value. But I do. And I do not think it is evil. I think it is cultural. And a result of trying really hard to use what's been given to me for God’s glory.
 
I don't even know what I am trying to say with all of this other than I just am at this totally bizarre place in life in which I both know where I want to go and believe I have the talents to do it (if I let go of certain other things that I've held on to), and I can completely recognize that I am not the person I thought I was. In other words, I feel like I am waking up to who I am and I am becoming more aware of my abilities. I guess what's really going on is that my vision is focusing. So much of the excess work, of the excess baggage, of the excess stress needs to fall away. I don't need to stay in this whirlpool. I know what I want - my husband, my children, to teach and write, and community ministry. The rest has to go. And that can be the value of finding myself where I am at 32 – the focus that I haven't been able to find until this point.

​(Image by Nicolette Tomas.)