Journal Excerpt

I took this picture of E today, while she was lying in her crib staring up at the animal mobile rotating above. She has this look of total wonder and amazement on her face. I find the whole thing rather amusing, because it was probably about the hundredth time she’s seen the same five animals, and because they are actually quite ugly. Garishly bright colors, old and used, and one day I turned them up and discovered their faces are painted with clownishly artificial smiles. Yikes!

I’m getting a sense now that E’s tastes and mine definitely do not align. She does not care for tasteful pastels or artistic realism. She is visually addicted to anything with stripes. And the brighter, the better. Her total delight in the things she loves to see is a joy to behold. When she sees a Tiffany lamp, she laughs out loud to herself for minutes on end. My mom made her a poster covered with wrapping paper scraps and she cannot tear her eyes from it. It’s like visual heroin.

But I love this about her. I love that I’m seeing the world a little differently through her wonder.

Journal Excerpt

She often wrings her hands now, as if in mute distress or eternal petition. It’s amazing to watch her acquire a sense of self-consciousness, one body part at a time. She still hasn’t gotten over the fact that she has hands, with ten fingers attached. She gnaws on each one in careful succession to reassure herself of this fact. She opposes them and grabs things. I tell her this makes her practically a different person. Merely a month ago she could only stare intensely at objects; now she flings her hands out and wraps her fingers around whatever she can find.

Sometimes when she manages to grab ahold of my hand she’ll bring it to her mouth to suck and drool over it in great exuberance. Her tongue feels soft, like wet velvet.

Journal Excerpt

She has sprouted a new tooth, a faint white bud in the gummy ridges of her mouth. She hides it like her own little Christmas secret. I only saw it today when she stopped sucking her fist long enough to smile, and it flashed like a beacon heralding bright new days. Solid foods! Weaning! Mommy gets her life back! Tooth brushing! New tooth! New tooth!

Immediately about six family members were crowded around all trying to pry open her lower lip while she looked at us as if we had all lost our minds. Ahh, the holidays.

Things That We Lose

I have made the slightly startling discovery that my love for E is not something I can take for granted. Just like my love for God, or my husband, it is something I can choose to nurture, or choose to turn off. For some reason I thought a mother’s love was immune to this, that somehow it transcended the usual rules. I thought mothers never got tired or critical of their babies, never felt distant from them or apathetic about them. Or that if they did, it lasted only a moment before they were again overcome by effusive maternal feelings.

In a way she is easier to love than the other things I have committed to loving in my life. She is naturally adorable; she looks to me for security and identity. But in other ways she is more difficult to love. She can’t reciprocate, can’t understand what I say or always tell me how she feels. She can be incredibly moody and often unreasonable. Sometimes she is heart-breakingly cute, but other times she doesn’t look all that attractive.

One thing I have found since returning to work is that if I choose not to focus on her, not to intentionally love her, it is easy simply not to. It is easy when investing long hours and mental energy at work for my relationship with her to become functional. On the surface things seem okay—I manage to rush feeding her before heading to the OR, manage to get home in time to feed her before bedtime—but something changes in how I am towards her, how I see her. Something is lost in my delight in her.

This is the same way it is with God, and with marriage. There are things in our lives that are incredibly important but rarely demanding, and if we aren’t careful they slip away. The kind of intimacy with God that informs and guides our day. Delight in and deep respect for our spouse. An overflowing heart towards our children; awareness of the privilege it is to be a mother.

These are things I’m asking God to restore to me. I don’t know quite what it means yet to balance work and motherhood or marriage, but at least I know what I can’t afford to lose. And I’m asking for the insight and courage to see the choices I have, and make the right ones when I can.

Journal Excerpt

E has her first baby cold. It comes complete with a baby cough and baby phlegm. When she coughs she sounds like Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone. When she breathes she rattles like a little Darth Vader. Apparently blowing one’s nose is an acquired skill. I feel like prescribing her chest physical therapy, like we do for old ladies with pneumonia in the hospital.

Christmas Babies

What child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping?

This time of year, I tell E, we think of Jesus as someone like you. Someone with chubby folds of thigh fat, who pooped everywhere, who drooled and sucked on his fists.

