Carol Lynn’s First Birth Story

In October 2014, Sarah Koenig released the first episode of her murder-mystery, hit podcast, Serial – a year’s worth of work to try and uncover a 21-minute-period of time. At the foundation of this 12-part series, Koenig shared, “It’s really hard to account for your time, in a detailed way, I mean…how’d you get to work last Wednesday? Was it raining? Are you sure? Did you go to any stores that day? If so, what’d you buy? Now, imagine you have to account for a day that happened 6 weeks back…” (Koenig, 2014). If you’re practicing the exercise, you may quickly realize how difficult recounting a single day in your life is – with one important caveat.

What Koenig quickly realized was that “if some significant event happened that day, you remember that, plus you remember the entire day much better” (Koenig, 2014). With that in mind, birth is a pretty phenomenal exception to our normal stream of consciousness and reality. We know that women with Alzheimer’s can recount their birth stories in detail even if they can’t recognize their child today (Clark, 2013, Introduction). Birth exists without exception – every person having been born from a viable pregnancy and a successful birth. It is a common thread woven into humanity that spreads across time, tradition, and location, but is often patterned and organized in ways that as Tina Cassidy says, “reflect the culture in which it happens” (Cassidy, 2006, p. 250).

In 1958, in the heart of Chicago, Illinois, among the ranks of middle-class American, my Catholic grandparents, James and Carolyn Lynn were expecting their first child. At 20 years of age and after one month of marriage, when my regularly-cycling grandmother’s period was late, her suspicions arose. After confirmation with her family doctor’s office, she was told she could be 3 weeks early or 3 weeks late of her LMP-based due date, April 2nd, 1959 – all were considered healthy and full-term.

When I asked about her care provider, there was no question who my grandmother would trust with such a precious time in her life – her lifelong family doctor, Dr. Chrzan. Not surprisingly, she had never heard of a home birth (outside of her own grandmother sharing stories of how babies were born in olden days) or midwifery (though the ACNM had been recently founded in 1955). This period preceded the advent of specialized obstetrical practice, and while her friends were all seeing the highly-recommended Dr. Chen, her loyalty was fixed on her “nice-looking” provider and anchored by much more than the details of his neatly-pressed, buttoned down shirt and cufflinks – prepared faithfully at each interaction.

At each 45-minute-long prenatal appointment, Dr. Chrzan checked vital signs, weight, fetal heart tones, asked how my grandmother was feeling, and did an internal exam from 4-8 months of pregnancy to check the baby’s positioning. While ultrasound technology was just sprouting into development, no such device made its way into my grandmother’s uncomplicated care (Cassidy, 2006, p. 173).

“When the apples ready, it will drop” still dominated much of my grandmother’s thinking and expectations, but by her doctor’s appointment on Monday, April 20th, Dr. Chrzan wanted to induce with castor oil by Wednesday. After his assessment that the baby was “low”, Dr. Chrzan believed my grandmother would go into labor soon. To my grandmother’s delight, labor contractions began at 7am on Tuesday morning. Her instruction was to wait until the contractions were 3 minutes apart to head into the hospital, but having heard stories of Jean across the street’s birth, my grandmother anticipated a much faster process to meeting her baby. My grandparents loaded their hospital bag and headed into the hospital at 9am.

When I asked my grandmother what she expected of childbirth in terms of sensation and pain, she told me, “Nobody tells you everything. They say ‘it’s painful, but it goes away.’ I knew it wouldn’t be a piece of cake, but I wasn’t afraid.” Considering that my extroverted, sociable grandmother had readily heard of Jean’s births, and no doubt many other family, neighbors, and friends, I was considerably surprised that she had never heard about Twilight Birth. It sounded almost as unheard of as a home birth – which is saying a lot in 1959 when nearly 100% of babies were born in the hospital and most women were fully sedated for their deliveries.

According to Cassidy, “although the class of hospital patients may have changed in the first half of the twentieth century, the culture inside maternity wards did not. Women often were treated shamefully, with little regard to their own wishes” (Cassidy, 2006, p. 63 ). Words like “shame” were never attached to my grandmother’s re-telling of her birth story – though, she did not appreciate the pubic shave upon admittance. After her first cervical check of 3 cm in triage, my grandmother was taken to a labor room separated by curtains from other laboring women with my grandfather at her side. My grandfather stayed there until delivery, and while he felt bad for her agony, was of little help and support. In her own words, “there was nothing he could do for me” – partner-supportive, and specifically, husband-coached childbirth education had not yet been rolled out by the Bradley Method. (Couples would have to wait until 1965 for those tools.)

Whether my grandmother realized it or not, “hospitals, in an effort to eliminate perpetual infections, had become rigid and methodical. The obstetric ward’s obsession with sterility had changed birth entirely” (Cassidy, 2006, p. 65 ). Not surprisingly then, my grandmother labored on a steel bed and struggled to relax on it. Unlike the stories depicted in the Ladies Home Journal of November 1957, my grandmother’s body lay untethered by wrist, leg or shoulder straps, but with each rhythmic contraction, her body tensed. While the Natural Childbirth movement was just revving up, with the work of Grantly Dick-Read gaining momentum in the United States and Europe, my grandmother never mentioned being offered medication, or quite frankly, having a choice in the matter. Her drug-free labor was not inspired by the Feminist movement at the turn of the century, and it did not incorporate Lamaze-styled breathing techniques (that were hot off the press that year) nor visualization and hypnosis (to later come into vogue of the Hypnobirth Method after the 1980’s).

By 6 cm, her water still hadn’t broken, and needed to be ruptured artificially. “That’s when things really started moving along”, and Dr. Chrzan was called in. Instead of arriving with an injection and bandaging her eyes with gauze and ears with cotton, Dr. Chrzan took his post at the end of the bed and waited for the baby’s head to become visible. With DeLee ideology present long after DeLee’s death in 1942, birth continued to be viewed as a disease and it was standard practice to apply forceps with episiotomy as part of the normal birthing process. My grandmother was no exception.

At 7:58 pm on Tuesday, April 21st, my grandmother delivered a 9lb 5.5 oz baby girl, my Aunt Donna. Once she was born, Dr. Chrzan immediately cut her cord, and the nurses suctioned out her nose, weighed her and took her measurements, gave her a bath, applied eye ointment, and put her in an incubator. The afterbirth took about 5-10 minutes to be passed, and after my grandmother was “all sewn up”, my grandfather returned to visit my grandmother and meet his newborn daughter. He’d return for visiting hours each night after work from 7-8 pm and a nurse would roll my aunt to the window for him to see his baby, protected by glass, and therefore, from (outside) infection and disease.

While the staff laid my aunt on my grandmother’s abdomen for a couple minutes following the birth, my grandmother didn’t get to hold her until the next day. Instead, that first night’s primary goal was making it down the hallway to use the bathroom. My grandmother was determined to make the journey on her own and leave the hospital on time the coming Saturday. By 1944, following hospital crowding from World War II, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that women benefited from walking around within three to four days after birth (Cassidy, 2006, p. 223). Clearly, this was now a significant benchmark – one my grandmother met enthusiastically to have her and her baby home by the weekend.

Though the hospital staff encouraged breastfeeding and recognized its benefits for the baby, their top priority was helping my grandmother recover from childbirth – consequently, something inhibited by the demands of her new baby. For this reason, my aunt did not room-in with my grandmother, and instead, was brought in from the nursery a couple times each day to nurse. Despite the rise in popularity of Freudian psychology, it would be prudent to assume that someone else was meeting the needs of my newborn aunt.

The staff tried to teach my Aunt Donna how to suck, helped my grandmother with her latch and encouraged my grandmother to feed on demand instead of a strict every-four-hour feeding schedule (something that was further inspired by her Dr. Spock magazine subscription) (Cassidy, 2006, p. 64). By Saturday’s homecoming, it seemed my aunt’s breastfeeding demands were constant. My grandmother got no relief and felt frustrated by the now hourly feeds. She lamented that her baby wasn’t eating enough, and after 3 weeks, instead of phoning Mary White of La Leche League, my grandmother rang Dr. Chrzan and said she was done. He put in a prescription to help dry up her supply, and the switch to formula was conveniently made. Now, my aunt slept for much longer periods of time, and my grandmother was thrilled that her baby was well-fed and could have her nutritional needs met by other helping hands.

