Posted in musings, poems, quotes

remembering Christmas

Posted on by kristinabean

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover,
For the wine of the world brims over,
Its splendor is spilt on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all –
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountain of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate –
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

Christmas is past, but it need not be forgotten. How do we move forward from Christmas and carry it within us as we go? Chesterton hints at the answer here, I think: that it is to continually throw ourselves downward, as did God Himself in the Incarnation, in love, service, sacrifice, and humility. It is those who are afraid of falling who fall in the worst way possible; those who cast themselves into the downward rush of grace will find they have nothing to fear in even the farthest fall and the greatest humiliation. One of C.S.Lewis’s most powerful images comes to my mind, here, from The Great Divorce: that of the great waterfall in Heaven, thunderous and beautiful, which is more than just a waterfall, standing as one crucified, pouring himself over the edge in glorious self-giving.

That is God. That is Christmas. And that is how we ought to live in God long after the songs and nativities are packed away and out of sight: because His plunge to servitude and sacrifice doesn’t end with the season.

Posted in musings

postpartum depression

Posted on by kristinabean

I had PPD with my first baby.

I’d hoped for a natural delivery and done all my prenatal care with a wonderful midwife at a birth center near our home, but I was still pregnant two weeks past my due date and state law required her to transfer my care to an OB and, after a failed induction, Rondel came into the world via a C-section.

The week of his due date I’d had a major fight (for lack of a better word, and without going into the details) with my husband and was feeling extremely emotional and stressed about that episode through the early postpartum weeks (despite how supportive and amazing my husband was through the rest of the pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum period – I have trouble letting go of negative emotions).

So I felt like my body had let me down, and like my marriage was letting me down, and then Rondel turned out to be one of the most sensitive babies I’ve ever met, struggling with the basics of babyhood and responding to his struggles with tears and screams and demands for instant comfort. The sleepless nights wore me down. The constant crying wore me down. Nursing helped hold me together – until his prolonged comfort nursing led to an oversupply and an overactive letdown that led to more frustration and discomfort for us both. Nothing was outside the realm of “normal,” but the sum total of things, plus my own hormonal instability, meant that it wasn’t a good situation.

I didn’t trust anyone else to care for Rondel as well as I could, or to love him as much, even my husband. If someone else was holding him I couldn’t let them out of my sight. But at the same time that I loved him so fiercely and completely, I worried with a deep, uncontrollable fear that I was a horrible mother, that he would be so much better off with someone else, that if I just left the picture somehow both he and my husband would be happier and better in the long run. Neither fear was rational; between the two of them, I felt hopeless and stuck.

I managed to hold life together until I unexpectedly fell pregnant again, around 7 months postpartum, and the changing hormones broke the hold of PPD on my mind and body. There are still things that bring back flashes of it: a rough night with the boys, maybe; the casual off-hand comment of a friend about how women’s bodies are designed to give birth so it shouldn’t be that difficult; a post about how well someone’s infant sleeps through the night thanks to some method or other. The insinuation that because labor was difficult for me, that because I needed an induction and a C-section I somehow was weak or a failure, triggers the old lie that I’m not a good enough mother; the assertion that some parenting technique can make your baby happy, relaxed, independent, and a good sleeper does the same thing. Because my body gave childbirth everything it had, and I gave motherhood everything I had, and we didn’t have the “expected” or “ideal” outcomes.

Now, 3.5 years later, with two more babies’ worth of experience, I know those things don’t define me or the “success” of my motherhood. But it’s a powerful lie.

Will I have PPD again, in this postpartum period or in some future one? I can’t say for certain. I didn’t with Limerick, and I’m still in the baby blues/transitional period with Aubade so it’s too early to know. It was one of my biggest fears through this pregnancy, though – because in the midst of it, asking for help seems almost more difficult than just enduring it, and the overwhelming sense of failure and shame is a pain so great I don’t even want to imagine having to go through it again. But this is the resolution I have made, for myself, for my family, for baby Aubade: that I will make rest and self-care a priority from the beginning to try to prevent it, and that if I feel things are not right within me, even if I can’t say I “know” I have PPD, I will ask for help.