It’s strange to think of Christ as a baby this year. In some way I’ve anticipated E’s coming most of my life, sat a year ago knowing she was in my body. And now she’s here, and so much more her own being than I could have thought. She has the full force of her own personhood, yet is utterly helpless. She can’t blow her nose when it’s stuffy, can’t itch a rash, can’t verbalize her thoughts.

What must it have been like, to be like Simeon, and hold with tears in your eyes the baby you had anticipated your whole life, knowing this child would change your life and that of all humanity? To know that God in his full being could be in something so powerless?

That is what strikes me about it all this year. That Jesus did not appear a man, descend a hero. That he came through a woman’s body like the rest of us, screaming, cold, and helpless.

Journal Excerpt

News just in: she doesn’t just love her bath. She goes crazy over her bath. She is a little bathing maniac. Kneeling next to her bathtub is like sitting in the splash zone at Sea World. The way she slaps the water with her arms, kicks her little legs, arches her back and wriggles her butt is practically diabolical. She laughs, real laughs, which I’ve decided is my favorite sound in the world. It was possibly worth going through labor to hear that sound.

I think part of her happiness in the tub has to do with how she loves being naked. Put her down on the changing table, unwrap her diaper, and she goes absolutely bonkers. Huge grin, legs kicking like a soft and chubby baby frog. She absolutely hates getting dressed, which makes cold weather difficult. She must get this from D, who would wear shorts and flip-flops every day if he could. I’m more for cozy sweaters and long jeans. Nope, E is a summer baby. She would probably stay naked in the tub all day if she could.

Trials of Many Kinds

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.” –James 1

This is what happens. I’m sitting in my clinic room, hooked up to a breast pump, desperately trying to calm down and relax so the milk will come, trying not to imagine some patient or technician barging through the door without reading the DO NOT DISTURB sign I had hung up. Maybe I should have added UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, I’m thinking. Or, BECAUSE I AM HALF NAKED.

Meanwhile there are about six patients waiting to see me outside. My only surgical case for tomorrow just cancelled because she failed to show up for her pre-op physical despite my calling her twice yesterday. I realize I forgot to eat lunch. I wonder if that relates to why I can’t seem to pump enough milk these days, and try not to think about what happens when the freezer stash runs out. I stare at the pile of charts piled up on the counter. I talk like an auctioneer while dictating but still can’t manage getting through all thirty from the day without a few piling up.

Pumping is the one thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to multi-task while doing. The rest of the day feels like ten things at once. Bundling her up for daycare while packing my bags. Dictating while checking the pager, examining while getting the history. Filling out consent forms while waiting for patients to dilate. Studying at night while breastfeeding. Calling D while running to pick E up. He and I are like a two-person special operations team. The last time we were this strategically intense, we were at Disney World figuring out how to ride Space Mountain during their busiest week of the year.

But those moments, when I pump locked in my clinic room, I have nothing to do but sit caught by the weirdness of my life. By the fragility of my sense of self. By the weird duality of my existence. I feel rusty at work, uncertain about daycare. I wonder whether I am doing too many things to do any one thing well. I take D’s advice and try to use those times to pray, and mostly, I am praying, God, help me stay true. Help me, at the end of the day, to have pumped enough milk for her, to not have worsened anyone’s vision, to not have neglected D. Help me to experience joy as I can. Help me to have persevered.

Journal Excerpt

I think she has recently discovered that I am attached to my breasts. She will stop in the middle of a perfectly good feed, pop off, arch her head back and gaze at me in wonder as my milk keeps leaking everywhere. If I smile at her she grins back and starts to try to talk, modulated coos that sound like a baby whale. Maybe a baby whale in pain. Eeeeeiiiii… ahhhhhh…. I continue my Operation Brainwash E’s First Word, repeating to her slowly, maaa-maaa…

I try to get her latched back on, but her hunger is forgotten in the wonderment of realizing I’m actually there every time she feeds. She cannot tear her gaze from my face. Sometimes she starts to loll things around with her tongue lazily. Quit playing with your food and eat, I tell her.