After the weekend, my grandfather returned to work, and regular rounds of grandmothers came to help with the baby. In the first few weeks postpartum, my Great Grandma Scheier would do laundry (including cloth diapers before they were carefully crafted into “all-in-one” options), cook, and bring the baby to my grandmother when Aunt Donna woke up. Besides the baby’s one-month check-up, going out was highly discouraged until the baby had been christened (something my grandmother almost missed due to her episiotomy recovery and pain). Fortunately, if questions or concerns arose, Dr. Chrzan could always be reached by phone and would graciously respond.

Since this was before the 1960’s and ‘70’s, and the dawn of mental health and attention for postpartum mood disorders, my grandmother, and many other women, relied on a mother, sister, or friend to come over and help. Conversations among friends included comparing personal experiences and determining if any of your own were out of the ordinary. Unable to afford a second car, it’s quite fair to assume that this support network was critical in how my grandmother healed both physically and emotionally postpartum.

As I struggled to complete an unbiased interview of my grandmother’s first childbirth (despite my grandfather telling his in-laws, “You better enjoy your granddaughter because she will probably be your only grandchild. Carol is never doing this again!” they did go on to have three more children), I was struck by how vivid and matter of fact my grandmother’s birth story was. Funny phrases (like the one I just mentioned), the graphic depiction of clinging to the iron rails of her bed with each contraction, the wondering if her baby would ever come as laboring women were rushed out before her again and again, the fear when my grandfather started praying over his rosary beads, the sadness of when my grandfather was ushered out (despite Michel Odent’s thoughts on the matter), the emptiness accompanied by the newly-expelled placenta, the weeks of frustration trying to meet the demands of her newborn baby are all aspects of her birth story that stuck out to her, and therefore, to me as well.

Circling back to Koenig’s point – for the amount of detail my grandmother recounted, it is incredible that this is a story that happened 59 years ago. It is easy for me to look at it “behind the (nursery) window” and say just like the Houston mother who visited her friends in the hospital, “I can’t believe that grown people let this happen to them,” but that wouldn’t do justice to my grandmother’s birth or the birth culture that she had her babies in (Cassidy, 2006, p. 227). From where she sits, episiotomies are how doctors help you have your baby and prevent you from more serious tearing. In her mind’s eye, today, her birth would’ve been a Cesarean section – a way longer recovery than the 3 weeks following my Aunt Donna’s birth she was pressed to sit on an intertube for relief.

Obviously, our conversation unearthed something in my grandmother too. Just as in her early postpartum days, she delved back into her community for support – now reachable via her iPhone – and her own investigation of the 1950s was underway. My Aunt Jeanne, a best friend of my grandmother since high school, had three of her five babies born breech vaginally. My grandmother, knowing my opinion of her episiotomy, quickly rambled about how those babies would’ve been born by Cesarean today. She’s not exactly wrong. “Between 1970 and 1978 cesarean breech deliveries in the United States jumped from 11.6 perfect to 60.1 percent. Today, almost all breeches born in American hospitals are by C-section, in part because the malpractice risk is too great and most obstetricians are no longer proficient in the delicate art of delivering them naturally” (Cassidy, 2006, p. 119 ).

While I’m not here to write about vaginal breech birth, or episiotomies or Cesareans at length, what I found enlightening was how we all look at time from wherever we fall in it. While Cassidy remarks that our culture shapes our birth, I would argue that our culture’s view of itself is deeply embedded in the birth culture of other times. I look back at the perineal trauma that dominated much of 20th century obstetrics, and my grandmother looks forward to see that it could have been her uterus severed instead – both of us fixated on how fortunate we are to have given birth when we did. As much as I hate to agree with Cassidy, perhaps in closing I can’t help to with this one take-home point from her book, Birth – “if only we’d known how skeptical we should have been. And should still be.” (Cassidy, 2006, p. 253). Wherever your birth falls in history, it’s fair to say, that the past has given us many tools and insights, but the future leaves plenty of room for improvement.

Letter to 5-year-old Marin

Dear 5-year-old Marin,

Oh, my girl, you are a delight. Honestly, you are one in a billion. Really. I mean, am I biased? Yes, but also no – how many 5-year-olds wait to eat their Lucky Charms marshmallows last? Or willingly (without even being prompted) share their favorite foods? (This is of particular significance because you really, really love food and your common ‘high’ for the day involves a treat or snack.) How many 5-year-olds will come out of nowhere to give a hug or plop a kiss or share a word of encouragement? Or are quick to apologize or ask for forgiveness? Or pick up their toys without being asked? You are just so naturally kind, helpful, and free. All of the qualities that I struggle to emulate and that I am so grateful come to you with ease.

To be fair, you are also very 5. You can be found twirling in the playroom as a ballerina, building forts, working on your cross-stitch, and playing games. Our conversations have a new tint of articulated curiosity and wonder to them. Your imagination is fast at work – you’ve begun asking questions. Questions that surprise me less and less as I realize you are being raised in a household that talks about birth like it’s the morning news. Questions like: “Do you want to have a baby at home or the hospital? I don’t know Marin, what do you think I should do? I think you should have your baby at the hospital. Why should I do that? Well, they have tools. Oh…ya?…what tools? Water…Marin, we have water. A bed….Marin, we have a bed. Medicine! Well, fair. I do not have as much medicine at home. Does it hurt your popo to give birth? Do you still have your period when you give birth?” All on a wintry trip home from Costco…

But, I loooooove ittttt. I have yearned for this phase and I approach these conversations with a solemn interest. These are the days that I have looked forward to for all of my life. And they have seemed more precious to me in the years where I wonder if I’ve held my last baby. In this, I have longed for peace in a life with the demands of young children, the focus to soak it all in, and the ability to give you both my full attention. I have said ‘no’ to a lot of other stuff, and I have struggled to say ‘yes’ to the things I feel called to do…or need to do. (Enter lamenting statement about dishes.)

But this reality, this is my everyday battle – how can I be a good Mom to you and balance my other responsibilities? Let’s not even add seeing friends or calling family to the equation. Or that you have a younger brother who’s simultaneously chasing our beloved Nala under the bed. Or homeschooling. Oh ya, we’ve started calling our days ‘homeschooling’, but truthfully, I don’t really know if it’s fair to call it that (though, we are technically in Year 0). Our mornings are now filled with book readings before venturing outdoors. Our afternoons are spent more often close to home and our days have felt less rushed for outside opportunities. We’ve started a co-op, Courageous Explorers that meets on Mondays and has Discovery Days on Thursday. We made it a priority to go to Farm class on Wednesdays and enjoy our bi-weekly Fridays with the Truth Beauty Goodness community. I feel like I’ve been baptized in a Charlotte Mason approach to education – an unknown possibility to me this time last year. It’s been an experience that’s made me feel like a nomad who found a permanent home.

Last year, the Kindergarten journey got real (I’m sure I touched on it in last year’s letter). I approached that decision with a heavy heart – tormented by the polarity of choosing or not choosing public school. If we didn’t put you in public school, then I was deemed disappointed, or hateful, or ungrateful for something free to all and pursued by many. I didn’t have a teaching degree. I didn’t have a clue what I was getting myself into – I had no plan. The idea of teaching you to read sounded terrifying. I knew that I had no interest in teaching the same curriculum as public schools at home – the philosophy behind what we were doing and the approach to it had to be different. But that was really all I knew.

In our wandering and dabbling, we watched you fall out of love with learning in a traditional preschool. I watched my typically calm, reasonable child flip out at a Kindergarten assessment after years of window-looking at kids waiting for their school bus with excitement for your own pending drop-off. I watched in amazement as a room full of parents’ questions were dismissed about their child’s next year. And I got invited into a Charlotte Mason book study through one random email in a secular homeschool group.

The friends I thought that we’d homeschool alongside left last summer. It seemed my options were running thin and that we’d be living on an island together in homeschooling. But God knew what He was doing, and in a season of uncertainty and fear, we were given a beautiful community again. Truly, God’s provision was shown through this 6th year. All the intricate, intimate ways God knew my heart (and yours) became exposed through this journey together.

