Babies Don't Keep

A portion of a very sweet poem by Ruth Hamilton:

The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow,

But children grow up, as I've learned to my sorrow.

So quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep!

I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.

This poem conjures up images of a mother in a white cotton nightgown with her hair neatly swirled into a bun at just the right place on the crown of her head, rocking her sweet sleeping baby with a gentle grin on her face and her eyes closed lightly, humming a sweet lullaby.  I love you, dear girl.  Oh, how I love you.  But this is not my life.  This is not my reality.

I just bounced you to sleep for the third time tonight and it's not even 10pm.  I am wearing sweatpants stained with the lavender paint from your bedroom and an "IU" tee shirt from college, complete with the wet spit up mark on my right shoulder that now always adorns every outfit I wear.   My hair looks decent, but only because I styled it last night in preparation for church this morning, although we didn't make it to church due to a variety of slightly ridiculous factors including one involving you and a middle of the night party started by an interest in the tinkling of the air vent blowing heat against the vertical blinds.

Don't get me wrong, I adore your snuggles.  I'm very conscious of the fact that you won't be little for long.  Your brother taught me that lesson very clearly.  I hold you, and bounce you, and carry you, I study your soft skin and tiny toes, and nuzzle my nose against the top of your little head and breathe in deeply that heavenly, perfect baby smell, I know the dimples on the back of your knuckles and the way your chubby cheeks make your eyes shrink when you smile.

But, here's the thing, I'm a bit of a neat freak...bet you hadn't noticed...and I like to have things in their places.  Some would even call me, dare I say it, OCD.  After I got you and your brother to sleep tonight I started my normal ritual of putting our house back together after a day of letting things fall apart around me as I tended to the needs of my sweet children.  Get this, Lydia, there was a lid from a steaming pot in the bathroom sink on top of a pile of peed on clothes from your brother's "potty learning" experience.  I have no idea why it was there nor how it landed in that location.  All I know is that by the end of the day I am completely exhausted and my house is a disaster.

I treasure you and your brother, but having two under two is insane, complete madness, and I have a feeling it won't change much when your brother has his birthday in a couple of weeks.  Yet, once you are both sleeping peacefully I absolutely can not relax until my house is put back together.  Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect.  I'm "done" for the night and there are two heaps of laundry in the middle of my kitchen, a pile of toys in the living room that I swept out of the walking path with my foot, and a heap of framed pictures on the kitchen counter that I haven't gotten to hang on the wall since we moved in two weeks ago.

I'm learning.  I'm learning to lower my standards, to be more realistic.  I'm working to get to a place where I'm okay with the heap of laundry and swept aside toys.  They bother me a bit now, but I'm so wiped out that I will let them be until tomorrow.  I know that the most important things in my life aren't things, but people...your daddy, and your brother, and you!  Still, I like the things to be neat and orderly.  It's hard for my brain to rest when my house isn't tidy.  So, I'm compromising.  I took the pot lid out of the bathroom sink, and I put it in the hamper so that I could take it out and put it in the kitchen sink to be washed on my way to take the laundry to the washer, except...I'm pretty sure...now that I think about it, that the pot lid is still in the hamper, and it's just going to have to stay there until tomorrow.

Your daddy is off of work tomorrow. That means I'll get most of the "put off" things caught up.  That means I'll get to shower long enough to shave my legs.  That means, if I'm lucky, that I might get to go to the bathroom without my entourage!  I love you both dearly, but wiping my bottom while  fielding your brother's questions about my "gina" and holding you is...interesting, to say the least, not to mention the one handed shimmy I have to do to get my pants back up with you perched on my arm.  Yep, that's my goal for tomorrow: diminish the laundry mountain and pee in privacy.  It's not glamorous, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Sweet Dreams, my littlest love, until you wake to nurse in a couple of hours....
Love,
Momma

Delayed Urgency

I can't wait.  I can't put this off.  I have to get these things written out for you now, before they fade and become blurry memories.  These are things I desperately need to tell you, just not the 3 month old you.  Someday you will be where I am.  Maybe not 27, maybe not with a 23 month old boy and a 3 month old girl, maybe not with a police officer for a husband, but someday you will be right here.  You'll be Wife and Momma and overwhelmed and elated, thankful and terrified all at once.  There are things you need to know.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on background information, because I've got a lot to say about this very moment.

I hope by the time you're old enough to need this there is no evidence of the fact that your momma ever struggled with sinful eating, but it's a truth.  It's a truth that I'm struggling to make a part of my past.  What was once perhaps a "sweet tooth" has turned in to "emotional eating".  I had a moment about a week ago when I got really honest with myself about the situation.  I've known for some time that I was struggling with food, with self control, with eating to "feel better" emotionally.  Yet, I'd been sort of sweeping it under the rug.  I've developed a mountain of excuses to justify to myself why I have been doing what I have.

