For my Adelaide on her fourth birthday

My beautiful daughter Adelaide is my giggly, silly, twirly testimony. We prayed for her for so long. My desperate desire for a baby took me by surprise, and it soon morphed into a deep anger when every month revealed my lack of control. The medicine didn’t work, but one day I discovered I was pregnant anyway. I called the nurse from my driveway, and I stood there in disbelief and cried. What a gift! I was beside myself with gratitude, but pregnancy was hard, and I was afraid. My love for this person I’d never met shocked me and sometimes oppressed me. I wanted to get this right.

Adelaide was born fifteen days after her due date. I tell everyone this, and I think it’ll be the thing I say from my creaking rocking chair when I’m wrinkled and leathery. She was born on my granddaddy’s 93rd birthday, and I tell everyone that, too. What I rarely tell people is that with shaking conviction, I turned down multiple opportunities for an induction and gave birth naturally. I don’t often tell people because I don’t know if it helps them to know. While natural labor makes so many women aware of their strength, I came away acutely aware of my weakness. I was in labor for six days—yep, six—and the pain, anxiety, and terror nearly swallowed me up. (How thankful I am for my husband, my incredible doula, and my kind doctor!) I could barely put together a full sentence when I was finally laboring at the hospital, except for one faint hiss to my husband: “This is hell.” It was. It really was. But then? She was in my arms. Oh my goodness. I’ll never get over the strangeness of excruciating pain meeting unparalleled joy. Everything melted away, you know? She was better than anything I could have imagined, as if a giant bucket of love and joy and magic was dumped over my head and splashed all around. I was uncontrollably shaking like those triathlon runners they cover in silver blankets, but I held her tight anyway. My weary form soaked it in. I was in awe. Oh, I wanted to get this right!

A week later I was admitted to the hospital again with septic infection, a terrifying and painful result of the excessive labor, and I had to leave my precious new baby. I cried and cried. Physically I felt as if I couldn’t take any more pain, and emotionally I was devastated that I couldn’t take care of her. How could I get this right when I was so very weak? I wanted to get this right!

That became the new norm, you know—weakness. I didn’t know how to do anything, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. It would get dark, and I’d feel my throat tighten and hands clam up at the idea of facing the night and a crying baby. Three weeks after we had Adelaide, we sleepily filmed a video for our church where they asked us to talk about our infertility issues. I told them how angry and alone I’d felt on Mother’s Day but how I’d realized God was there the whole time. I cried when I said it, and people said it meant something to them to hear our story told so vulnerably. But when I watch that video, I know that I’m crying not because of the old pain of infertility but because of new pain. The tremors of new motherhood. Of a raw and overwhelming love. Of desperately wanting to be a good mom but more aware of my inadequacy every day. I want to reach out to that Caroline and take her hand. Gently tell her, “Take heart! You are beautiful in this shaky place. This is better than the old, angry pain because it’s good to be weak. This is where you will find God to be strong.”

In her first few weeks and about a million times since then, God used Adelaide to soften the heart that I’d let get stony. His softening came strong—like a mallet. Like a meat tenderizer. But though the softening was not gentle, He was. Parenting forced me to be parented. I finally stopped trying to be strong and instead let myself be led.

God used Adelaide to revive my sense of awe. Everything about her inspired wonder—these eyes, these hands! Only a good God could have created something like this. He must be very, very good.

God used Adelaide to empty me out. And it wasn’t an emptying that felt like He tumped me over and let all the selfish spill out; it was as if He scraped it all out bit by bit, so that my insides were left raw and aching. The scraping brought quiet. It brought surrender. The scraping made it so that I could no longer deny my utter weakness. There was no “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” There was no control, no illusion of perfectionism, no hustle. There was just dependence. There were just tiny, trusting steps.

Sometimes I forget and go back to the fearful, hardened, hustling place, but this bouncy girl is my stone of remembrance. I can set down my pride and my desire for control and just dance in the kitchen with the twirly girl in the polka dot dress who has taught me more about God than any preacher ever could. She still inspires me to awe over the goodness of God. What a treasure she is.

 Adelaide, my beautiful girl, I want to teach you what you’ve taught me: Don’t be afraid to live in the shaky place. This is called faith. You don’t have to be perfect or control everything—you just have to trust the One who is and does. He is good, and  every time I look at you I remember that. Keep twirling in polka dot dresses, my love. Happy birthday!