My Journey: Hints of Spring

Mine was considered a high risk pregnancy, and my doctor (the same sweet woman who delivered Allison)saw me more often than normal. By March, I was in my third trimester and seeing her for weekly visits. By late April, we had added a weekly stress test at the hospital. It was a challenging schedule to keep, but I often took Jenifer with me, and we always stopped at Golden Donuts, located in a dumpy, renovated gas station near the hospital. The place made the best chocolate milkshake in town.

As this new little life grew inside me, I continued to wrestle through loss, fear, and blame. Eventually spring came in me, as it did in the world outside my windows. The soft red blush of the first spring buds, then the greens—spring green, seafoam green, lime, jade, forest green—a full rainbow of green. Life coming forth from the dead of winter. 

I was as big as the side of a barn. There’s not much you can do about how you wear your baby, but on a fifth pregnancy, you don’t really care too much. My body was definitely feeling worn and frazzled. Those muscles at the base of the abdomen that support the baby were stretched thin as a worn-out rubber band. Just walking to the mailbox was stressful. When my hands weren’t occupied with something more important, they were generally holding up my baby bulge.

As my due date neared, I rested a lot. I must have been reading a book about on faith. Unfortunately, I didn’t record the title in my journal, but I copied down some excerpts during the month of May. My faith was finding its feet again.

“The more we find Him in our sorrows and wants, the more we’ll be drawn away from the place where the sorrows are to Him in the place where He is.”

It had been a hard year and a half, but I had survived, and I knew even then, before this baby arrived, that something in the essence of me had changed, grown, stretched.

“In a tree, growth is not a uniform thing. In some single months there is more growth than in the whole rest of the year. During the rest of the year, however there is solidification. Without that, the timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth when the woody fiber is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk is only 4-6 weeks in May, June, and July. If we don’t acknowledge the time factor from the heart, we can get caught up in experiences and blessings and our ever-changing feelings, losing our anchor of scriptural facts.”

Solidification.