It's been six months and twelve days since Samantha was born. In the last three weeks it has begun to seem as though the hardest part of motherhood is finally behind me. I know that will probably change. Another tough season will come. But for now, she is sleeping a bit longer which means I'm getting enough sleep so I no longer hit a wall every 10 minutes, feeling like I've reached the end of my capacity. I'm breathing again. A little bit deeper every day.
But it's still tough. I was reminded just how tough yesterday morning as I picked up a new book written for Moms. You know you're still in the thick of it when the first few lines of the introduction have the power to make you well up with tears, relieved and grateful that someone else knows just exactly how you feel.
"I can't be a mother today, Lord, I'm just too tired," Sarah Mae recounted of her own feelings as a young Mom. It's those first two words that got me. "I can't." The exact words I battle every few days. I counter back with "I can. And I will," based on a phrase in II Timothy that tells me "God has not given me a spirit of timidity, but of power." I'm battling and having success, but the battle itself can be tiring at times.
As I read Sarah Mae's words, I breathed the fresh air of another woman's understanding and I looked over at my baby and wondered how this small, sweet bundle of joy, deep in peaceful sleep, could cause these tears.
How could her presence cause me to pick up a book called Desperate?
I suppose it is the very fact of her incredible sweetness and utter vulnerability that makes me desperate to do the best job caring for her.
I am reminded of a pivotal day in February, when she was only two months old and I wasn't getting enough sleep and I realized on an new, important and deep level that I needed the air and the food of God to make it through one more day as a mother. For several weeks, I kept running into a wall, reaching the end of myself and getting angry. I have never experienced anything more peculiar than the type of anger that rises up in me when I am pushed to the end of myself and am still being asked for more... when I realize more is needed and WANT to give it!... but just have no more to give? That is the most bizarre feeling I have ever felt. Nothing in my life before has ever brought me to the true end of my own energy and pushed me for more. Not like this. I felt exhausted, claustrophobic, boxed in. My husband endured several emotional meltdowns as I reached that wall over and over and every time sat down in despair and didn't know what to do.
I kept turning to food and sleep and a one hour break from the baby while he took a turn watching her. These things helped a little, but they were not enough. It was not until I remembered that "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God," that I was truly rescued. Instead of taking a bath with the hour my husband gave me, I sat and read bits of Psalms and Proverbs and Philippians. I drank and ate every word, transformed in 10 minutes from a woman who wasn't going to make it through one more day, to a woman who felt revived, happy and eager to go find her baby and kiss her again. I had pushed through the wall and found the other side; the place where there is an endless supply of energy to do whatever is needed.
So about that baby in this story...
After 10 years of waiting, praying and hoping, she arrived on December 8, 2012, cuter and more precious than any dream we ever conceived: Samantha Grace Sherman - which means "God hears."
I'm already dreaming of the things I want to teach her; the books I want to read to her and the places we'll go. But in these first few months of life, her presence has been teaching me far more than I've been teaching her.
There were three particularly poignant moments these first three months. Today I will tell you about the first. It happened the first week home from the hospital. My husband and mother both left to run errands, leaving me alone with my baby for the first time ever. Before pregnancy, I prided myself on my vast experience with babies. Yet NOTHING could have prepared me for the weight of responsibility that came with the arrival of my very own baby. I was SO stressed. The delivery and c-section, left me weaker and more vulnerable than I have ever felt in my life. It baffles me, even now, to think that God entrusts a woman with the most precious task on earth, caring for a helpless newborn at the very time when we are at our weakest and most helpless ourselves. Mentally, emotionally, physically broken. I honestly don't know how I would have made it through those first six weeks without this promise from Isaiah.... "He (God) gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young." I recited this to myself dozens and dozens of times those first weeks.
But back to that first poignant episode during week one: First, you have to know that my greatest fear that week was Samantha choking. In the hospital there was a moment in the middle of the night when she silently started vomiting and choking on amniotic fluid and I was unprepared for it. I happened to turn at exactly the right moment to see her choking, but I had no idea what to do and she started turning blue. I turned her over and somehow she got through it, but I came away from the episode thoroughly traumatized and gravely afraid of being left alone with her. Nonetheless, the moment came later that week when everyone left the house and I was alone with my baby. I had just finished feeding her. I sat her up to burp her and I said aloud, "Jesus, please help us not to be scared by ANYTHING." What I meant to say, was, "Please don't let anything scary happen." But that's not what I accidentally said. I said, "please help us not to be scared by anything." So what did He do? He expertly allowed the thing for which I was most afraid to happen at that very moment. Literally, as the last word left my mouth, Samantha projectile vomited for the first time, splashing the bassinet, two feet away. Milk came out of her mouth AND NOSE!
We lived through it and I smiled. He could not have more clearly spoken into my life to say, "We are not going to avoid all scary situations. Instead, I will be WITH you and you do not need to be scared by ANYTHING.
For those of you who think a baby vomiting is not a scary thing, it is humbling to share this story with you. Indeed, it does seem a bit silly to me, looking back on it now. But we all have fears. Insert a different fear and maybe you can relate. What fear do you carry that you can let Jesus be WITH you to overcome?
