Tomorrow, Isabelle will be 6 weeks old.

She loves to look around, and if awake, wants to face out and take in the world around her.

She rarely wakes up crying, instead signalling her wakefulness by wiggles and squeaks, much like her oldest sister did as a baby.

She has the.most.adorable dimple in her right cheek.  It’s elusive, though.  Despite several attempts to get a picture, it is as yet unphotographed,  Otherwise, I would show you, because it’s so sweet.  Oh well.

Her eye color is still yet to be determined.  We’ve had to wait to find out for each child.  So far, we have two with solid brown eyes, one with a brown and green mix (hazel?), one with light gray-blue, and one with dark gray-blue.  Whatever color they are, though, they are big and beautiful and full of the wonder of this life that’s so new to her.

She loves to be rocked.  She is the first child to really take to it.  It definitely beats walking around late at night.

She has fussy times, but she has times when she is really content just looking around, too.

She is adored by her siblings, even her nearest-in-age sister who, despite some obvious adjustment difficulties, has quickly added words like “cute”, “gentle”, “kiss”, and “Belle-belle” to her vocabulary, and has taken to swaddling her own little stuffed bear in a washcloth so that she can have a “baby”.

She wraps her arms around me and my heart melts.  Her head gets kissed endlessly, and I choke back tears as I look in her eyes and tell her she is beautiful.  Words can’t really describe how beautiful.  I love her – this fearfully and wonderfully made little girl – completely and indescribably, for ever and always.

…contentment – and distinguishing it from apathy.  I will never be perfect.  I know, I know – that’s a shocking notion.  But, really, it is a difficult concept for me to grasp.  I have trouble setting goals that are anything short of perfection, and since I never come anywhere near perfection even on my best day, even in the littlest things, discouragement comes easily.  And I want to be better than I am, I want my kids to be better than they are, I want my house to be better than it is, and on, and on, and on.  I need to learn about grace – more and again.  I need to find the freedom that comes with acknowledging that the gap left by my failings and insufficiencies is covered.  I need to not let all of the things that don’t go just right dictate my attitude.  So far, I do a pretty lousy job of this.

…submission.  You may be surprised to learn that my husband and I don’t always agree on everything…but I really hope you aren’t.  In any case, there are times when we don’t see eye to eye…times when I wonder if we’re even facing each other…times when we’re both convinced the other is wrong and giving in would seem to mean certain devastation.  Sometimes it’s little things, but sometimes it’s not little things.  And I know I’m supposed to let him lead, and trust that God is bigger, but it goes against every fiber of my being.  My childhood was one where submission meant the forced relinquishing of any say and then bracing for the fallout of what would almost certainly be a bad decision.  Authority was not trustworthy, in any capacity.  I don’t know how to let go of that.  I don’t know how to submit when I’m convinced that a mistake is being made.  But I do know that the weight of responsibility for this family is not mine, and I don’t want it to be.  So, I need to learn how to stop arguing.  I need to learn how to support my husband even when I don’t agree.  I need to learn how to follow.

…blind faith.  Normally, I would argue against this.  Even now, I’m certainly not advocating for it in a general sense.  But, in trying to understand why life has seemed so devoid of God’s presence lately, the only answer I’ve sort of gotten is that I need to learn to trust Him in His absence – not just absence from circumstances, but absence from my worship times, absence from my Bible study, absence from my prayer time.  I’m seeing that I have grown used to having Him answer me, rebuke me, comfort me and challenge me on a very personal level.  I haven’t learned to rely on the foundation of faith that has been laid in my life.  Instead of answering my questions and fears and doubts with the truth that I should have embedded in my soul, I have expected that still, small voice to answer me every time.  I can’t fully explain it.  I don’t really know why I shouldn’t expect Him to answer me.  And I have struggled to reconcile my faith with how it is supposed to bear fruit in my life.  But, I’m trying to figure it out.

