On New Momma Fears and Truth-Telling and The Things She Most Wants to Hear

My brain makes a crackling, cellophane sound, like a tv that can’t quite make the connection, every time I go to think. Third trimester is pulling out the baby brain, throwing up walls where I used to make connections. Twice now, driving has been an adventure –mid-route my mind breaking and stalling so that I didn’t know how in the world to get to the place I was going. The well-working home-bound routines are also permeated by a hazy fog that hasn’t lifted in a while, veiling my deep feelings and thoughts, like how I might feel about all this upcoming change, the end of so many normalcies.

Don’t hug me too tight or the waves of emotion might come spurting out, all these mid-process thoughts that won’t be ordered into understanding. For instance, my mind is divided between longing to hold my baby for the first time, see his red tinged skin and draw him into me, and being overwhelmed at the thought of not being able to jump in the car and go, say I just need a day to myself and head to the coffee shop with the friend. The cold, common selfishness that shirks at being needed constantly wildly juxtaposes the warm peace that fills me at knowing he’ll need his momma to draw him from the bassinet and press the nurturing life-food into his ready mouth – me, and not the random woman on the street.

He rolls around like a whale in my stomach and I need to hold him, see him, pat him gently on the bottom while I rock him to sleep in the same chair my momma rocked me, in the same room I grew up in, brought home from the same hospital where my parents met me. If you don’t know, my husband and I temporarily live in my childhood home while we penny and pray our school debt away. It’s a gracious gift that sometimes sits uncomfortable in Cody’s and my stomachs as we long for a home of our own, where we’d nurse our baby in his own nursery, the room he’d grow up in, in a neighborhood full of friends ringing our doorbell begging to play. Sometimes I don’t feel a full mother without this. Which is silly. But it’s there - rooting out my fears and fighting my misplaced hopes out of the dirt.

He’s told me to trust Him a thousand times over. But sometimes the “yes” takes a while to make it all the way into my hopes and dreams, my relentless desire to have the material things and know all the parenting statistics. “Yes” I trust You with all my heart but my mind is still straggling behind.

There are so many fears that a new mother faces. Some are written on our faces, some hidden in our hearts. If I felt confident to tell you that I fear not getting enough skin-to-skin with my baby, of people crowding too close and losing intimacy with him (that crucial time to bond early), then I might hold back telling you I fear someone hurting my son, or worse, of hurting him myself – not knowing every detail of his developmental stages and all the best ways to stimulate his body and mind (because this is where the real insecurity hides). If I tell you that I’m tired and can’t imagine the tiredness coming, then I’d stop short of saying that I’m afraid of losing all my friends – being just outside the beltway of all the places they might drive and being too exhausted to drive myself. Fearing my interests won’t converge with theirs’ and that every time I’ll want to talk about my son I’ll feel guilty, knowing our lives don’t look the same and that I could be burdening or boring them. The lies we tell ourselves are the most convincing feelings.

Maybe it’s all this and more that makes the kindest advice from the kindest momma feel like another rock in my pack, weighing me down even as I think I want to hear you! I want to know what you know.

The new momma, the one with the first babe still warm in her womb, the one with the crackling, cellophane mind – here’s what she might want you to know and to say.

Know her mind is wracked with thoughts and emotions as she works hard to prepare for this new normal. Know she values your input, has a million questions, covets sound counsel – and that some days she’ll have the mental space to listen long to your wisdom (mulling it over well and considering the benefits), and some days she’ll be the one that needs to talk it out, these confounding feelings bearing down on her.

When you meet with her, try not to heap suggestions on a young mother’s head. Don’t take your strongest held parenting dogma and tell her she has to do this because it’s the only way that works. Do look her in the eyes and tell her she’ll do great. You won’t notice the eighth inch her shoulders raise, the way you’ve removed a fraction of the burden she feels. But she will. Don’t tell her all your hard-won, childrearing wisdom in one whirlwind sit. Do ask her what she wants to know, and what she’s looking forward to, checking in with her often with an ear quick to listen. If you’re able, turn back the pages of your mind to when you were in her steps, and empathize and joy with her. Remember the fear and the excitement and the lurch in your stomach every time you realized that this humongous tummy sitting on your legs was a very real human waiting to call you mom. Hold her hand – she’ll need you. She doesn’t know how to read this new map. Be her friend – that might be more than she’s capable of asking.

Being Honest with Ourselves: on life patterns and looking back

My 25th birthday is four short months away. This birthday, it seems, has been culturally imbued with wry humor: the “quarter-century” comments about mental breakdowns and the approach of thirty. Though I can’t claim to be “old” yet (I say that as a sort of apology or shrug of the shoulder to any who might laugh at the forthcoming comment), this birthday has been making me feel . . . older.

It’s a bit of a joke with my family and friends that the pigment in my hair is noticeably emptying, coarse gray and white hairs filling in at my roots. On top of that, the other week I was walking down the sidewalk and did a playful jump and heel-click and almost pulled a muscle. All joking aside, this birthday feels like a weighty milestone. In some ways, it feels like I’m exiting the “dreamer” phase of life: that stage of living where there is so little behind us that our eyes only point bright and shining to the future and what we think it might hold.

