Journal Excerpt

This week she had solid food for the first time. It was a somewhat anticlimactic experience. First of all, I’m not sure rice cereal really counts as food. It’s a mysterious powder mixed into milk or water. Despite all my instincts I tried tasting it. It tastes like nothing, with a slightly mealy aftertaste.

Secondly, perhaps a few morsels of said concoction actually made it down her throat. Most of it ended up on her fingers and the bib. The parts that did make it to her tummy probably got there by sheer gravity, as it took her awhile to figure out how to swallow apart from sucking. She spent most of the time drooling it out of her mouth, while trying to suck her fingers, which apparently remain better-tasting than the food.

I kept trying to spoon the dribbly parts back into her mouth and maintain order while she grinned and played around. Hm. This feeding stuff might be harder than it’s cracked up to be.

Journal Excerpt

E has this generalized look of nonchalance. I go around exclaiming all the time. Look! You’re grabbing the bird with both hands! You can bring things to your mouth now! You used to only be able to look at the butterfly in a strange stupor and now you’re actually grabbing it with both hands AND putting it into your mouth! I can’t believe it! I must take more pictures!

She just goes around with a look of extreme boredom. Look, lady, it’s like I’ve done this a million times. You got anything new?

Journal Excerpt

A strange thing happened today. I was looking through pictures of E while pumping, and found myself missing her newborn self. There is a picture of me in my hospital gown, gazing at her as she looked vaguely back, mouth agape and tiny head resting on my shoulder. I miss those otherworldly days, when she looked like a gentle extraterrestrial. More alien than human, barely fitting in the crook of my arm.

I miss her tiny hands resting between my breasts while she fed, which was about all she could do back then. Suck and cry. She couldn’t smile, or focus on much. Her unused hands actually collected lint between its fingers and got smelly like feet do.

Now she is practically a different person, and I miss having a newborn. I actually felt myself longing for another one. I am turning out to be one of those women whom a few months ago I would have diagnosed as mildly psychotic.

Journal Excerpt

Her hair is gradually thinning out, as if it isn’t growing fast enough to catch up with the rate at which her head expanding. She’s nearly bald in several spots, particularly where the back of her head presses on her bed at night. I find myself sweeping her hair to cover up the thinner spots on the sly, like balding men do.

Genesis 2

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. – Genesis 2:24

As far as I can tell, this is the first time the word mother is mentioned in the Bible. And it’s basically to point out that it is a temporary thing. The verse could just as well say, For this reason a woman will leave her father and mother…

I think about what defines who I am, and the two things uppermost in my mind now are medicine and motherhood. Both have so unnegotiably transformed my life, are so inflexible. Both demand a lot. But I think more about what this passage is saying, and I realize the two things that should define me are God and my husband—two things that are not inflexible, most of the time not as demanding, but the two things that will last the longest. Marriage, for this lifetime, and God for eternity. God first, as the one who created me; D second, as the one to whom I am given.

This passage also brings to mind what it means to raise E as a woman. Right now I feel so connected with her. She was a part of my body and came out of my body; when she breastfeeds we are literally still one flesh. When she is naked with me she feels no shame. But she was not created for me. Woman was taken out of a man’s body, was created for him, and this is part of her purpose for existing. For a man, for Christ.

So to be a mother is to understand what it means to let her go. It is understanding for what purpose she was originally created, as a child of God, and as a woman. It is preparing her for a healthy marriage, by praying for her potential husband, by having a healthy marriage myself. It is giving her to Christ, because He will be the one who will be with her forever, not me.

And for myself: it is hearing the demands of God, and my husband, more than I hear her demands upon me. Which is practically difficult, but in principle important. I guess the more important things are often the harder ones to do.