When faced with the reality that a cesarean was going to be my only option, 5 weeks ago, though I had many reservations and concerns, few were regarding the recovery period that would follow.  My first two children were born by cesarean, and – really? – I didn’t have much objection to how long it took me to be “back to normal”…if “normal” can be called that with a huge gash across one’s abdomen that had not previously been there.  In any case, I figured this time around would be no different.  I didn’t consider that being 8 years older, or four babies later, or even having my insides cut open and rearranged for the third time, among other things, would affect my ability to recover.  I was hoping that, at least, this part would go right.

At first, everything seemed to go as I expected.  Standing and walking didn’t pose any greater challenge than previously, my incision appeared to be healing well, and I was allowed to go home after 36 hours.  The day after coming home, though, I got the most excruciating headache ever – and I’m not entirely unfamiliar with brutal headaches.  After trying Tylenol, and caffeine and water with absolutely no effect, we realized that this was a spinal headache – what my anesthesiologist claimed he’d only seen twice in 24 years, and which was only relieved by laying flat on my back.  Perhaps being forced to lie flat on your back doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world, but when trying to nurse a baby, it becomes inconvenient, and when you have a just-starting-to-heal abdomen, it’s also incredibly painful.  The solution, then, was to get a dural blood patch.  What is that?  Well, it’s when they take an epidural needle (or a slightly larger one when they don’t have any of the usual size available), stick it into the spinal column (while admonishing you because you aren’t adequately tightening your incredibly sore belly in order to round your spine, which is reflexively arching in pain in spite of the claims that it shouldn’t hurt at all because a local anesthetic has been injected) then draw blood from an arm and inject it into the spine until it feels like a horrible muscle cramp, and then inject some more in until it officially becomes the worst pain thus far in the whole labor-surgery-recovery-headache course of events.  But it worked, and over the course of the next day, or so, the headache subsides.

At this point, I thought things should be getting easier.  After my previous cesareans, it took about two weeks to resume normal life activities.  This time, I could barely stand for even five minutes at the two week mark.  My abdomen was visibly bruised…I can only presume from a less than gentle delivery technique…and I was still pretty much useless for any kind of productivity.

Since then, I have improved…slowly.  Pain from the incision has become less frequent, but as I move around more, I am finding that my hip joints are extremely loose.  My balance is easily thrown off and after walking short distances my legs are shaky and sore.  This is new for me, and I guess it may be in part because I have been off my feet for so long, but I find it hard to not be discouraged.

I just wasn’t ready for this.  I was hoping to move quickly past the frustrations of this birth.  I was hoping to be able to look back on all of it and think it wasn’t really so bad.  I was hoping that I could possibly consider the thought of another baby in the future without even more anxiety about the now even greater probability of another cesarean.  I was hoping to find some silver lining to all of the disappointment.

…

I write this with a beautiful baby girl asleep in my arms.  And I would endure all of this a thousand times and more, if that were necessary to ensure the protection of her life.  Please don’t misread this as any resentment over the cost that a safe birth sometimes carries with it.  Mostly, it is just a weariness of soul and a wondering why and a fear of hoping.  That’s all.

When Isabelle was born, we didn’t have a name picked out.  Through the course of the day right after her birth, we didn’t get a chance to try to figure one out, either.  I was hoping that we could that night.  But that night, we realized Ava would be too much for Tim’s mom to handle on her own, and the hospital would not allow Ava to stay with us in the hospital room, so Tim went home and we spent our first night apart in fourteen years.  It was hard for me, honestly, but there was grace in it, too.  As I sat awake for most of the night holding my baby girl, I prayed for a name.  Tim and I really were at an impasse, name-wise, and I was extremely discouraged and desperate for God’s guidance.  After a while, the name Isabelle Sophia – devoted to God; wise – settled in my heart.  I don’t know how to explain it other than it seemed right, which was fairly significant since neither name had been my preference.  When Tim arrived the next morning, I asked what he thought of the name, and his response was that it was exactly what he had been thinking.  That was it – she was named.  And I was thankful, in the end, for the timing.