Motherhood and Work

I went back to work full-time last week, to the hardest and most surgical rotation of the year. And E started daycare at Hopkins. She refused to eat or sleep the first day, so there I was: at daycare, getting paged while struggling to breastfeed through her fussiness. At clinic, getting calls about her, trying to remember to pump and find a place to do it, trying to finish in time to pick her up. In between everything washing my hands like a madwoman.

I have been everywhere along the work vs. motherhood debate: raised with Focus-on-the-Family values, by a stay-at-home mom who later worked; absorbed in an unforgiving career, having stayed at home with the baby the last three months. All I can say is, none of it is easy. Staying at home with her is more exhausting than a day at work. Working in a non-family-friendly, driven culture is difficult and lonely. I used to see the issue as pretty black and white, but now I’m all sorts of gray.

I can’t work the way I used to work before I had E. I can’t be a mother the way I used to before I worked. And the adjustment is tough. There are the logistics of getting her there and back, and dealing with all the bottles, ice packs, and pump parts involved in maintaining her on breast milk, which is a full-time job in itself.

But even harder is the emotional subtext. There’s all kinds of guilt, and fear—of leaving her, of putting limits on my work. I have to go here on faith. I have to believe God is sovereign, that he ordained her to be brought into my life at a time when I don’t have much choice about things. I have to believe that He loves her more than I do and has some purpose for my finishing this training, and to be faithful to both simultaneously is not an impossible thing. I’m starting with the fundamentals. Trying not to be paralyzed by worry, trying to be open. I’ll probably be writing more about this later, but for now, I’m just taking it one long day at a time.

Marriage in Heaven

“In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had married her.” But Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” - Matthew 22:28-30

I had prettied myself up so often during interview season that I shunned heels and embraced hooded sweatshirts for a month after. Tonight I lingered again before the mirror in honor of a night out with D. Kohl running along eyelids; hair pressed straight and glossy, the steam wafting up in tribute to some unseen goddess of vanity. My apartment-mate clicked up the stairs, purse crooked in elbow: she who’d been in a long relationship, now out for a single girls’ night out; I who’d been single all my life, preening for a guy. Strange ironies.

We spend so much of our life dwelling on romantic relationships: defining, recovering from, dreaming of, maintaining, cultivating. Or maybe it’s just being in the February of our twenties, having forsaken tacky elementary-school valentines and benign college fellowship festivities. In the last week I’ve talked with girls figuring out which guys to give a chance, girls trying to pace relationships, heal from broken engagements, find their legs in a new marriage.

I used to really cherish the idea that in heaven, we’re not married. That feeling came back to me when I read that verse, a feeling as surprisingly freeing as it was alien. To think that one day, for all days, there will be no other. No being taken, no being given, just being. Me, God, here, now: it doesn’t get any more Real than this. That’s what it means. To think otherwise—to place our primary energy, hopes, and attention upon another person (or the absence thereof)—is to forget the Scriptures, which paint the greatest love story since the dawn of time, and promise the greatest consummated reunion that ever inspired a happily-ever-after. It is to forget the power of God, which both allures and commands the sort of worship that will define being and satisfy all other desires out of existence.

Alien, but freeing. Good reminder that the only constant in this life will go on being the only thing that matters for the eternity to which this life is merely the introduction.

Written February 11, 2006

Journal Excerpt

She is becoming like a real person now. She recently noticed her hands, and has gone a bit nutty in the discovery. My hands! My hands! She sucks and slobbers on them with a sort of fierce joy that makes me look at my own in a new light.

And her hands have discovered each other. They clasp together desperately like long-lost lovers. I think to myself, big day in neural development here. There’s something about crossing the midline that seems like a landmark. The two halves of her brain have discovered each other. Next she’ll be doing higher order math.

She actually sees me now. It’s still a bit startling, the moment her roving eyes fix on mine. She gazes at me like I’m Jesus Christ. I smile, and she breaks out into this huge grin. Works every time—in the bath, in a crowded room, in the dark at night after a feed.

Speaking of baths, she’s finally admitted that she likes them. It’s as if one day she decided to give up the pretense, stopped quietly gripping her bath cloth in surly concentration, and just let all loose. She slaps the water, kicks her feet, actually chuckles, real chuckles that shake her shoulders. Whenever it looks like I might be getting ready to get her out she wriggles and splashes some more.