So by the first day of public Kindergarten, I solidified that my love for public school didn’t rest on putting you in it. I decided that the most adorable crafts and the most well-organized centers weren’t worth it. I decided you could and should learn to read later. We prioritized things that seemed pointless to most in our current society – day hikes, playing hide-and-seek, discussing the parts of a milkweed plant, and rest (to name a few). I felt like I had tapped out of a long internal battle, Peanut; I looked at the system and sprinted the opposite way.

And let me tell you something – you flourished. On your first day of ‘homeschooling’, you told me that if this was learning, it was way better than you thought. And it has just been onwards and upwards from there. That’s not to say everyday is perfect or as well-planned as I’d like, but it’s really opened my eyes to how much more there is to life than professional success. For us, this journey has been full of faith. It’s gained more family time. It’s been filled with the best of your days, everyday. It’s been filled with book reading, camping trips, and vacations to Florida. It’s been filled with redemption and healing. It’s been filled with playing endless rounds of Crazy 8’s, Slap Jack, Old Maid, Uno, and Monopoly. It’s taken inventory of every decision as important and nothing for granted. It’s catapulted intentionality behind relationships that aren’t provided in proximity. It’s taken us to joining Girl Scouts (something that I would say is your absolute favorite thing to do) and Highs and Lows at the dinner table. It’s made Family Night and Family Breakfast sacred tradition in our home. It’s said that there is something distinctly important for children found in their parents alone – a heavy statement to marinate and ponder. And because that is so, it’s made the reality of parenthood more complex and simple simultaneously.

I have felt the stress and the joy that this all entails, and I find my heart yearning for more hours in a day with you. More energy when Isaac is napping and you’re not. More preparation for the morning ahead. More card games and cuddles when I could catch up on my emails. More unscheduled nights to tuck you into bed. I feel like I am savoring and squeezing out every ounce of the time we have together – especially now with my midwifery career on the horizon.

For so long, I could only quantify this decision as loss – for my time, for my career, for my quilt-making. (Those quilts are currently sitting across from me as I type. Staring back as if to say ‘one day’.) I thought I’d be keeping you back. I thought my life would have to go on hold. I thought we’d fight over lessons. I worried about saving for retirement. But this way has been gentle and steady. It’s been attainable and fun. It’s let me live in the deep fruition that motherhood offers so that one day, I can I look back on these days with the contentment that I gave you my best.

Since you are my one-day-becoming midwife child, I’ll end with one of my favorite labor affirmations: “You do not take charge of this labor, this labor takes charge of you. This labor has been perfectly designed for you and your baby.” In many ways labor’s theme holds true for our lives. I had no idea that I’d be writing you this letter or that we’d be building this type of life together. But it is often the things that we wouldn’t choose that become the things we wouldn’t change. I wouldn’t trade this for anything now.

I love you, always and forever,

Mommy

The Spring of Panic Attacks

I learned to swim when I was 2 and I still remember the rigorous lessons. Actually, both Mike and I remember them. We assume we first met when we were 4-years-old after panting for breath along the pool edge and eating soggy crackers from our ‘dedicated’ Coach, Mrs. Marian at the Countryside Club pool. Growing up, I spent countless hours and summers there –  living off of snacks on my Grandma’s tab and swimming like a fish.

I graduated from those lessons and did competitive swimming until the 7th grade. I remember the disappointing phone call to tell my Dad that I was quitting. My Dad had swam all of his life and till at least my high school years, he could swim 6 laps underwater without coming up for air and held unbeaten records at Dunedin High School. The man was and is a complete fish out of water most days.

I don’t remember if I told my parents, or if anyone asked me why I was quitting swimming all of a sudden. I quit swimming because I became terrified of swimming. Being the oldest of five cousins, I was the back my younger cousins latched onto during their own Mrs. Marian drowning-you-for-crackers stages. The fear of taking my last breath started logically – trying to swim with someone more than half my body weight on top of me was logically and in reality, terrifying. I started to worry that I would drown and no one would notice. By middle school, that Baby Fear grew. I’d do a 500 fly, and feel light-headed as I got out of the pool, I’d begin to worry – what if I passed out while swimming? Who would see me then? I’d surely drown. Lap after lap my fears grew underwater until they kept me on land.

Enter Thursday, April 13th, 2017 at my favorite spin class. It’s worth noting that I don’t do any workout for the fun of it, especially spin. I do spin for the taking out of all of my emotions on a bike for one hour. It’s me against the world against those pedals…But back to this moment…Nearing the finish line, our spin instructor throws out one last message to give it your all – let’s sprint to the finish! Sprint I did. I sped with everything I had and then, I couldn’t breathe. I slowed my pedal stroke and it didn’t give – complete and utter chokehold around my throat. I immediately strategized how to not pass out in a classroom of people and how I’d handle getting my kids out of childcare if I did. As my heart rate slowed, the grip started to loosen. I left feeling scared, confused and completely stunned from what my body had just experienced.

Over the next week, I’d catch myself not being able to bike too fast in spin to the severity of not being able to carry the groceries up the stairs. If my heart rate went up, the knot in my throat returned – the first symptom of not being able to breathe. Simple Google searches led me to think this was more than likely panic symptoms, but I was only 95% sure of it. Not considering myself an anxious person, I felt my self-knowledge suddenly shallow and misplaced. How could I not consider myself anxious while experiencing the highest level of anxiety possible?

About two weeks later, my search led me to find that panic symptoms can happen in our sleep. I mentioned it to Mike who naively said “Oh ya, that happened to Chris Kyle” as we were tucking ourselves into bed for the night, and my panic erupted. That horrific Monday night, I tried everything. I mean, loony-bin-level everything. I slapped my legs to ground myself. I sang songs I made up. I worshipped. I prayed. I tried distraction. I read my Bible and had faith to move mountains – I was ready for a revival to happen in my living room. I took a shower. I tried to sleep. I tried to breathe. I tried to go up a mental elevator each floor meaning a deeper inhale or a deeper exhale. I tried to go to a meadow and the seashore in my mind. I watched Parks and Recreation and tried to laugh. And no matter how at peace I could get my physical body, my mind could not turn off. My fear had me in an unmatchable choke hold.

I have been in labor for 38 hours. I have been at 8 cm for at least 14 hours scared I wouldn’t make it to 10. I have labored without an epidural with non-stop back pain. Trust me, I do not say this lightly – I have never been in more pain or more scared in my life. I ended up going to the ER and it is with painful humility I say this, medication was the only way to calm my racing heart. It was the only way to get my body to sleep. Even still, it took hours to fall asleep with Mike’s help for a week. Every night, little by little, I improved. Overall, the experience itself was about survival, but the fear of making the wrong decision about my health care moving forward was incredibly overwhelming. My blood pressure came back excellent. My levels and thyroid were perfect. My presentation cheerful and sane. And here I was, in an ER with panic-level anxiety that seemingly came out of nowhere.

Over the next several months, fear took on many shapes and sizes. I went from having a childhood fear of not breathing to a fear of night to a fear of not going to bed with Mike to a fear of staying up too late to a fear of new surroundings to feeling like myself again. The vast majority of the time, I felt like I could make it through the day on my anxiety’s terms which has felt like living life in a cage. Initially, anything that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe fully was trying – hugging, nursing Isaac against my chest, eating food that would make me feel very full or create mucus (especially bread and dairy), finishing a meal (I once had a panic attack after eating broccoli), hiking in higher altitudes. I learned intimately how important sleep was to my ability to mentally fight what I was feeling. The exhaustion to curb each ridiculous fear with seemingly obvious truth – something I’d simply taken for granted before – wore me out to the extent that I’d burst into tears from a mix of frustration and confusion. How did this happen and was this going to be how I had to live the rest of my life? There were often moments where I’d wished my test results came back with a physical problem with a more specific and obvious next step.