Since then, I have gone through the inevitable struggle to not call her the names of our other children, and I think I’m now mostly through that phase.  She has acquired a few nicknames, however…most consistently Belle-belle, which is what Ava calls her, and Sweetpea, which was Tim’s attempt to have something to call her so that he wouldn’t inadvertently call her by any of Ava’s nicknames.  The others…Izzy-Soph and Izbo…were mostly just meant to be silly suggestions of possibilities, and really haven’t been said much, but do somehow seem to fit upon occasion.

Maybe a particular nickname will stick, maybe we will decide that ‘Isabelle’ is most suitable on its own…time will tell.  But whatever we call her, we are most happy to be able to call her ours.

I stood at the sink, scrubbing away the mess from newborn clothes.  It’s a part of life with a 3 week old.  This was yesterday’s mess, actually.  It had been left because, yesterday, I was so exhausted I could barely stand.  And Tim said he would clean it, but then forgot.  And that’s more than okay.  Because he was working all day, plus doing a dozen other things – at least – that were more important than cleaning baby clothes.  So, I stood scrubbing.

After a couple minutes, I felt the sharp stinging pain in my abdomen that told me I was doing too much, that reminded me that things had gone wrong and I’m not all better.  I finished scrubbing.  I got another load of laundry going.  I went to fetch the not-quite-two year old for her nap, telling her to hold my hand – that I couldn’t carry her right now.  When she didn’t take my hand right away, my ten year old offered to carry her for me, and it seemed almost laughable that he could do that which I couldn’t.

I finally sat down after going through the naptime routine.  It wasn’t even two in the afternoon yet, and I had to be off my feet.  I feel like a failure.  I have lists of things that need doing and I can barely manage to do laundry and throw simple dinners together.  My brain is foggy and days are slipping by with little order and little productivity.  And I doubt that I will ever measure up to any standard.  I tell myself that this is why God doesn’t answer, this is why He overlooks me – ’cause why would He bother with someone who does such a terrible job at life, even when trying to do well?

Even as I tell myself these things though, I am reminded that it’s not really true.  I’m reminded of a moment in worship several weeks ago when He did answer these particular doubtings of my heart.  The logic that has run through my mind countless times in life that says He loves me and saves me by default, that He only “loves” me because He loves the whole world and I’m a part of the world, that if He could choose to love me, He wouldn’t – was assaulting my heart at that time, too.

But, His words to me then, and again today, were simple: If I had wanted to, I could have chosen to not die for your sins.

See, I forget sometimes that the whole idea of salvation was God’s alone.  I tend to think that He was bound by some rule that forced Him to make it an all or nothing thing.  I gloss over the reality that the punishment Jesus bore wasn’t for the idea of sin, but for the personal, one-at-a-time a gazillion times over sins that each hold the power to separate the sinner from God…which means that each of my sins had to be addressed on the cross, and could have been left out if God so chose.  So, to be saved, God had to want to save me.  I know it’s simple, but I guess I need simple.

At that same time, my other question to the Lord was why didn’t You make me good enough? I asked because I felt like so many others were good enough.  Everyone always seems to do so much better than me at everything.  It can appear as if others make God’s gift of salvation worth it.  Me, though?  I was sure I was a waste of His time and effort.  His answer, however, was that He didn’t make anyone good enough – that not one is righteous apart from Christ, that even what I might see as amazing in someone falls so far short of His standard.  Even if He were in the business of comparing me to someone else, the reality is that my worst and someone else’s best are hardly different when compared with sinless perfection.  He’s not in this to garner from us a certain level of performance, and regardless of how I might perceive things, the free gift of salvation is impossible to deserve. This wasn’t a new realization, but I obviously needed to learn it again that day.  And again this afternoon.

Much of the time, lately, it has seemed to me that God has just been completely absent from my life.  I have a lot of frustrations and confusion about a lot of things.  It’s easy for me to be so focused on those things that I ignore the times He does show up and speak truth to my often foolish heart.  But remembering those moments is necessary (obvious, right?), especially when I feel forgotten.  They may not be as frequent or faith-building as I might think I need, but they do remind me of His character, and His presence with me, and that I’m not so far removed from Him that He can’t or won’t reach me.

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.  —Psalm 139: 7-10