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.