I didn’t know how to explain to my friends or my family that something was going on that I couldn’t explain and that previously wouldn’t have affected me at all. I recognized that I was living life at a 10 and I had hit and broken through a ceiling I didn’t know I had. I missed friends’ parties, slipped up on emails and felt like I couldn’t commit to anything well. After doing nothing but reading my Bible that first week, I was back to raising kids and bearing the mental load of our home. Mike helped however he could around the house, but the reality was that I felt lost in the chasm of this experience, and there was no great way for him to understand what I was going through. It felt crippling to have no clear-cut finish line. It felt heartbreaking to not relate to others. It felt devastating to not be myself. It felt awful to take on an identity I didn’t want for myself – and that I felt powerless to change.

As spring turned to summer, I almost cancelled our trip to Florida. Mike had become my lovey and I didn’t do well without him closeby. Deep down, I felt I needed to go – not for family or the kids, but for myself. While panic was still large and in charge by July, I had learned something key in this process that has challenged me – if you don’t fight fear, fear wins. Everytime. The rule of ongoing fear is that the more you feed it by telling your mind it’s a real threat or problem, the more you think it is and the harder it becomes to convince yourself otherwise. I had to become susceptible to triggering my fear enough to confront it, but not be overwhelmed by it. I had gained some new techniques, and I had learned that my fear didn’t just live in the deep end of a pool anymore. I knew it didn’t stay on a spin bike. I knew it crept and would creep as far as I let it. And I knew that I couldn’t bear to live like this and not fight back.

(To be continued.)

Letter to 2-year-old Isaac

Dear 2-year-old Isaac,

It is amazing to me that you are 2 and that you are not a baby anymore; although, you are still this house’s ‘baby’ and I am having a hard time realizing you are now the age that Marin was when you were born. You have completely challenged just about every notion I had from parenting her, and I feel constantly caught off guard that you are an entirely different child – and that in many ways, is the narrative of our life together and this blog post. Your Story is the comical opposite of Marin’s in just about every way.

When I had her, I thought every labor was at least a day (or that mine were). Then you – well, I’m sure you know the story by now. When she was a newborn, I thought every newborn was the neediest, most overwhelming baby ever. Then you laid on my chest and nursed for hours while I read books to a Mommy-missing toddler because I didn’t have the ability to obsess over your sleep schedule. When she was a baby, she got easier and then easier, and I thought – wow, they really do get easier – *this* gets easier. And you got harder and harder and I got more tired and drained as I kept thinking by the next month you’d grow out of “it”. When she was a toddler, she was at my feet begging for my attention, and when you did your own thing, I thought “he doesn’t really need me” and tidied up the kitchen. I remember saying to a friend (honestly, this is probably from a year ago) – “Isaac just lives his own life”. And you did.

I’ll expand on that thought process because it is the current layer of unsanctified, brian-tripping logic that God has most recently placed His finger on. It pains me to say, because I take much pride in (but not for granted) the fact that our lives allow me to typically be the Mom I want to be to you every single day. So here it comes – I’m so sorry that I have passively parented you in many ways for two years. I often took advantage of your ability to entertain yourself with ease because with the mix of raising you kids, Bradley and doula work, and the need to keep a clean home with full bellies, I felt like my plate was always more than full. I had much anxiety around your complete lack of self-care and to constantly engage that drained me in a whole new way. My new found personal space became a battle of momentary freedom and hearing the sound of something or someone falling that makes you cringe or go running to the scene.

So in many ways, my solution was creating safe spaces and mentally spacing out. The first time I reflected on my shortcomings and sin in this area was when a dear friend handed me a cardboard box of homeschool preschool materials to use and try out with Marin. For some reason, this random art book was a fork in the road of my typical hands-off approach. In it, the author said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “now, you may be tempted to give your child this art book to give her something to do, but your child needs you to sit down and to help them. You need to model for them how to color in the lines or to do an activity in this book”. The flicker that became the flame was lit, and the epiphany that my active involvement mattered began. As I placed this thought under a Christian microscope (and as our church is now exploring the Book of James), this truth set into my heart: Christian parenting is active parenting.

The former notion that standing by and being available when you reached out would produce a wonderful adult over 18 years took its first blow. And then came the bigger blow, the really, ugly sucker punch: if we just had Marin, we could’ve settled for a good kid being our ultimate goal. And to be as frank as I’m willing to be with you on it, it totally freaked me out as a self-proclaiming Christian parent. You were the curve ball we didn’t see coming and it did something to me in the depths of my soul.

All of a sudden, good was total crap – so, so far from our top objective (but certainly, a product of it). I began to think about correction differently and the idea that something being a ‘phase’ didn’t give me permission to not consistently steer you in a Christ-like direction. To give an example, you had a long stretch of someone coming over, wanting to play with your toy, and you screaming “NO!” .5 second before trying to hit them with that toy because you didn’t abide by a “sharing is caring” philosophy. I’d bolt in your direction, probably end up removing the toy, often feeling like it didn’t really matter what I did – it was just a matter of time before it happened again. Enter playdate after playdate of just holding my breath and hoping that you wouldn’t whack someone or pinch my friend’s kid’s face before I could get to you, and I started to feel like you were a lost cause. We didn’t exactly teach you to rip someone’s cheek off – where in the world did this totally different result come from? How were you not another Bennett child carbon copy?

I began to explore that more. I realized your DNA wasn’t your excuse. Regardless of make-up or expectation, you were Isaac who (just like Marin) made mistakes, benefited from guidance, and needed Jesus. It just happened to look a lot different. And I know parents are always saying something similar of their second or third or ___ child, but I really thought I had let go my expectations from the start. What I failed to do was reorient my strategies and problem-solving duties, and I began to see that as we rounded your second year.

I don’t mean to paint a bad light on you because your territorial nature did have its benefits. Anytime you feel someone you love is being threatened, you waste no time in protecting them. You’re utterly fearless and while that’s landed you a noticeable forehead scar, it’s something I truly admire. You regularly tell me “I love her” about characters when reading books together, tell us when you miss someone, and have the cheekiest, heart-melting smile that has some serious heartbreaking potential (even if it’s only mine). You roam around the house on your one hip pushing trains and trucks and you make the cutest Dinosaur/Alligator/Lion roars imaginable. You have this indescribable, but so you, hand-clasping-and-wriggling gesture and wide-smiling combination when you are utterly overjoyed about something. (And I not-so-secretly hope that if you have children, at least one of them does it and I get to relive this excited expression all over again). You love all things alligator and dinosaur-related mainly by chasing someone with an alligator, nursing your alligator, or making dinosaurs tracks in playdough. Your motor skills are impressive and your ability to be appropriately careful to do a task correctly (like pouring water into a small hole from a glass) is remarkable because it is so different from the Wild Man you can also be. You love dirt, stomping around in the snow, and finding huge sticks; it breaks my heart that there’s not a backyard to plop you in to roam freely about to discover them all more. Ironically, you do not like when your hands are dirty – another sign that you are your Father’s son. You are a furniture parcore-gymnast-extraordinare, and the positions with which I find you hanging from the couch are oddly impressive. You love making pillow forts and playing Hide-and-Seek with Marin – and she has much patience for your ability to be ‘found’ by cackling in delight over a well-animated search. If given the chance, you would slowly pace on forever ‘riding’ your balance bike while proudly wearing Marin’s purple cat helmet no matter how many times it slumped over your forehead.

And in all of that, it broke me that people only saw you as the toy-ripping, “NO!” screaming, Tornado that was already living in his Big Sister’s shadows. And I so deeply hate that because I know that you are made for incredible things and we are just beginning to chip away and see them. You are a child of my dreams – so privately loving, so often misunderstood, and requiring so much of my mind and heart. Your gentle-nudge-requiring and direction-re-aligning assistance has been so incredibly satisfying for me as parent as it’s forced me to be one with intention and much reflection. You’re not going to let us get off easily with the same ol’, same ol’ and I love you dearly for it. You draw me into the everyday moments in a way that has really precipitated a desire to make a life made up of more of them. You are truly a gift from God to me and I am so thankful that the gospel gets to be shone to me daily by my Cheeky Boy whose blue eyes are the regular commentary of any stranger you meet.

