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
 
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, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Last night I dreamt many dreams about my baby. I can't remember them all, but I remember the ones shortly before I woke up. The baby needed its diaper changed and Trey was trying to do so; however, the baby kept pooping while Trey was cleaning its butt and he couldn't figure out what to do. I had to jump in and take over. Afterwards, I started feeding the baby and I dreamt about how it will feel to have a baby sucking on my breast. In my dream it was a good experience. I also thought about the baby's name in my dream. I called her “V” and was very satisfied with it. After waking up, I felt even more certain that I do truly like the name.

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.)

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Well, I've started reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Which is terrifying. WHY do all of these women's health guides always feel like they think they have to romanticize the female bodily experience in order to make us women interested in it? Just be a medical guide, don't try to tell me all of the reasons why I should distrust the medical establishment because they disdain the natural processes and a woman's body.
 
It is exciting, though. Here we go. The lid is about to be taken off of Pandora's box.
 
I do think that we need to wait one month longer before we start trying. I really want to start after the next round, but if I got pregnant right away (and even though it's a big if, it's still an if), I would be due mid-December and that seems crazily difficult to swing with graduation. I guess I could make it work? But one month more isn't going to hurt anyone.
 
Trey found out today that he has been accepted at Brown. Still waiting to hear from Harvard, but at least we know he has Brown. The day has been full of so many thoughts, mostly just thankfulness, but it also puts a lot of my plans and thoughts almost into motion. I am really, incredibly excited for this next stage. I'm excited for where it seems God is leading us, and I am excited for the changes they entail for me, too. I have good work ahead of me: the work of bearing children, the work of mothering, the work of editing, and maybe the work of ministry in the church. Right now, I have really hard work to get my thesis finished, and it is incredibly hard. In the future I hope to have more hard work on a dissertation to do (I discovered an exciting UK option at Birmingham this morning!), but that's for the future. I don't need to prove anything to anyone – I just need to think the thoughts I like to think and see if anyone out there wants to hear them. And in the interim, I'm excited for the hard work of trying to be a mother.

At Home, East Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Last week, my mom came to visit. Mothers are such complicated things. I don't think my relationship with my mother is any more complicated than anyone else's, but sometimes, in my most disoriented moments, it certainly feels that way.
 
My mom and I are very very different people. She is all practicality. She is rooted in life in a way that I've never been able to share. Her mind is all lines and sense where mine is chaos and flicker. People are central to her world. Ideas are central to mine. She listens to people's hearts. I imagine what their hearts could be.
 
Recently, I've started to realize that as much as she struggles to understand me, I struggle to understand her. For a long time, I thought that I was a lot like my mother. And we are. We both care about people a great deal, and I thought that her gifts and talents were mine. The thing about this is that of course most children inherit some of their parents' abilities. I got just enough of my mother's straightness, just enough of her “peopleness,” just enough of her empathy to think that I could go through life doing much of what she did. As with most children, I tried to pattern myself off of her frame.
 
But I can never be everything that my mother is because I can't understand her frame. And this is currently one of the biggest struggles in my life. Within me, there is a tug to be rooted in reality and people the way she is, but I can't do it. The times I've tried have overwhelmed me. But without following in my mother's footsteps, in whose footsteps do I follow? My own are a scary and lonely place.
 
I can't be my mother. And she doesn't want me to be her. She made it very clear when she was visiting that I have to be my own person. I have not been made to replicate her. But this is frightening. It is being cut loose into a world of decision. It is having to think. It is having to examine. It is having to trust.
 
There is so much within me that comes from my mother. Though we do not think alike, we certainly feel alike. And that strongly. And maybe that is why it is sometimes difficult to relate. Our minds and attitudes are miles apart, but our hearts beat the same emotion. We struggle to comprehend what the other is thinking, or why she is thinking such things, but we feel the same way – strongly and sensitively. Both deep love and great hurt are often produced by this reality.
 
My mother is a great woman. Perhaps the greatest I know. And in the end, this is the most profound reason why it hurts at times not to be just like her. I have risen and called her blessed, and I fear that unless my life looks exactly like hers, my children will not be able to do the same for me. What does it mean to honor your father and mother? Surely it does not mean becoming exactly them. And yet they have shaped me and molded me in indefinable ways. I am grateful to know they love me and are proud of me, despite all of the internal crises I put myself through.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
I haven't been doing so well with the whole "having kids" thing this summer. I was ok for most of the beginning of the summer. The first Greek term kept me really busy and I just didn't think much about it. But recently, I've been having a hard time. Fear is behind it. And the knowledge of the sacrifice it will take. I bought a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility right before we went on vacation with Daniel and Bethany. It's good I have it now, but thumbing through the book was a bad idea. It's a very graphic and very brutal reminder of what I'm about to try to do to my body. And it's a reminder of how much every aspect of it is hard work, and uncertain work. Ultimately, I set the book aside and have decided not to look at it until shortly before I'm going off of birth control. There are many women I know who would devour this book with joy. Their bodies, and bodies in general, are mysteries to be figured out and enjoyed. But I've never liked riddles and I've never been comfortable with my body, so there are two huge strikes right there.
 
