Nothing is more important.
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There is nothing more important to me than staying in faith and raising my kids with love.
Nothing.
Yet how often I would look around me – and my life reflected none of that back at me.
Instead of trusting in what God had in store for me, I was counting the months between my babies and wishing they weren’t so close together.
Instead of looking forward to having a large family, I struggled to see how I could take any more on.
Instead of loving on my kids, I just wanted them to leave me alone so that I could do my own thing.
I used all of these struggles against myself – they were proof that I was doing it wrong. That I had made a mistake in becoming a mom, and that my kids would be better off without me in their lives. The shame in even having these thoughts – what kind of a mom am I to think this way? – kept me from opening up about them and getting the help that I needed.
I could talk about them to my husband, but he didn’t know what to do to help me. I could talk with friends, my mom, my sisters, but they also couldn’t help.
My low times postpartum were where these thoughts became the strongest, where I wasn’t strong enough to see them for what they were – lies.
I wasn’t planning on starting work until the end of March, but around Christmas time I started getting a nudge to get back to it. it literally felt like someone was pushing me forward, right behind my sternum. Strangest feeling, other than when someone is literally pushing you forward from inside your belly.
I feel so strongly that this work is needed right now – not starting next month, or next year, but now. It can be easy to push it off because you don’t know what will happen in the future, to hope that it will get better or go away on it’s own, but it doesn’t. when you haven’t worked through something like postpartum depression, it comes with you. I don’t say this to make you feel guilty for not working through it, but to open your eyes. There is that guilt, the shame, the inadequacy that hangs onto you and you can’t quite shake it off. This isn’t how you need to live for the rest of your life. Change is possible.
Sending you all love, wherever you are.