I never thought in a million years that God would make himself known so incredibly through the daily lessons of parenting my babies, but He certainly has in no greater way than giving me you. I love your tenacity, and your Spirit of reckless optimism that makes you more like your Daddy than looks alone. I love your fire and the way you fight as if you are the single greatest force to be reckoned with. I love the way you softly say something you want, and the way you still fall asleep in my arms with your feet propped on my lap. I love that you still haven’t grown into your hands and that every time I call you “Meatball”, your sister calls out “Meatball Head!”. I love how you scamper around the house and that you are so goofy and playful. I love how you sit still looking through the pages of an open book. I love that you are daring and inquisitive. I love that you can be entertained by the water of our bathroom sink or bath and that you love to discover a good pool drain.   

In the coming years, I’m not side-stepping my responsibilities, and I’m not trying to just make it through accomplishing them or the day.  I’m letting go of the desire to fit you into our routine better and the frustration that what we did with Marin doesn’t work with you. I’m going to be a better follower of Jesus because of you and I am truly grateful that you have kept me on my toes and led me to my knees in prayer. Thank you for being the most beautiful, wonderful son that a Mom could ask for. Your name fits you well, you are my “Joy” and “Laughter”, and there’s no greater honor than being yours and Marin’s Mommy. Thank you for everything, my Sweet, Sweet Boy.

I love you always,

Mommy

A Letter to my Non-Existent Third Child

 

Dear Non-Existent Third Child,

I hate that I am writing you this letter and I hate that you do not exist. I could elaborate on all the things that I would love to share with you, or my dream birth (ha!…you don’t even know…), but I’ll save that for another letter.

For now, I want to write about all the things I’ve felt these last 11 months wanting to have you – to get pregnant. It’s honestly been quite the emotional roller coaster because you represent a lot at this stage in my life. This now, almost 30-year-old body, that won’t have half her kids in her 20’s – according to my original Family Plans of six (now you know, Universe). Oh man, did I confuse biology and reality – I thought one right after the other each of you would come.

As with most of my Mom letters, I like to compare my kids – because it says a little about what makes them a Bennett and what makes them uniquely individual. Marin was and is my Golden Girl – off without a hitch we went! From finding out we were going to try for our August girl to the positive pregnancy test two weeks later, the surprise announcements to Daddy and family turned out beautifully, and the inevitable call to Grandpa Bennett to tell him the Bennett predisposition to having only boys had come to a screeching halt – well, that was just plain fun and games.

Enter a conversation with our ped at Marin’s 1-year Well Care visit, and her perchance comment to say “So when are you trying for a second?” with a confident grin and my hip feeling just about back to speed it seemed so obvious to go for #2. The combination of being in love with your Daddy, having the sweetest daughter to share, and being foolishly naive about the fact that children do indeed cost money – well, there we were. And we stayed there. Longer. 6 months longer than with Marin. And I carefully added the months between those two, and when he didn’t come in June, I was ok with breaking that tradition. And when their age gap went past two years, I thought it’s ok I can’t say “#twoundertwo” or some stamp that my motherhood was *hard* – but you know, I’m like, crushing it because I put it on Instagram.

But as the story goes, he came…wait, A HE CAME?! Not a girl? Ok, well, that’s cool because he’s healthy and awesome and like probably the most goofy 2-year-old on the planet today. But that took a little getting used to. I just imagined a sister for Marin and kinda went with it despite everyone telling me otherwise (even probably my own intuition).

I did get used to the he-bit. But the one thing I didn’t get over? That the second he came out (I don’t think there was any time separation here), I immediately thought and felt “I CANNOT WAIT TO DO THAT AGAIN”. Oh man, Isaac, really, really paved the way for you – that longing, man, it just stuck. And when I forget what I want, I come back to it. Nowadays, often.

And I have seen baby, after baby, after baby be born since (because I teach childbirth education and attend births as a doula currently). And I have seen the friends who we said we’d coordinate our pregnancies get pregnant and have their babies. And I have had the friends ask if everything’s ok and I’ve felt the wonder if maybe it’s me and Mike? Or maybe it’s me? Or should someone ask? Or will it just make me sad? And I have been asked probably the worst-feeling question of them all – “Don’t you have enough with two?”

So, I’ll make it perfectly clear – yes, I do. I do have enough with two. I kiss them and I hug them with the love I have left over from not having you (yet). And when I tell them I love them, I tell them I love them with the love I have for you too. And I have not felt empty – I do not want you out of emptiness or need. I want you because I want you. Because there is space in my heart still for you. A nook and cranny unseen, unheard, unnoticed – silently hoping you’ll come home to it. And maybe that’s why I’m in such a weird predicament.

I always thought I’d have babies because I just couldn’t live without having another one. But now, I see my two, and I see that after each of them, my heart has been filled beyond its former capacity. To a point I can’t imagine increasing. The space has grown, the chasm widened. Because now it’s not just my heart that wants you, it’s the hearts I’ve created with Daddy wanting you too. It’s some odd form of unprecedented multiplication – the way they love you, and the way you love them back, and the ways you grow without me with them. It’s exponential. Incalculable, really. And it’s the stuff that puts a Hallmark card to shame.

I see the less adorable realities at face value too. That once unbelievable and now laughably obvious fact, that children do cost money, or that having a house is worth saving for. I see the benefit of swim lessons or ordering a pizza on a Friday night. I see the summer road trips and the weekends away with Daddy (not necessarily now, but in the window of the not-so-distant future). I feel the rest of a full night’s sleep and how nice it is to rarely pump. I see the orderly schedules and the gym routines. I see the limited space on my lap, and feel the joy of reading “one more book” without a crying baby to rush to bed. And I see the kids’ room with his and hers bunk beds (laid out in my mind, anyways) taking up only one bedroom of Boston real estate.

So now my heart and my logic duke it out. They go tit for tat and they don’t play nice. Am I foolish? Am I selfish? Am I crazy? How can you put a price tag on a baby? A sibling? Who wants to go back to drowning when you’ve just gotten up for air? Often, the questions silently plague my mind because I’m too scared to ask them out loud. Not because I can’t ask them outright to myself, but because someone else could hear them too. And I’m afraid to create a foothold for the nonchalant “helpful” advice or a casual remark. Who has space to be sad, confused and vulnerable with an open invitation for a tourist’s two cents of your life?

It’s worth noting that this process has likely stalled from still breastfeeding Isaac. And it’s likely that my workload and Daddy’s hasn’t helped either. But what are we going to do? Do I wean him? Do we have Daddy work more, and me work less? Or the other way around? And I keep coming back to this one real dilemma – how do I put life on hold for my Non-Existent Third Child if that’s what it takes to have an Existent Third Child? I keep waiting for my nights to slow down – to not be an opportunity for me and Daddy to catch up on work or household tasks. I keep waiting for Isaac to not want to nurse anymore. Or never wake up at night. I keep waiting for life to come together in such a way that it says “it’s time”. And while that’s not happening, I know in my heart that I don’t want for things to change to make more room for you. I want you to make room by existing and demanding we do something about it.

Now I realize that I want having a third to be as easy as having a first. Or at least a second kid. But now, it’s more like having my cake and eating it too. I didn’t have to make this decision with Marin, and with Isaac, it didn’t end up coming down to this. Now, it’s reading about my adrenals glands and reducing stress. It’s charting cycles and having sex when you’re tired. It’s making romance in the form of Saturday pancakes and in a random text to say you’ll be home on time. It looks so, so different – way different than I thought – but my dream of and for you has not left.

Our nest still has room for you in it. We’ll do our best to get ready for you – even before you exist – but in the meantime, know we hope to meet you soon. If we’re lucky, you’ll be a Christmas baby – and don’t you doubt for a second that I won’t have a tree wrapped in lights for your debut. And if not, we’ll still be lucky whenever we meet you in 2018 or beyond. But hurry up, I want to meet you, and know you, and hold you and kiss every little inch of you. And this time, I don’t care at all whether you’re a boy or a girl because you’ll be my Existent Third Child and I love you no matter what.

