motherhood | Song Dog Journal

Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on Nov. 5, 2025

When I struggled into my once-baggy sweatpants on Wednesday last week, the only thing left that was comfortable at 9 months pregnant and warm enough for working cows on a cold morning, I heard a seam pop and may have almost cried. Baby wasn’t due for another week and a half, and I knew that could mean three or three and a half weeks, and frankly I was just over it. Everything hurt, nothing fit, and I couldn’t reach down to tie my shoes. Heck, I couldn’t even see my toes if I looked down.

“Do you think you’ll make your due date?” Brad would ask occasionally over the last few weeks.

“Absolutely,” I’d reply with just maybe an edge of frustration, or disgruntled resignation. “One hundred percent, yes.” The last month of pregnancy really is as long as the first eight, with the shortness of breath and fatigue and back pain and everything else that is just a part of the miracle of knitting together a life, a little tiny human. I’d think about another four or three weeks and balk. But then I’d feel the kicks and the jabs and the rolls, all the sweet little movements that help bond a mama with her unborn baby long before they get to meet face-to-face. What sweetness. What a special time.

Part of me really wasn’t ready for that to be over. However, it isn’t like I had a choice, one way or the other.

Well, not even 72 hours after the sweatpants incident, in the peace and comfort of our home, I was handed a slippery, sleepy little baby with a head full of blond hair, the same baby that had been kicking and jabbing and sitting on my bladder for the last number of months, the same baby that had left me with sore ribs and a body image crisis, and I fell in love. Felicity Mae arrived a week early, and has stolen our hearts.

Those first few days are funny, and confusing. The sleepy, slippery baby that you’re supposed to just know how to care for transforms into a sneezing, pooping, crying, hiccupping, burping little package, and just when you think you’re at your wits’ end, you fall even deeper in love. And somehow there is God-given instinct that rises up and you do, you really do, know what to do.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods, women have. And men, too, honestly. We’ve been told that an unborn baby isn’t a baby, for starters, or at least isn’t human, and that their humanhood depends upon the desires of his or her parents. We’ve been told that children are an inconvenience worth sacrificing on the altar of self. We’ve been told to intentionally postpone children until the important, fun stuff has been accomplished, like that random dream vacation to Antarctica. We’ve been told that choosing to have children will destroy your life, or everything that makes your life worth living, like your career and your body and hot dates and good sex and your own personality, and social media is rife with influencers trying to convince others that self-centered loneliness is superior to self-sacrificial love, and that getting to have brunch with your friends and pamper your pet or your houseplant will bring more happiness than seeing the purest form of trust reflected in the eyes of a 48-hour-old infant, who is half you and half your faithful spouse and wholly a unique person created by their loving Heavenly Father. Mind blowing.

I can’t tell you how many times I have counted her tiny fingers and toes and gazed at her little blossom of a mouth, and then looked up at Brad and said wonderingly, “She’s mine…This is MY baby!” Honestly, I’ve never really cared about babies. Just being brutally honest. I could be excited about them in a very general way, and very happy for the very happy parents, but I never felt inclined to hold all the babies or found myself pining for baby snuggles. Older children, I could enjoy, but someone else’s crying, pooping, angry baby that I had no idea how to soothe because it wasn’t mine? No, thank you, you can keep it, it’s yours.

But this is like absolutely nothing I’ve ever experienced, and nothing could have prepared me for the sweetness and the wonder.

Oh, I know all the negative “yeah, but’s”, insinuated in the wealth of comments told to expectant parents beginning with the words “just wait until.” I know the tendency to focus on the frustrations and the challenges and the outright pain and discomfort of children and family and life in general. Is there some truth there? Of course there is.

But I wouldn’t trade this for the world. Any of it. Not the popping seams or the back pain or hobbling around in a postpartum daze wondering if I remembered to eat, or deciding whether I have the energy to walk from one end of the house to the other. I wouldn’t trade any of it.

Welcome to our family, baby girl.

When Brad and I got married, I knew I needed to do some soul-searching when it came to having children. I had been single a long time, and I honestly think it was God’s kindness to me that He sort of lifted the desire for children away from my heart for those 10-plus years of being a single woman. I remember as a highschooler and college-aged young woman dreaming of having 10 kids, picking names out, and truly having an active desire to be a mother. But as the single years wore on, it was a struggle enough to grow in contentment and confidence that God would provide a husband if and when He chose to do so; I believe it was God’s kindness that temporarily and gently suspended the desire for children and kept it from being another stumbling block.

So when I found myself married to a good man, I knew I wanted to be the mother to his children, but I also had this strange sense of neutrality. Some of it is temperament – I’ve never been the baby-chasing sort. As sweet as new babies are, I never feel compelled to hold and cuddle other people’s babies, and am perfectly content to admire from a distance. But now that I was married? I knew this was something I needed to wrestle with. It wasn’t that I didn’t desire children, in an active sense, but rather that passively there was no active longing. Does that make sense? I wasn’t opposed to children, but I wasn’t actively experiencing a desire for them either. It was as if my years of singleness had sort of muffled the sense of that desire. And as I pondered that, I realized how empty that was.

Too often, I see women on social media or elsewhere, professing to be Believers and proclaiming confidently that they have absolutely no desire for children and that should be fine. Granted, I don’t know their situations, but a common thread in the Bible is God’s love of the family, and His desire for His people to raise families to His glory, beginning in the Garden of Eden, with the command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” Procreation is obviously part of that. And my personal conviction is that if God says something is good, we should think so, too. If God commands something to His people, we should take that seriously. We are not victims of our desires.

So I began to pray and ask that God would give me right desires, desires that pleased Him, and that if it was His will that we have children that He would open my heart to children, and remove the fears that gnawed at the margins of my heart.

And it is wonderful how God answers prayers. Before too long, I found I was no longer praying that God would give me a desire for children (because He had answered that prayer and had given me the desires I had prayed for!) but I was praying that He would make me fruitful, and would give me contentment and peace if He didn’t open my womb. Because I also knew that, although I am responsible to cultivate right desires, God doesn’t always satisfy those desires the way we want or expect, and He owes me nothing.

Well, it took my breath away when I saw the two red lines, and took my breath away again when I heard the heartbeat for the first time and saw the baby on ultrasound at 19 weeks. I’ve been living in a state of constant flux between incredible reality and surreality. Nothing had prepared me for how sweet it would be to feel the first quickenings, or how comforting it is to feel the baby move at all hours of the day or night. Nothing had prepared me for the sweet fullness of expectant motherhood. Fears have slipped further and further away.

And I can’t wait to meet our baby girl in November.

P.S. I took these photos for us with a tripod and shutter timer while we were camping in the Bighorns this weekend. Brad was great, and even consented to push the shutter button for me a few times. 🙂