Posts Tagged ‘pregnancy’
For When You Relive a Traumatic Birth
Author’s Note: My first son was born almost fifteen years ago after a two-day, induced labor because I had severe preeclampsia. I was in and out of the hospital over the course of a month, finally spending a week in the high-risk section of the labor and delivery wing before they induced me. My second…
Read MoreReflections of a Pregnant Church
I can feel myself stretching. There is tension in my skin, and soreness in my breasts as they usher life in. I am enlarging the space inside of myself; This Body made up of so many parts. They were all comfortable, all had their roles; An eye as an eye and an ear as an…
Read MoreWhy Taking Prenatal Vitamins is an Act of Faith
Because you’ve been down this road before, when the line turned more and more pink, leaving you without a shadow of a doubt: you’re pregnant. Because you’re struck by the wildness of it all — nearly a year since the miscarriage. . . and this?? Because you’d finally settled into contentment, not the restless back…
Read MoreNo Breaks in a Broken System: Common Horizon Excerpt
We sit in a small office off the main hallway. The insurance representative is pulling all the forms for me, the new hire at a medical records office. He spots the ring on my finger, my grandmother’s diamond newly set in the band. “Married?” he casually asks. “No. We are thinking of moving the date…
Read MoreWaiting for Resurrection: Depression and Pregnancy
I’m lying flat on my back in a hospital examination room, acid reflux burning in my throat. A polite male doctor scans my protruding belly as I stare at the graying tiles on the ceiling while praying hard and fast, “Please be okay. Please be okay.” It was a routine appointment until my 34-week bump…
Read MoreEveryday Sacrament Excerpt
This Is My Body, Given for You When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him…Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this…
Read MoreFighting For Our Lives
“I am very frustrated. I don’t understand why you can’t just be confident in our care!” My perinatal specialist yelled these words to me when I was around 24 weeks pregnant with quadruplets. Why? Because I was asking her questions about what my children’s birth might look like. Up to this point, no one had…
Read MoreComplicated Joy
For all of the beauty found in celebrating the liturgical year, I find that marking milestones by these holy seasons and rituals has a tendency to make whatever experience that much more intense and emotional for me. Pregnancy announcements during Advent—potent. Witnessing conversion and Baptism at Easter Vigil—stick a fork in me. Gifts of selflessness…
Read MoreAs A Mother Comforts Her Child
I was not excited when I found out I was pregnant. In fact, I remember staring at the five pregnancy tests in our tiny apartment in Texas trying very unsuccessfully to not fall in a panic attack. All I could think as I saw that plus sign in front of me was, “I can’t do…
Read MoreWhen You Do Not Want To Give Thanks
It’s been a hard month, hasn’t it? In our small corner, it was the shock of twins. The exhaustion of early pregnancy. The darkness of morning sickness. And the upheaving of expectations. But in the wider world, it was Paris and Beirut and Syria and so many million more places where the earth is broken and…
Read Morein which we are all (begrudgingly) images of God
I do not like the experience of pregnancy. There. I said it. I like the fact of being pregnant. I love the gift of life, the sheer blessedness of getting to bring a child into this world. I love the answer to prayer brought by pregnancy after infertility and miscarriage, the undeserved grace that this…
Read More40 weeks: God’s womb & mine
The baby is nine and a half months old. I could say I don’t know where the time flew, but I do. Newborn blur, life with two littles, the months when he stopped sleeping, the months when we started moving. Since his arrival on this spinning planet, we’ve been whirling fast. But the nine month…
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