Love,

Mommy

 

Letter to Four-Year-Old Marin

My Dearest Marin,

As my eyes well up with tears, I just want to start by saying: Thank you. Thank you for the gift you’ve been to me and the gift you are to me. I not only can’t imagine my life without you in it, but I can’t imagine my life without your constant way of shaping me and transforming me day in and day out. It is truly impossible to separate you from my own identity because of the magnitude at which you changed our lives forever: you made me a mother (and Daddy a father). I will never look or experience the world the same again because I’m now forever Marin’s Mommy (and since, Isaac’s too). Every day, I’m challenged to see the world the way you do, to correct others the way you do, and really, to love them unapologetically like you do – with everything you’ve got, and then some.

Per usual, your birthday brings on much reflection of your Birth Day. There has been no greater, no holier, no more profound day in my life. I didn’t know it then, but that day would inform so much of who I am as a Mother, a Teacher, a Doula, and much more. I think about it all the time with sobering gratitude. The more births I see, the more appreciation I have for that day being filled with grit and collaboration and ending in sheer joy and celebration. I’ve never done anything harder or more worthwhile in my entire life (but I haven’t yet had to drop you off for your first day of school).

I often reflect on how birth is the perfect first act to parenting. You come in with expectations and hopes, you surrender and work hard, and you ultimately, can do a million ‘right’ things and it’s still in God’s hands. Now, four years later, I joke that you are my “Midwife Kid”. You beg me to go to labors and always ask if you can join me for class. You don’t miss a scraped knee or a broken heart – you are never far from those who are hurt and you are readily available to help them. I even joke that you’re the “true Christian” in our family – correcting bad attitudes, calling out any ugliness and sin, and asking Jesus for help. I am in constant awe of your display of ‘childlike faith’ and how easily my heart drifts from it only to return again with your not-so-gentle nudging.

You don’t miss a beat, Marin. You remember if I said I’d do something and don’t. It humbles me and reminds me of how important it is to show you to be true to your words and gracious – a lesson I’m still learning. You look forward to spending everyday with friends, and you slump in your chair in disappointment if at breakfast you find, I’m not carting you to a playdate that day. You love swim lessons, movies, treats, and trips to the park, and now, doing an afternoon craft with Mommy or making Friday night pizza with Daddy. Your Kuncle recently took you on a date, and after you talked about it the entire weekend, I realized how special one-on-one time is to you (still). (Since I wrote this, we’ve gone on a date to see Peter Pan and it will hopefully be the first of many more plays together! You try to wear the dress you wore every chance you get to twirl in it like Wendy and get upset when we have to change into pajamas for bedtime).Last year, was your first year as a “Big Sister” and while we all certainly adjusted, it was you who bore the brunt of this new addition to our family. You went from being the center of our little world to a part of it. When Isaac was little, I got comfortable telling you to wait or be patient – after all, these are two of the wonderful sought-out blessings I’d hoped for in adding a sibling. This year, I am learning to do the same with him. For what I waited seemingly-forever for, but was actually two years, I can now utter the words “go play with your brother”. You two love to take laps around the kitchen and playroom with your buggies and chase one another for hours. You make each other laugh, you fight over the same toys, and you watch out for one another. At your first day at our new gym, you went to hit the employee who was checking Isaac’s diaper and when she told me, I internally smiled knowing it was out of protection for him.

I think back to the initial insanity of two and smile sipping my hot coffee and writing out a to-do list in peace at the kitchen table. I’m amazed at the amount of time you entertain each other with little supervision and I worry about what that will look like next year when you’re school-age. On that note, apparently 4 will live in infamy as the year I worried too much about what to do with your education (after reading last year’s post, I’m noticing a pattern here). My typical hands-off, you’re-gonna-make it approach has abruptly hit a wall as my parenting style hits the-much-more-organized-and-mainstream public education phase. You are currently in a very well-done and interactive playgroup with a former kindergarten teacher, and if it is an indication of what lies ahead, it feels fun and playful, but overstimulating and exhaustive. Out of insecurity, I ask the parents with older children in elementary school about their experiences, and I wait to hear something that sparks my passion to send you away.

The luxury of enjoying leisure breakfast times and trips to our favorite hangouts seems to be a thing of the almost-past. I conclude that these must be ‘the days’ and these ‘days’ are a chapter nearly over – how do we have only a year left of this (less, actually)? How am I (what feels like) the only parent not wishing it to end or looking to get an extension? It seems unfair now that if you were born 2 days later, I wouldn’t have a choice. I’d happily wait my turn and for another year to enroll. But here we are, my August 30th baby – the girl I’d hoped would come in August for years.Now, it’s a decision. And a big one that makes me not want to lift my head to see what’s ahead. In seeing how much your interest in learning your letters has been sparked from a couple playgroup sessions, I’m encouraged that you aren’t going to drop out or fail next year, but I’m concerned about what this means for us, or nap times, or Isaac and me time.

As my oldest child, you will always be the scariest one for me to raise. Which honestly, is a shame since you are the easiest in so many ways. Maybe that’s part of it – making the ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ choice has always seemed less obvious with you, but then again, your brother will always have the benefit of more-seasoned parents parenting him. It’s just so weird to hear you cry that you’re afraid you won’t fit in my arms anymore when I hold you on your couch before bed, or for you to recite my expressions perfectly as your own – you’re confident, oh-so-sweet, and you’re never one to turn down my hugs and kisses – and you’re slowly, but surely, growing up.

I feel the same way I did when you first weaned – what will this next chapter hold? How will we manage it or how will we look different? And I feel so ridiculous because to so many people, this next phase is just a next phase. For me, my often-flaky-but-still-there desire to homeschool isn’t rooted in fear, but really, the desire to spend more time with you than not. Or to have the best part of our days be together. But then, I know it will still be different too. Every year has, every year will. I’m a really good play-based parent, but what about when we have to intentionally do a workbook together? What will that look like?

But if I were honest with myself, while the pictures and videos take me back to some of our sweetest memories together, the best is always ahead of us, Marin. I don’t miss nursing you right now and I don’t miss that winter when Isaac was first here (although, I miss his babyhood). I don’t miss not sleeping and I don’t miss you not wanting to walk up the stairs. In all the missing, there’s a lot of not missing. But the thing is – as a parent, you always remember the best of each phase and treasure it. And I certainly do.

So with the future fast approaching, I’m not giving into the belief that our best days are behind us and I’m not holding you back either. My sweet Star, you will always shine bright, no matter what we do with your schooling or how many siblings you have or how many times we nail it or completely screw our parenting gig up – God’s destiny on your life is too great and wonderful. I am doing all I can to actively rest in that and pray for you and over your precious life. You have been such a gift from the first dream I had of you (just days before our first positive pregnancy test) and no matter what the path is ahead, I’m not losing sleep over our bond at this point. I know it’s there, and like a chapter in your favorite book, we always pick up right where we left off.

No matter how near or far you are from me 8:30 am – 2:30 pm next year or when it’s miles away, one day, too. I love you, my Peanut, my Sweetheart, my Silly Lady, and this Halloween, my Hillary Clinton.

Love you, always and forever,

Mommy

 

Ending 28: The Omnipotent God [Part 4 of 4]

 

• The Omnipotent God

 

The main consequence of letting God rule and reign over your life is that you can’t anymore. Whether you see that as unfortunate or fortunate is up to you and your story, and where you’ve placed God in or over it.

So let me say this, as blatantly and as boldly as I can, it was not the plan for me to be a (part time, full time, kinda-some-uh-the-time) working parent. It was not my (initial) dream. I was not twiddling my thumbs idly waiting for an opportunity to come. I was not discontent with being “just a Mom” or feeling like I was wasting my time by raising my delightful children. I left my admin job on July 2nd, 2012, and my first thought was “I am so excited to not work for forty more years”. Book closed, commutes abandoned, arms open to the days of child-rearing ahead! And so the story goes…

I had my first baby and in the words of award-winning, local midwife, Nancy Wainer (and probably countless others), “the midwife inside of me was born the day that I gave birth at home”. I am going to share more on this explicitly, but having Marin was the most monumental and spiritual moment of my lifetime. God lit a desire in my heart that has not gone away, no matter how hard I’ve tried to put it out or hide it, no matter how many times I’ve handed Him my carefully laid out agenda. That fire is there, and I wrestle constantly with the timing and possibilities for it coming to fruition. But it is my deepest belief that wherever God takes me in life, and in this specifically, He is going to use me to blaze a trail in the most unique, God’s-about-do-something-big kinda way.