Yesterday, I was doing research for my paper for the Jonathan Edwards class I'm taking. I'm researching and writing on the women that surrounded Edwards and it's reminding me just how much I love research and how much regret I have that I didn't do grad school earlier in life. I firmly believe that God gave me everything in my 20s for good reasons, but I admit that sometimes it's hard to see those reasons. I wish now that I was ten years younger and going straight out of undergrad into a PhD track. But then, I don't really wish that, because I wouldn't be the person I am today and everything about the last ten years has given me the interests and voice I have. So that's that. But it is really hard to look at my life and the reality that my chances are so incredibly small of doing further academic work once children are in the picture and not feel some regret.
 
The problem is that I can't escape the idea that my life will truly be over once I have kids. Trey has been concerned about this in me from the beginning of our marriage. He tells me I always talk as if having kids will be tantamount to self-immolation. I always deny that this is the case, but the closer I get to actually trying to start a family, the more I see this to be true about me. Bearing and having children seems like it will be the total negation of Hannah.
 
And I don't want that. But I struggle to know if my rejection of it isn't just pure selfishness. I want to homeschool. I want to be with my kids. I truly truly want those things. But I also want to be more than those things, not just for myself, but for my children. There is a big world, with so many interesting things to think about, and sometimes it feels like my soul will die if I don't have space, mentally and physically, to think about anything but children. Sometimes I feel so guilty for feeling this way – most women for most of history have not worried about these things. Identity is only a problem for the privileged twenty-first century woman. If I could change myself out for someone who never thought about these things and who was certain of herself and her space and who didn't have anything more to be known about herself than the community around her, I would. But I can't do that and that's not who I am, and so I struggle.
 
Last night, Trey and I were lying in bed. I half-jokingly reminded him that hopefully in the next year or so, he won't be the only one with access to my body. We continued to joke about it, mostly about the differences between his and little babies’ touches. And then, all of the sudden, very quickly the joke dried up as the reality that everything about my body will be destroyed in the process of becoming a mother set in. My children will literally suck their life from me and it will take its toll on me, and on my husband. The only response I have to that reality when I face it is fear.
 
And this is where I meet up with my sisters throughout all of the ages. My struggles with identity, my regret over lost opportunities, these things set the modern generations apart from the long chorus of motherhood. But the abject fear of giving up your physical self for the creation of another physical self unifies me with all who have gone before. It is raw and it is scary, and this, I think is the real source of my struggles with motherhood.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Last night I had the weirdest dream. I dreamt that I had a baby. But the father was already married. The baby was the sweetest thing ever and much of the dream had to do with taking care of him. But then I had to address the issue that I was a single mother who had a baby with a married man. Yuck. It felt horrible. 

 Momma and Daddy's Flat, The White House Guesthouse, Glasgow
 
I really want to live abroad with my children whenever I have them. In particular, I would love to live in Edinburgh. Some of the greatest treasures of my childhood were my experiences living overseas and in various places around the county. As with most things in life, this is also funnily the most painful aspect of my childhood. For so much of my life, I longed to have a sense of place. But now I look back and am deeply thankful for the way my world was always a much bigger place than it would have been if I had just lived in one location. I hope I get the opportunity to share this aspect of who I am with my children.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
This morning as I showered, the greatest sense of peace came over me regarding having children. I thought in passing about how much I haven't been stressing over the issue recently now that everything with school is pretty much decided and I'm only a few weeks away from starting. It's like someone has pressed the "play" button, and now that everything is in motion, it's all ok. My next thought was a premonition. All of the sudden, I felt very certain that Trey and I would not be able to conceive. But rather than panic, I immediately knew that was ok, too. We would keep trying for a while and then eventually adopt. And I was totally, completely happy with the thought. It would be a very different life than what I've ever imagined, for sure. Thinking of myself as the 35-year-old mom with a career, multiple degrees, and newly adopted child is definitely not what I ever imagined for myself. I've always loved the idea of adoption, but not necessarily this way. Yet there was deep peace in all of these reflections and I knew it was ok.
 
After my shower, I continued to reflect on it. Disappointment started to creep in at the possibility of never asking the question, "Who does our baby look like more?" That would truly be difficult. But then I also thought about the joy of redemption that adoption uniquely offers and I knew that there are aspects about both that the other doesn't share. Working hard, making money, and accomplishing certain things wouldn't be bad. And the mothers I know who have adopted are no less mothers in my estimation. I've never once lumped them into a different category in my mind. I would still be experiencing the fullness of motherhood.
 
In the end, though, I'm glad to be able to say, "What 'er my God ordains is right," and leave it at that. I'm excited to be a mother and I am excited to know peace in whatever manner motherhood comes to me.