Posted in family life, musings, Uncategorized

beauty in the little things

Posted on by kristinabean

newborn baby giggles as little girl slips, milk-drunk, into sleep in my arms…

the smell of fresh bread, sweet and citrusy, to celebrate Epiphany…

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it got a bit lopsided but tasted delicious!

warm sun and a cool breeze and a couple hours at the park with my family…

little boys all crazy smiles running through the splash pad in the cold…
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warming up before heading back into the spray

sunlight on baby girl’s face, streaming through the window to the changing table, holding her spellbound for a good twenty minutes…

little boy hugs, head laid down on baby’s tummy, arms ever-so-gently tucked around her…

big boy love, wild and exuberant, caring and protective, running joyfully in each morning to say hi to the baby, showing her his toys, getting up at dinner to check on her…

tiny fingers capturing us all with their utter perfection…

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not forgetting that tiny perfect nose and mouth and chin of course! or the perfect chubby curve of that tiny cheek…

Postpartum is hard. But in with the hard times, there is so much beauty – beauty in the new life, beauty in the old familiar everyday that keeps on going on – and the beauty is what keeps me going on as the old and the new become one.

Posted in musings

seven things I learned from my third childbirth

Posted on by kristinabean

Because I thought I knew how it would go after having two babies, and discovered I still had a lot to learn!

  1. Every delivery is different – and by that I mean different enough to leave even a third-time mom completely confused and unable to read the situation! Baby #1 I had no false labor but dilated to 3.5cm, was induced two weeks late, and had a c-section for failure to progress. Baby #2 I had some preliminary Braxton-Hicks but nothing painful or regular until the real thing, a slow and steady labor. With this one, I had several weeks of regular uncomfortable contractions with no dilation, then an incredibly rapid and intense labor that took me from 1cm to delivery in less than 24 hours. My mom and MIL both describe their deliveries as all being cut from rather similar cloth but that has not been my experience at all!
  2. Oxytocin is pretty powerful. I’ve not been very excited about this pregnancy, or about meeting the baby, and I hadn’t felt any sort of emotional attachment with her – but lying their in labor, I suddenly felt this wave of anticipatory love, thinking ahead to the moment when she would finally be snuggled up against my chest. So I’m grateful to the hormones for that one!
  3. Transition is miserable without drugs! I was comfortably attached to an epidural for my first VBAC by the time I hit transition, but this time (because of the labor’s fast progression) I got to experience a bit of it before the anesthesiologist could put the line in. Normal contractions are bad… transition contractions are worse. I would describe them by saying that the pain suddenly was all the way around all at once instead of focused in either my back or abdomen, and it was significantly harder to breathe through them because of that lack of focus. I am in awe of you ladies who can make it through labor drug-free.
  4. Epidurals can come out during labor. Not the most pleasant thing to happen at 9.5cm, but…
  5. Pain that isn’t relieved by your epidural can signify uterine rupture. Before the doctors realized that the epidural line had come out, they were starting to become seriously concerned about that possibility. So I suppose the bad news of hearing there was a technical difficulty was really good news compared to the alternative! I was lying there thinking, well, the worst that can happen is that I’ll have a hysterectomy and this will be our last baby. The epidural makes me rather blasé about disasters and fatalistic about outcomes, I think… if something had gone drastically wrong, I wouldn’t have felt the emotions for a day or so.
  6. That crazy feeling of a baby slipping out of your body is simply amazing. Not quite as good as the feeling of the sticky warm baby herself pressed up against you a moment later, but pretty close 🙂 I don’t think either of those feelings could ever lessen in their primal beauty and profundity.
  7. Finally, labor is more than just a physical process; it involves the whole emotional and spiritual aspect of a person as well. The contraction pain drove me to prayer, and prayer – while not necessarily relieving the pain – brought comfort and hope in the midst of it. It’s very much like squeezing my husband’s hand through a contraction: the knowledge of his presence in response to my need gives me strength to persevere through the pain. Labor prayers are not particularly eloquent but they are fully and authentically meant! There isn’t much room left for pretense or appearance at that point, after all. And one of the strongest feelings I can recall from my labor was that of being held, enveloped, by the love and strength of Mary and Jesus. She was another mother, my spiritual mother, holding me through the pain, giving me her comfort; He was love itself surrounding me, the One without whom nothing can be made or created, with me bringing this new life into the world. And when we thought that we’d have to have a c-section anyways, because Aubade wasn’t aligned right to make it past that last half centimeter, it was prayer that gave me peace regardless of the outcome and prayer that, I think, made the difference in straightening her out and letting the dilation finish during the 45 minutes of prep time for the section (after 5 hours of unsuccessful contractions).

What did you all discover after the birth of a subsequent child, that you didn’t know or fully realize after the first (or second, or third…)? It makes sense that every delivery would bring some new revelation, since the experience is bound to be different in some way or another 🙂 I just didn’t realize how different it could be the third time around!