When I began this 28th year, I was starting to teach Bradley childbirth classes. Another provisional instructor reached out, and when we met, she mentioned another affiliated teacher who I hadn’t yet heard of. She encouraged me to reach out to her and I did. At 8 months pregnant, Rebecca happily met with me and it is the utter grace of God that she was not only generous with her time, but that she willingly referred her students to me to attend their births. I had casually mentioned that I was hoping to attend some hospital births to benefit my teaching, and by the end of that evening, I had two referrals for doula clients. Our conversations and meet-ups and chemistry continued and it has now blossomed into a doula partnership and friendship with someone who is in more ways than work, out of my league.

I have said this about my husband, and I’ll say it about this – if I had tried to make it happen, it never would have. When I wasn’t forcing things to work out the way that I’d planned, they fell into my lap in the most God-alone-did-this kind of way. I couldn’t take credit for this happening if I tried. It felt like if I didn’t take this opportunity, I was clearly not trusting God with the next step in this journey. So I am choosing to trust Him, getting my feet wet, and taking it one prayerful decision at a time. Things like childcare and working together with Rebecca have just-about-effortlessly fallen into place which is my consistent confirmation that I’m moving in the right direction.

So while I know in my heart, I want to be primarily focused on mothering now and hope to be a midwife one day, I’m choosing to trust and let go of the plan I’d laid out neatly for myself four years ago. As I navigate this story inside the greater Story, I am more content with having the faith to take each day as it comes without knowing the bigger picture. I learned at a Mompreneur event that keeping my passion lit, by investing what I can now to keep it ablaze, is all it takes to be open to the next door God cracks open. I don’t know what that balance will look like with young children and a marriage to care for, and I am suspicious it doesn’t exist, but I know that all I’m doing now matters deeply to me and that I am grateful for what God has given me to do today. And for me, on most days, that’s enough information to make it until tomorrow without complaint.

So that’s that. 28 was seriously a great year where I truly felt the Lord’s Hand guiding and caring for me in what could feel utterly terrifying if I didn’t just embrace it as the adventure it is. God gave me new, exciting opportunities, I got to experience toddler Isaac which is just about the cutest (and scariest) thing ever, I got to go away with Mike to Vermont for a weekend, God continued to add to our neighborhood and build a wonderful community within walking distance, I got to see Marin’s friendships bloom, I learned how to budget wisely, and I felt the faithfulness of God in his preparation and purposes for my life. I am grateful for another year and I hope to not take one day of this life, or this coming year, for granted – even if it doesn’t start with organic, grass-fed pasture raised collagen peptides in my coconut milk coffee. I truly cannot wait to see what God has for me between now and the big 3-0.

Ending 28: God, the Author and Perfecter of Our Faith [Part 3 of 4]

• God, the Author and Perfecter of Our Faith

When I went to Florida this summer, the one job my Grandma asked me to do was to clean out my room filled with hundreds of Beanie Babies, Boyd’s Bears, and a boatload of junk that I was happy to donate or throw out. In some of the boxes, were high school notes and childhood pictures that embodied this Girl that I felt was rapidly slipping through my own memory of her. While I was happy to throw away my Spice Girl poster, I had this crippling fear to throw away anything that pointed to this ‘old Me’ in hopes that my kids could one day know who I was or used to be. Or perhaps, if I’m honest enough with you and myself, that I could go back to her – because that Girl is known to me now fully in hindsight and because she is fully knowable, she is safe. And prioritizing self preservation is always the first step away from relationship when we feel threatened and removed. (See last post for more details).

Can I just pause and say: Isn’t that just so human? When I think of God, and the fact that He is often asking us to let go of something for what is always something better (even if it is just the freedom to forgive someone – which make no mistake is a powerful gift), this perpetual self-preserved battle baffles me. But emotionally, that tension (that I allow to often dominate my life and decision-making) between who I was, who I am, and who I could be if I just surrendered to God’s hand in my life is the most joy-robbing sin I’ve ever lived. And it is the first sin and it will probably be the last one too – believing that we know what is best for us more than God.

On the other hand, I started to see my Story in God’s Story this year. I saw the resilience and confidence that overshadowed a lot of pain in my childhood – and I said, “Lord, let me find that again. Let me live like that again”. Now, when I look back on all the bumps and humps the Lord has truly carried me through, whether I knew or served Him or not, I see the blessings, the ever-forming-me-into-who-I-am-today God who doesn’t quit, and the character building that could have never come had it not been through trying times and circumstances. I see it not through my pain, I see it through the calling that God has placed on my life and the plan He’s made for me.

For instance, as I’ve already mentioned, I kinda love sleep. As in, I am the first to fall asleep at a sleepover or I’d rather sleep than watch TV on any given night. So I often laugh to myself as to why I want a big family or am pursuing birth work because that’s kinda the opposite direction of this whole sleep-prioritizing trajectory. But when I talk to Mike openly, I have a fear of living a white, suburban, middle-class, ‘normal’ life and that’s because I didn’t have a normal childhood. I was raised on bar stools and job sites and my ‘home’ changed every 3-4 days. I literally would carry large bags of stuff from place to place and constant transition was mine and my brother’s normal. My parents divorced, and remarried, I had stepsisters and a stepbrother, and then I didn’t, and so on and so forth, as you may or may not imagine.

And when I look at that, on paper, I think they were utterly nuts. As a parent, I see that they wanted us evenly and they were truly loving us as best as they could with what they could in the circumstances surrounding those decisions and it makes much more sense to me. So at this crossroads of life – now forced to decide how we raise our own children – I think, “what childhood could have better prepared me for this exact moment in my life?”. Births and babies don’t come when you want them to, they can happen slowly or suddenly, they have emotional mountaintops and valleys, and the only guarantee is that they are going to change.
And I know I am the parent I am today because of the parents they were then – probably thinking they were failing too – and in reflecting on my own wins and losses, God is using my mistakes and victories as an ultimate victory for my children. God is not wasting my good or my bad, but using them for the benefit of my children (and those He’s placed in my life), and isn’t that just the loveliest thought for us Christ-professing parents (and individuals)? I lean on that promise constantly and I thank God for far-removed hindsight that gives perspective and re-definition to our pasts. 

Ending 28: Who Loves Ya, Baby? [Part 2 of 4]

 

• Who Loves Ya, Baby?

 

If you asked my family about how I was from about four-years-old on, you’d get some good stories, eye rolls, and “Ashley!”s. They’d say I blossomed again as I ended high school, and for what it’s worth, they wouldn’t trade those in-between years – at least for the opportunity to see me live them again now as a Mother myself.

Despite the good, the bad, and the certainly ugly moments of my own childhood, I have always been hyper self confident (to a fault). I don’t think I have ever doubted I could do something if I wanted to do it or that people wouldn’t love me (that sounds arrogant, but I already warned you it was ‘to a fault’). I’ve gotten the large majority of jobs I’ve wanted, I’ve helped materialize goals of ours by picking up side jobs, and I have many more goals ahead that don’t intimidate me because of my track record in doing well at getting stuff done (in a sea of track records of forgetting birthdays, being 5 minutes late to everything, and not resting well). I’m far from perfect, but I have a decent understanding of what I’m good at – and an even clearer understanding of what I’m really bad at.

And what I’m bad at is an ever-present thorn in my side. That tension between who I am and where I’m going grows and grows as I begin to look at the sidelines for approval and my value begins to teeter-totter on the opinions of others. Sometimes, my cheering squad is full and sometimes the stands of my story are painfully empty and quiet. This year was met with a little bit of both – my faithful Fan Club and those who couldn’t see my wins no matter how many points I put on the scoreboard – and this post is about what they both taught me. 

You will never win at loving people when winning someone’s love is your ultimate goal. With those who require more effort for their approval, the harder you try, the more you fail. For every step you take towards a person – who is unwilling to be wrong or give you the space to be human or love you without strings – when your identity is based on their opinion of you, you can easily walk away from the person that God’s elevating you to be. It’s not as simple as ‘losing yourself’ in some spiritual discipline- it’s the you you try to be to compensate for the you that doesn’t win their approval instead of you that you could be if you let God rule and reign over your life. I found myself stuck in that conundrum time and time again, and finding my security and score for the day based on the need for someone’s approval, acknowledgement or understanding of my actions was crippling – for both of us. 