I still understand that stage. I look forward to having kids, to growing old with my husband, to living life wherever it leads us. But I also have many dreams that have passed, that have morphed into memories. There’s an inner conflict here, where there is still so much to look forward to, but, also, so much to look back upon.

At almost twenty-five, I’ve lived enough years to see patterns in my life. In our lives, desire works itself out in telling ways. It undergirds our decisions—the man behind the curtain, as it were. The pattern of decisions we make is our most important narrative, because it reveals the state of our hearts. What do we want? What do we work toward?

Lately, as I’ve been processing this birthday and the way age opens our eyes little by little to our deepest desires, I’ve been looking back with a measure of clarity. From this vantage, small as it is, peering out squinty-eyed over the expanse of a quarter decade, I’ve been wondering what the patterns are forming themselves into. What the narrative might be saying.

There’s a line I wrote in my first blog post, and I see it lived out within the patterns of my life more than I care to confess:

“So often I long to be, before I am.”

So many seasons of my life have been characterized by the pressing, verbalized desire to be something other than what I am. As a child, I spoke often of wanting to become a writer. I also gushed about becoming a singer. Anyone hearing me at ten might have supposed my greatest desire was to sing in front of an audience. Time weeded out the truth. I never took my desire to sing further than the words it took to say it. But I treated writing differently. I nurtured it, fed it, practiced it—working at it always, despite the obstacles.

The difference is plain: true desire works for what it wants. It doesn’t passively wish for it. It digs deep, works long, pushes on. Obstacles are hurtles, not barriers, for true desire.

Proverbs two puts me in my place when I read it. No matter what my verbalized desires are concerning my spiritual growth, Proverbs lays it all out on the line: true desire works for what it wants.

“My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding—indeed, if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God” (Proverbs 2:1-5).

Looking back at the pattern of our lives is a great perch to suss out what we truly desire, versus what we long to be seen as. The superficiality of pseudo-desires can maraud itself as diligent desire to others, but in our day-to-day lives, we know the truth.

The thing we sometimes don’t want to hear is that all of us have desires that are working toward what they want. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, these desires are present in our daily, mundane realities, pressing toward a goal. It takes discernment—and honesty—to see these desires and pseudo-desires alike.

Don’t be afraid. Look back, trace the patterns, read the narrative. Take time to name the things that need to be rooted out or redirected. Let’s be truthful with ourselves about the things we earnestly desire and are working toward.

It's Okay to be Here

The setting sun sets fire to my clothes, the edges of my sleeve shining gold. All the lights in the house are off, and these last rays steal in and rob patches of darkness (patches of the sink, the table, the floor). I stand at the sink washing dishes. I do my best thinking here, hands busily scrubbing and washing, methodically placing plate and glass in drainer.

I’ve been pulling at the threads of a thought. A thought about present-ness. Here-ness. And the more I pull at this, the more the ripples show themselves in everyday places. Being present is so important. Being here, in this place, where the lessons are.

A dirty plate holds heavy grit and I elbow-grease it off. All this tugging at the threads is making my daily rituals look a little threadbare. The time wasted away in cyber places, lost in the abyss, and spent for nothing. The time looking toward the future, the seasons to come, and missing the one I’m in.

It is so dangerous not to be present.

Transparency, clear through to the heart: Lately, I’ve been so caught up in what the next season will look like that I’m afraid I’m missing the one that I’m in. Our seasons change, sometimes quick lightening and sometimes slow rain. Either way, there are lessons to learn and seek here. Right now. And we don’t need the added pressure of trying to be somewhere we aren’t.

This absence from presence pulls my heart away from prayer and real listening. In the crazy and the chaos (or the dead calm quiet), the now, right here, we can “be still and know that [He] is God.” What other time than now should we come to our “ever-present help?”

Truth: I’m a new wife. I’m not a career woman. I’m not a mom. I’m not a college student. I am here, in this place, and I need to live here. Seeking someplace else only takes away from my time here.

Feet planted on the rug, I watch a single, small and perfect soap-bubble glide around the space before me. Its rainbow swirls move—kaleidoscopic—as it gently floats up and down before descending to the sink and quietly disappearing. Yes, be here, this very day.

When we live in a mirage, that shining marauding of reality, we can expect to miss out on God’s teaching. Isn’t this the place where God has put us? We don’t expect Spring in Winter. We wait out the winter; appreciate the wind and the bare trees. And so we seek the Son wherever we are, even when the clouds accumulate thick.

And when we’re waiting for the next season, when it’s just around the bend? Here’s a piece of hope for those of us who are straining to see around that corner:

This place is not pointless if it propels us toward God. No matter where we are.

It’s okay to be here: here in the waiting, here in the unbeautiful mess of dishes, here in the mundane madness, here in the trying to peek around the corner to see what’s next. I pile the last dish on top of plates and utensils and pans, flick the water away and dry my hands on the damp cloth down by my knee.

I want to joy in today. I want to be present.

So help us see You today, Eternal One, and embrace the path You have placed before us.