bleary eyed bliss

i made a pledge to blog-world honesty and authenticity, so this is my honest post for this week.

my beautiful daughter eden has been alive, outside of me, for one week and one day.  one week and one day ago, i still had her tucked safely away inside of me.  that version of myself feels so distant and foreign.  i look at photos of myself pregnant from even a week and a half ago and it just seems impossible that that person is me, because now i am a mother and i feel so different.  and its not that who I am has completely changed, but my purpose in life certainly has.  and our purposes are so closely linked with who we are, aren’t they? 

i went into labor on saturday the 10^th and eden was born on sunday morning the 11th.  (full birth story to come sometime soon).  even now i wish i could go back and have her all over again and experience the miracle of her arrival on the scene.  (i would literally love to have her again, from start to finish, her birth was just incredible).  God’s faithfulness was on display beautifully throughout her whole birth and in the perfect timing of her arrival. 

i already miss her first few days, which were a blur of people and family and busyness and bliss.  i wish i could bottle her newborn smell and keep in in a bottle near my bed. 

as for the hormones, i am trusting God to help me stay afloat as wave after wave of emotion sweeps over me.  is it possible to feel ALL things at once?  because that is what I am riding right now, every emotion all at once, without any real break.

and so for those of you who are asking how i am, this is how i am.  i am tired, i am blissful, i am afraid, i am a little sad, i am joyful, i am overwhelmed, i am in awe of my creator, i am excited, i am in love, i am ALIVE.  at one moment i feel like robert and i will never have any spontaneous time together again, and then i know that i would never ever trade eden for spontaneity.

just like pregnancy, new motherhood, at least for me, is not all perfect looking and fantastic and glamorous.  the things i am feeling are very real and the negative feelings try to take me over.  but I keep affirming the same true things over and over, and this is what I know has kept me together. 

God made my body.  God made eden’s body.  he knows how mine feels now, and what it needs now.  he knows how hers feels now, and what it needs now.  and he has given eden to me because he knows that I am the perfect mother for her, and she is the perfect daughter for me, though neither of us is perfect at all. 

and I just know that God is the God of this little family of three.

and my cup overflows with the joy of this knowledge and with love for this brand new life.