On the other hand, I realized that you can’t live to make the people who delight in you happy either. For years, I’ve been conditioned and pleased to make decisions that make my family happy because I love them and they love me unconditionally. Making them happy wasn’t out of a need to win them over, but a desire to make them even happier within their happiness and love for me. I thank God that foundationally I rarely doubt the love of God because my family has never made me feel that I could outrun or compromise their love for me – that is truly a gift I take less and less for granted. But, I’ve come to terms that I do a lot of things that they don’t approve of and I’ve gotten more secure about them over time – from how Mike and I dated to moving to Boston to staying at home with our children – the list goes on and on. And God began to show me, in my fear of making a decision that was more likely than not going to not win everyone’s approval, that leading to this point, I  have made a lot of God-ordained, hard, pretty dumb decisions because I wasn’t seeking someone’s official stamp of approval to do them and they have utterly impacted the trajectory of my life and my legacy for the significant better. The faithfulness of God is so obvious in hindsight, isn’t it?

The two polar ends of my belief spectrum rapidly flowed into one another in unhealthy ways. The reason I found people getting under my skin and felt the weight of my own disappointment to them was because my lifelong process of making most decisions to earn someone’s love and approval was no longer panning out like it had before. The rosy-colored glasses that my family had always seen me through didn’t apply to those who didn’t assume or hope for the best in me.

God began to remind me that I didn’t need to earn my love or worth to Him, and it is allowing me to love without the expectation to be loved and accepted back. In Christ, we are asked to meet someone where they are and to love them there and not to expect them to live and love exactly like us. In Christ, whatever He’s asking of us is for our good and the good of those around us. This is probably going to be a lifelong struggle for me and the tension from it weighs so heavy on my heart. What God began to teach me through my hip injury was what I believe to be a long line of ‘no quick fix’es as I push onward towards the Finish Line of life. As a friend encouraged me – I need to pray more. I need to not run from this and instead allow myself to be filled with the purposes for Christ that God has placed on my life alone. I need to fight the fear of being alone in _____. I need to learn to let go and embrace the people God has placed in my life – even, and perhaps especially, the hard ones that push me towards Christ head on.

Ending 28: Working Out and the Whole30 [Part 1 of 4]

I’ve been meaning to write for awhile now, and it seemed like having a Birthday was just as good as any excuse to do it. Summers fly by – and we have had a good time running around outside, hiking the Fells, discovering Sandy Beach, playing with friends, visiting Florida and our family – so it’s no surprise, that when the weather starts to slowly cool down, and our fall schedules begin to form, that August typically hits like a ton of bricks.

The month no sooner begins and we’re unpacking our bags from a typically 31-hour-long voyage and re-settling into our home and rhythm after a month away. Our kids – who were staying up waaaaay past their bedtimes in Florida – started going to bed at 7:30 – 8 p.m. simultaneously. After 20 months of Isaac’s life – with crazy bedtimes, butt patting, and overall sleep (or lack there of) insanity –  Mike and I have begun to cuddle up next to one another and watch Parenthood (OMG. So. Good. Almost too good.) I have felt that this month specifically, we have hit some unforeseen sweet-spot in our parenting continuum where somehow everyone’s needs are happily, and easily, met – and as such, of course, all I want is another baby.

And that is definitely the feeling that I am ending on this year – a mountain-top-high – but it has certainly come from striving to cross a perpetual bump I couldn’t quite hurdle over. I wanted to share the top four things I learned and to reflect on what God has ultimately done in my life these last 12 months.

 

• Whole 30 and Working Out

 

I cannot understate how big of a deal it is for me to eat well and to exercise. Before I got pregnant with Marin, I was at my unhealthiest point in life – I had gained a lot of weight and in hindsight, am pretty certain that I was depressed when we were first married and living in Atlanta. I felt completely isolated from my Florida friendships, I ate ice cream in bed all day, our apartment was a complete mess, and if I so much as went outside, Mike would praise me as if I had performed a miracle. I had been let go from my job, (it felt like) my husband was always at school (because he kinda was), and I just remember feeling so incredibly sad and lonely. After he graduated, we went to Clearwater to stay with my in-laws for a month, then that June headed to Boston for 6 weeks to find jobs and move here. I started doing Weight Watchers, and by November, when I got pregnant with Marin, I had lost about 35 pounds. I was feeling like I had taken control of an area of my life that had become completely out of control and it mirrored the other aspects of my life at that time. What I didn’t realize then was that my health had less to do with weight gain and more to do with feeding myself foods that didn’t feed my body and its needs well.

Being sad and sick continually – to the point of always having some type of indigestion medicine in my purse at all times – weren’t the only ‘problems’ I wasn’t managing well. From living on a hilly college campus, and walking it daily, to suddenly being at a desk job and then in bed jobless, my body physically got weaker and weaker. Up until my 24th year, I felt utterly invincible – and I mean that wholeheartedly – until one day, I pulled ~ 60 lb cart of groceries off the T while 8 months pregnant. When I seriously injured my hip with Marin – to the point that I could not walk up hills, walk up stairs more than once a day, or walk further than to the bus stop in front of our home – I was utterly terrified. In hindsight, I should have been probably more scared than I was, and in looking back, it was the first time I went into a situation knowing that a ‘quick fix’ wasn’t possible or promised. After months of postpartum physical therapy and trigger point injections, my right side felt 95% ‘normal’, but still weaker than my left.

So after Isaac, when I had worked out regularly before he was born, and eaten healthier and healthier by eating full fats and protein, I am not surprised that my first and third trimester and delivery was easier. What I didn’t see coming was how hard his arrival affected me emotionally. In the middle of what was hands down the worst winter Boston has ever had, the transition to two kids hit hard. We were stuck inside, except for what-felt-like-hell-getting-to WellCare visits and our weekly playgroup. On top of that, I felt like I was trapped in a concoction of raging hormones and lack of sleep. As someone who certainly thrives in the company of others, and who needs a lot of sleep, suddenly being landlocked to our apartment, and not having the option to get out of it without someone in tears felt debilitating for me. As the snow melted, and the seasons changed, Isaac grew and Marin adjusted, and I wholeheartedly expected for me to grow and adjust too. It didn’t really happen. Isaac struggled to go down for other sitters and the feeling of being trapped was maintained. By September, I was still feeling a ton of anxiety and was ready to try a Whole30 – I’d been itching to do one for a couple of years.

I had tried once before when Marin was a baby, quit on Day 4, and had always felt guilty about it. This time I did it (with the help of Mike, who did it along with me for my birthday last year) – cut out legumes, grains, dairy, soy, sweeteners (including honey) and basically, anything but fruit, meat, fish, vegetables, and a whole lot of coconut milk in my coffee – for 30 days. My initial desire to lose weight shifted into a desire to be well. My anxiety became considerably more manageable and I felt like my brain could think clearly and logically again. Physically, my face was way less puffy, my skin quit breaking out (in all the places I’d typically blame on my cycle), I had way more energy and needed less sleep than ever before. By the time it was over, I was utterly convinced that everything Melissa Hartwig preached was inarguable fact and that inflammatory foods did play a considerable part in the poor health-related – physical or emotional – side effects that I’d experienced. (And I am convinced that everyone, especially those with chronic pain whether physical or emotional, should begin treatment (whenever possible) by looking at their diet too).

Now 11 months later, when on vacation or out for a meal, I am way less than Whole30, but otherwise, I eat pretty consistently Whole 30-ish at home (or I apply its guidelines for making successful choices in line with what foods that do feed my body well). I have found that having this piece in my own health journey’s puzzle to be incredibly useful when it comes to treating symptoms, avoiding sickness, or working towards a health goal. (For instance, heading into another long, grey winter, and knowing full well that it will be hard for me emotionally, I am trying to lay the ground work to be successful now). I think everyone should try the Whole30, not to do for their whole life (I certainly don’t and either do its creators!), but as a health experiment, and even opportunity, to become in-tune with the body you use and need everyday.