Then it happened.  All I can attribute it to is the Spirit moving me, changing me, but it finally came to my conscience that what I was doing wasn't just unhealthy, it was wrong.  I talked to a dear friend, I cried, I talked to your daddy, I googled, and I cried some more.  Here's what it comes down to, my sweet girl, I've been using tasty sweets to fill a craving, a craving that I thought was in my taste buds, but it's not.  It's a craving in my heart.  My heart longs for the sweetest treat, and that is only found in Christ.

But here's the thing, taking my "issues" to the Lord isn't nearly as easy as taking my issues to a brownie.  I can't lie to Him.  I can't lick my lips and say, "I feel better" and fool Him.  He knows my heart, and that means He will force me to wrestle with some things I'd rather leave tucked away.  That means he will call me in to some really uncomfortable situations.  That means he will call out the worst in me so that He may break down the disaster I create and recreate Himself in me.

Guess what...brownies are a lot less complicated than that.  Cookies don't expect anything of me.  Ice cream doesn't call me out and whisper to my heart, "You were made for more than this." Brownies are nice, and sweet, and gooey, and quiet.  But all of the goodness that will come from Him refining me when I take my mess to Him, well, that just turns into chunk when I take it to brownies.  Let's not even get in to the fact that brownies, no matter how chocolaty, don't offer eternal salvation.  Yep, that's a pretty big one.

All of this to say, though I haven't been in a new frame of mind for very long, I've been thinking about my sweets differently.  Thinking about how I am called to honor Him with my body.  Thinking about the fact that I am made for so much more than "satisfaction" from sugar.  Thinking about the truth that taking my aching heart to Him will work towards healing my eternal soul, not only my fleeting emotions, though he cares about those as well.  Thinking about the shameful truth that I was worshiping food above My Savior.

All of this admitting and processing, praying and wrestling, it has put me in a pretty vulnerable place.  That's why I nearly let my progress be destroyed by someone I didn't even know today.  Another mom, 3 months pregnant with her second baby, said to me today, "You look like you're about as far along as I am.  When are you due?"

It's almost enough to make me cry just to hear it echo in my ears as I write.  I wish I could say that wasn't the case.  I wish I could say that I'm strong enough in my understanding of my image in Christ that her comment didn't rattle me.  I'm not there yet.

I struggled a lot after Gideon was born as I tried to accept the body I was left with after delivering a 9lb4oz baby.  There are parts of my body that will never be the same. As a woman in my mid twenties I found myself aching for the former smooth and firm tummy that used to look back at me in the mirror.  It took some time, and some prayer, and especially some self forgiveness, but I finally came to terms with my "post baby body".  I realized that a miracle, and now two, had been performed inside of my body.  The very hands of God knit together not one, but two beautiful babies right there in my womb.  My body was made for more than firmness under my tee shirt, it was made to be your very first home.

I can't say that the only reason I look the way I do right now is because I've grown two babies.  I have to be honest and admit that I've not been honoring His temple in me with the way I've been shoveling sweets in to my mouth.  I am made for more than that, and I'm working really hard on being done with that mess.  But I'm happy to embrace the stretched out parts that you and your brother have left behind.  I even sort of appreciate the fact that you didn't just use the pre-made stretch marks left before you.  You left your own marks on my body and they will forever serve as a reminder to me that the very Creator pieced both Gideon and YOU together deep inside of the safety of my warm and squishy tummy.  A tummy that, despite what the world tells me, isn't designed for the purpose of being revealed by a bikini, but rather for being the workshop for two of God's sweetest creations.

We live in a fallen world.  A world where media, men, and even other women cause us to question the beauty of God's creation in us.  Don't fall for that nonsense.  Rise above.  Rise above the tempting treats and put foods in your mouth that will nourish your physical body and reflect your respect for His temple in you. Rise above the desire to put a brownie bandaid over your aching heart and take your troubles and your tears to The One who can heal you.  Rise above the idea that media and the world shows you about what your body is intended for.  Your body is not a tool to be used to lure a man.  It is not a tool to be used to inflate your ego over that of your Earthly sisters'.  It is a tool to be used as God's dwelling place, and as his workshop when He makes you a momma.

As I snuggle all 13lbs of you in my arms and you suckle at my breast, you have no understanding of any of this.  But there will be a time, my love, as much as it pains me to imagine, there will be a time when you know all of these things by experience in one way or the other.  That's why I desperately need to tell you right now so that you will know without any blurriness or fading when you need this knowledge.  YOU WERE MADE FOR MORE, SO MUCH MORE.

Be blessed and be beautiful, my sweet girl.
Love,
Momma