My journey continued when I got home with this brand new little girl, full of love, awe, confusion, doubt. There were so many voices around me, contradicting each other and making my doubt and confusion all the greater. To make it worse, they were all "experts" - they had done it before, this raising children thing. They had fed them and put them down to sleep and changed their diapers and bathed them and ALL the other things that I now had the responsibility of doing for my new baby girl.
The trouble was, I was not listening to the best and only source for advice for THIS child, this one-of-a-kind, beautiful daughter of God. Only He could give me the information I needed to take care of her properly. Instead, I ignored the feelings I had in my heart, and drove myself crazy trying to listen to all the contradictory voices, trying to follow the contradictory advice, when the answers - the truth - were in my heart all along.
Her pregnancy was uneventful, healthy. Her labor was text-book. Everything had been fine.
Except fear had kept me from connecting with her and with myself. I feared the pregnancy, I feared the delivery. I thought I had no fear about the care of a baby, but that turned out to be fear based, too. I hadn't learned to trust. I was turning everything over to others. I was taking no responsibility. I was retreating from it all.
The turning point came with taking someone else's advice about letting my newborn cry herself to sleep alone in her own room - and having the guts to reject that advice. It was when we put our days-old daughter in her crib, in her own room, all alone and heard her cry in fear and loneliness. It was the moment we defied everyone else's advice and went to her and picked her up and brought her into our bed and kept her there, in the comfort and security and love of her parents, where she could feel secure and loved and never alone. It was that night that I became a mother to this daughter of MINE.
It is interesting that I write this post on this day. This is the birthday of that sweet, intelligent, strong woman. She now has 4 children of her own and she was smart enough not to make many of the mistakes I did. I learned from her, how to be a mother, how to trust myself and her and the Lord. I learned how to be there for my children. I hope I learned it well.
I made many mistakes along the way. I am not a perfect mother. But I did learn that pregnancy and birth and motherhood are processes and that they are sacred and that it is vitally important that we trust through the experience. There is so much knowledge and wisdom that we don't have access to unless we listen to the inspiration - some call it gut feelings - that comes from sources outside ourselves. It is so important that we tap into that, that we trust it, that we follow it.
Trust is so important in the process of becoming a mother - of becoming parents, because fathers are not exempt. Listen and trust. Be quiet and calm. Spend a few minutes each day just thinking and being quiet and trusting. The answers will come.
As we go through the processes we are prepared - if we allow ourselves to be - for whatever there is in store for us. Our Heavenly Father is a God of love. He knows each one of us and He never leaves us alone, especially as we accept the responsibility of parenting another of His children. He is there and He knows and loves these little people better than we ever could and in a way we cannot comprehend.
Trust.
