Motherly

the REST of the week #57

Whether you are a mother or not, I am sure you’ve experienced “motherly” feelings for someone you love. You know what it feels like to want to protect and nurture another person.

You may also know how unrestful it can get when those feelings get tangled up with worry.

In honor of Mother’s Day (which is this coming Sunday for many countries around the world) here’s an invitation to rest tucked into the story of my own peripartum anxiety (bordering on panic).

This piece originally appeared in Legacies of Faith—a devotional book published by the non-profit organization, Helping our Families).

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We are the Moms, the ordinary women with a role that assumes superpowers and sainthood. Sometimes we pull it off and sometimes we don’t. Mostly we’re hanging on for dear life, growing up all over again, and just trying to get it right. And we are far too familiar with worry, fear, anxiety--even panic.

Thirty-six hours after giving birth to my four-and-a-half-pound preemie, a paralyzing fear leaked through my joy and flooded my heart.

“Do you think I’m having panic attacks?” I timidly directed my question to the two physicians standing at the foot of my hospital bed. I tried to describe my anxious feelings and the sense that something was wrong.

They laughed.

Certainly their cheerfulness was intended to dispel my concerns, but there was no ignoring the terror we’d been through. Medical staff I’d never seen had stopped in to see for themselves that everything had turned out well. One called it a miracle, another declared, “someone was looking out for that baby!”

Panic seemed like a reasonable emotional response to me.

Early on in the pregnancy I’d been told that my baby “stopped growing three weeks ago” because my uterus was “a hostile place”. How does a mother bear the thought that her own womb is unsafe for her baby?

They raced me to Bronson Hospital in an ambulance, ran me through the emergency department on a stretcher, and then rolled me into a hospital bed while someone rushed to get magnesium sulfate into my veins. Things started turning for the worse and they induced labor.

It had taken days and a call to the regional neonatal center for my medical team to identify the underlying cause--preeclampsia. Of course, the one and only ER TV episode I have ever seen in my life had to be “Love’s Labor Lost,” in which the physician initially misses the mom’s preeclampsia--and she dies. I was filled with fear and couldn’t shake the heavy feeling that accompanied a vivid mental image of that solitary father in an empty room, looking down at the newborn in his arms.

The utter relief of hearing Gabriel’s squeaky cries was brief. He was four weeks early and couldn’t keep his temperature up. The pediatrician, concerned about infection, admitted him to the special care nursery. Meanwhile, my blood pressure remained elevated and a well-meaning friend warned me about another woman who’d had a stroke two weeks after giving birth.

“You’re fine,” one of those laughing doctors had assured me.

He added, “Just wait until your baby’s a teenager, then you’ll know what a panic attack is!”

I didn’t have to wait that long. Twenty-three months passed and I was birthing again, mercifully under more average conditions. However, three days postpartum, the return of hormonal chaos and sleep-deprived nights upset my faultlines, triggering a series of tsunami-sized waves of panic. My blood pressure started to spike, and I worried about having a stroke.

Days passed and the attacks continued to come--seemingly out of nowhere. My husband held me, read from the Psalms, and prayed. A friend stopped by and assured me, “This will pass.” It was hard to believe.

A week later, while setting bowls of oatmeal on the table, the panic hit again, full force. Walking over to the sofa, I slumped into the cushions and leaned into the armrest. I closed my eyes over the tears and whispered, “Please God, help me.”

At once, words entered my thoughts, clear and direct:

The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still.

A new visual captured my imagination: God, like a mighty warrior, went wielding a sword and clearing a path before me, while I rested, waiting until it was safe to continue on.

I looked for the words God had spoken to me in scripture and found them in Exodus 14:14, words spoken to a terrified people fleeing slavery. God had spoken those same words to me. The relief was immediate and I knew that the panic was gone for good, but the work of giving up worrying had only begun.

Worry doesn’t feel as damaging as panic. It doesn’t typically hit like a tsunami, either. It’s more like a series of persistent, small waves, relentless in their movement to erode the ground of our peace and joy.

That miracle grounded my faith, but the challenge of letting God fight for me in the day-to-day worries lingered.

The tricky thing with worry is that it masquerades as a noble pursuit when we apply it to valid concerns, especially spiritual issues. But the anxiety it produces does absolutely nothing to help us or our children. Worrying easily becomes a habit that fuels a tug-of-war between regret over the past and fearful imagining of the future so that the little joys of the moment are lost--like unopened gifts.

Every day dawns with endless opportunities to notice the worries that nag their way into our minds and get lodged in our hearts. However, we can be still, we can notice what’s going on inside, and ask for help.

Worry is a war against us, but we will win this war because we are the Moms. We are the ordinary women with a Mighty Warrior and Perfecter of Faith fighting on our behalf.

We need only to be still and let Him do the fighting--and remember that, after all, He’s the one who saves us and our children.

“I will contend against him who contends against you, and I will save your children” (Isaiah 49:25).

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Until next Friday,

Alicia

(That little baby is the grad in the picture!)