“Late at night my mind would come alive with voices and stories and friends as dear to me as any in the real world. I gave myself up to it, longing for transformation.”

—Little Women, 1994 film adaptation

Any writer will echo the truth of these words. The inspiration hits and all you can do is get the words down as they flow from some deep spring within. It is as unstoppable as labor, which this post is about. So as these words flow, I’m sharing them with you.

I will preface this post by saying: if you do not care to read the details of labor and birth, this is a post for you to skip. The reason I share it is because glory is due to God’s Name for His faithful, redemptive grace in my story. I also share it with the desire that I may encourage even one pregnant mama out there who has walked through birth trauma with a previous child… there is hope to be had in Him.

I suppose I should give some background. When our daughter was about eighteen months old, I began to have baby fever. We knew we wanted a second child, and while we had originally planned to wait a bit longer before trying, we also didn’t mind just relaxing a bit and letting the Lord do His thing… which, just as it had happened with our first, took exactly one cycle. I do not for one moment take this for granted, having known many couples who had to wait years to conceive.

In early October, 2022, I found myself staring at the faintest positive line on a pregnancy test. So faint that I wondered if it was really positive or if my eyes were playing tricks on me. Wishful thinking, you know. My husband was outside playing with our daughter. I needed to start making dinner. I chugged a ton of water while making our evening meal and took a second, more trustworthy test. I saw what appeared to be another extremely faint, positive line. And for that small window of time, only the Lord and I knew that this tiny, precious life was living and growing within my womb. I laughed with joy. I felt that anxious-excitement that I always imagine the mom from The Parent Trap (the 90’s version) was referring to in the scene before she flies out to meet her ex-husband for the first time in years. It’s a nervous, fluttery sort of giddiness that I’ve experienced very few times in life.

I told my husband about our second baby in the exact same way I told him about our first. We bowed our heads to pray over our food before partaking, and as he was praying, I slipped the positive test into his hand. His praying paused. He looked down. Instant happiness, in his quiet manner.

And just like that, our son made his appearance known.

My pregnancy was fairly uneventful. I experienced the usual symptoms… morning sickness, fatigue, and breakouts in the first trimester, more energy but also headaches in the second trimester, followed by roaring heartburn and all the aches and pains in the third trimester. So many beautiful moments were had: telling our parents, extended family, finding out his gender, my ultrasounds and hearing his heartbeat, feeling him kick and squirm, my baby shower, and getting to prepare our daughter to become a big sister. So many blessings.

But the hardest part of my pregnancy with him BY FAR was the mental and emotional struggles I dealt with throughout.

Going back in time even further, my labor experience with our daughter was so difficult. None of it was easy for me. I am careful to use the word “traumatic” because my generation seems to overuse it so much that it has lost all meaning. But my labor with her was truly traumatic. I was diagnosed with PTSD in the aftermath of her birth. I would have flashbacks to being stuck on my back, in agony that never seemed to end, unable to do anything but yell, and limited to only my husband for support due to pandemic restrictions. I had portions that I had blacked out because it was so difficult to go back to. Her birth story is for another day, but it’s relevant to this post to note that: my labor with her, though I’m grateful for the outcome of a physically healthy mom and a healthy baby girl, was the most painful, vulnerable, unexpected, lonely, disappointing, crushing thing I have ever experienced.

I want to say right now, in case she ever reads these words, that NONE of this was her fault. Not one bit of it was caused by her in any way, and when I look at her, I see none of the pain or the trauma. I only see a beautiful, priceless, amazing little girl whom I love with all my heart. I would do it all over again for her. And by the time we decided we wanted a second baby, I had clearly processed through the first labor experience enough that I was willing to go through it a second time. My daughter is more than worth the experience of her labor. But it is also an experience that I had to work through, to heal from, and to depend upon God to help me through if I should have to face it again.

Stay tuned for Part 2.