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
 
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."

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
This morning V was moving around quite a lot when I woke up. I could feel her kicking through my belly so that my whole abdomen moved. Trey has felt her move before, but only once, and every time he tries to feel her moving she seems to quiet down. So I told him to put his hand on my stomach and he got a few really good kicks. They were so hard we wondered if they were head butts. Oh, I love this little girl so much. Sometimes it feels like I'm falling in love with her -  I have all of the butterflies and heightened pulses and everything.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
We're having a girl. There's part of me as I heard the news that leapt with joy. There's so much that I want to share with a daughter, give to a daughter. But there's also part of me that has silently mourned. There's so much brokenness and misery that the world is going to give this little girl.
 
For a long time in this pregnancy I really wanted a little boy first. There is so much pressure on the first child – they deal with the battery of their parents' indecisions and inexperience in often emotionally brutal ways. And little girls deal with it more severely. I have known so many mothers who simply cannot understand the stress that their little firstborn daughters live under. There's no one to tell these little girls they are ok, they are enough, they are protected, they don't have to compete to be accepted. Their badness and their disobedience is understood simply as just that, rather than the complicated vortex of self-will, misunderstood responsibility, and desire for acceptance that it is. First born daughters are so often tightly wound baskets of sorrow. They just often look like little tyrants aiming for command because they don't know what to do with who they are. For much of my life I longed for an older brother – someone who I thought would help me make friends, shelter me from the confusion of childhood, and help me with my parents. I longed for a male counterpart to just give me a wing to hide under through much of life's confusions. I grieve to think of our little girl having that same sense of dislocation. Being first is always a defenseless position, and I have known the hardness such vulnerability creates in little girls both personally and in the lives of women around me.
 
I want to share all that I have found to be good and true and beautiful about being a woman with my little girl, but it terrifies me to think that in reality there will be so much twistedness and brokenness to try to teach her about and equip her for. There is so much in the world that will want to hurt her, to use her, to belittle her – and that is not what God created her for. In this world gender and its systems are deeply flawed and a cause of immeasurable pain for women. But that is not the whole story. God is here.
 
And he gives us blessings in his graciousness.
 
This little girl may not have an older brother, but she does have a truly wonderful man for her father. One who will be gentle, and kind, who I know will try to listen and hear her heart because he has demonstrated the same with me. He may not be able to function as her guide through the drama of peer life the way a brother would, but he will always be a warm and wise shelter for her when it is time to recharge for the world outside.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
I am ok. And I am going to be ok. I have a lot to work through, but I am going to be ok.
 
I need to repent of how I'm dealing with Trey. He really is sick. He was crying this morning when he woke up because he feels so bad and is frightened. This has just been really sucky timing for him to be so sick while I'm going through all of the emotions of a pregnancy “scare.” I love him and I need to try to be there for him. After all, he has been trying so hard to do the same for me.

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Today was so good. The Lord provided so abundantly for Trey, and I couldn't be more proud of him and thankful to God. Trey got top honors in his graduating class from Gordon-Conwell. On one level, I'm kind of frustrated with him because of how much he always talked as if this was just not a possibility. But that's only a very small part of me. Most of me is just really happy. And really really relieved. I know everything would have been good too if he had not received this honor, but I've been praying practically the entire time we've known each other for him to excel, not for his own merit, but for the blessing I think he will be to others. I believe in the work he wants to do and his fitness for it.
 
But since we got home, I've been feeling anxious again. I don't really know why, but as I was driving around doing errands today, it occurred to me that sometimes God's blessings are scarier than his discipline. I know this is twisted, but when the Lord blesses us, I often feel like asking, "When is the shoe gonna drop?" When is God going to call in the debt and discipline us?
 
So many people I know believe that suffering is integral to the Christian life – and a necessary fruit of the Spirit. I know the Spirit is at work in me, so when is the hit coming? Most of the time, I find myself assuming it will come in the realm of our family. We won't be able to have kids. The kids will be a disaster. There must be something huge and horrible in my life; it can't all be blessings.
 
I know this is faulty thinking, but it is so deep down in me that I don't know how to change it. God’s blessings scare me because they render me powerless and defenseless. They remind me the scales cannot be balanced - there is a debt, but is infinitely tipped in one direction, forever to remain so. I don't know why God ushers some into suffering and others into blessing. But I do know I want and need to learn to accept the goodness that God freely extends my way. 

At Home, Arlington, Massachusetts
 
Last night, I made Trey a really nice dinner. I made Japanese pork and noodles. It's his favorite dish that I make and I finally perfected it, so it was quite lovely. It’s a little labor intensive to make, though, so I was pretty tired when we sat down to eat. Plus we split a large bottle of beer, so that added to the tiredness.
 
We had a wonderful time talking and spent hours rehashing our college years at Covenant. We talked a lot about the dating world at Covenant and our experiences in it. It was funny and we laughed and enjoyed ourselves.
 
We got into bed and the conversation kept going. Eventually I was so tired, though, that it became clear sex was not going to happen. We talked about it and decided what direction the few remaining minutes of the night would take (or not take) and kept talking. I don't remember how, but it wasn't long before I was expressing my fears about having kids and all of the dismay I feel about the world and bringing children into it. Our evening of fun quickly veered into a deep malaise as I expressed woe after woe related to mothering.
 
Trey patiently responded to all of my fears, pushing back and refusing to let me wallow. I wasn't really listening to or embracing his counterarguments though. Finally, he bluntly stated, "I think you're just making up all of these woes because you feel guilty about not having sex tonight." I burst out laughing.
 
I am so incredibly and deeply grateful for my husband. He understands me better at times than I can ever understand myself. I had been looking forward to the bedroom all day and when we finally got there and I was too tired from the week of work and cooking a complicated meal, my disappointment flowed through and became guilt and despair. When I'm disappointed about something, anything, in life, it often ends up being expressed in totally random ways. It's really hard for me to say that I'm just sad about something and that's ok. I project that sadness onto some big, important problem in the world because that seems a lot more justified than my small personal feelings.
 
It's really good to have someone in your life who is close enough and loves you enough to see when your fears are legit and when they are the extrapolation of less significant, but more immediate disappointments.