Life is so different now. I am so different.
Those early years were long days and so much quiet. So much quiet and loneliness and what do we do with all of these endless hours. And I was so young. I am aware that one day, years from now, I will look back on my mid-thirties and think, "I was so young..." but right now this is how I look back on my twenties--I was so, so very young.
That little baby that I used to write about is speeding towards the teen years. She is ten years old, standing on the precipice of childhood. Teetering here. We are so on the verge of teenager. I hear it in the way she speaks and questions and stretches awkwardly into who she will one day become. She is now ballerina and writer and reader and such a person beyond me. It is the cliche-est of cliches, but where did my tiny baby go. I remember that first night in the hospital, unwrapping her tight swaddle, just to look at her. I couldn't believe she was mine. I felt like I needed to ask permission to even touch her. I was the mother?? How could that even be??
And ten years later, I am lost in motherhood, drowning in it. I feel like I can mother a newborn in my sleep. Because, of course, I have. The years are a sleepy blur of nursing and baths and swaddles and babies on hips and budgeting. The grocery lists, and ballet shoes, and laundry piles, and multiplication tables, and on and on it goes. I am so very lost. And there is so much we didn't know, couldn't have prepared for. A special needs, "on the spectrum" child. And a fourth baby who rocked our world, but so quickly became our sweetheart. We will say it for all of his days, "what if we hadn't had our Charles???" It is the most unexpected things, the hardest things, that have also been the sweetest.
But God has used these things to show me, teach me, imprint it on my heart and my mind, that HE is wisdom, HE is compassion, HE is strength, and if I feel lost, well, I must lose myself in him, and HE will make my paths straight. The years have passed, and what I have learned is that I know so much less than I even realized, but I serve a God who has promised that he will give wisdom in abundance, we need only ask.
He is a good, good father. He loves my children even more than I can fathom. He has planned the details of their lives, and nothing surprises him. He is a God of order, and can bring peace to my chaos. He does bring peach to my chaos.