Posted in musings

forced rest

Posted on by kristinabean

Everyone tells you to rest after you have a baby – to let your body heal, to bond with your newborn, and so on. This is especially true after a c-section or a bad tear, since significant physical healing needs to take place and won’t be able to do so as effectively if you’re always pushing yourself to your limits.

But rest is much easier said than done.

I don’t know if it’s just me or if it’s a wider cultural phenomenon, but I start to feel guilty and depressed when I just lie around all day, even when I know my body needs it. I see the boys running around and want to join them (despite the inconvenient fact that I can only walk at a slowish shuffle right now). I see the mess and disorganization from labor following hard upon the holiday chaos, and feel bad for not helping my husband sort through it all. Rest is hard. But my body needs it right now, for short-term and long-term reasons, and it would be foolish to deny myself that rest.

It has made me think about rest in everyday circumstances as well, though. I like to think I’m fairly good at giving myself opportunities to rest and relax – but really, most days the time I spend enjoying a good book or peaceful hobby is marred by the guilt of a hovering to-do list reminding me of all the things I should be doing instead. And a lot of time I get stuck in an indecisive limbo, neither resting well nor working well because I can’t do either without either guilt or exhaustion interfering.

Rest shouldn’t be a cause for guilt in any case, though! Even God Himself, who is outside time and has no need to rest, did so on the seventh day to mark that day as holy and to set an example for us in our rest and work. How much more, then, ought we to rest when we need it: to acknowledge the frailty of our bodies, minds, and spirits; to admit our lack of control over our lives; to be humble and small and at peace before God instead of continually striving to do everything in our own power.

So – I think I’m going to try to use this period of enforced rest as a training on how to rest intentionally and well, in hopes that it can carry over to normal life.

Posted in family life

Welcome baby!

Posted on by kristinabean

Birth stories are a love it/hate it kind of thing and I’m not that good at writing them anyway, so I’ll spare you the details and just announce the arrival of Aubade, the newest member of our family!

(As with the boys, this isn’t her real name. It is instead the name of a type of poem, in this case one which celebrates the dawn – quite fitting for this little girl who waited at 9.5cm all night long just to be born as the sun rose in the morning.)


I’m honestly not sure how to express all my thoughts about the pregnancy, the labor, the birth, or even baby Aubade herself. It was intense and overwhelming, full of unexpected twists and turns, punctuated by great pain, and only endured through much prayer and the support of people who love me. But there is something exquisitely precious in holding a newborn, sticky and screaming, to your chest and feeling her tension subside; there is something inexpressibly beautiful about watching your sons shower their sister with kisses and giggle over her tiny toes; there is even an undefinable sweetness in the sleep-deprived snuggle a new mother offers to her infant.


And so our lives unfold and deepen and begin to change in unknown and unforeseable ways, through this new life entering into ours, and we are so grateful for this gift of love in our hearts and our home.

Posted in musings

on Mary

Posted on by kristinabean

“And Mary said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
‘And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
‘For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden.
‘For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.'”
– Luke 1:46-48

“And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary His mother,
‘…a sword will pierce through your own soul also…'”
– Luke 2:34-35

It’s an interesting juxtaposition. In the first passage, Mary has just arrived at her cousin Elizabeth’s house, and Elizabeth has just proclaimed upon seeing her (and upon feeling the unborn John leap for joy) that Mary is blessed among women. In response, Mary enters into what is known as the Magnificat, praising God for His work in her life and in the world through the coming Messiah. She has been chosen for an incredible and unique role in God’s plan of redemption, and is realizing how blessed she is.

In the second, Mary and Joseph have taken Jesus to the temple for his ritual purification/dedication, and Simeon in the Spirit greets them with rejoicing and prophesying. And in the midst of his praise for the Messiah who is finally come, in the midst of his joy, he comments to Mary that her position as Jesus’s mother will bring her great pain and sorrow.

The two – the blessing and the sorrow – are far from mutually exclusive. They are intertwined, twin fruits of one tree. In entering into God’s redemptive plan, in taking up the role He has offered her, Mary receives both the blessings and the sorrows that come with it. She is given power, responsibility, purpose and calling, and the joy of knowing God so deeply and intimately as Jesus’s mother; she has to endure the scorn of those who think she has become pregnant illegitimately, and the greater pain of watching her people reject their Messiah and murder her son. Because the world is broken, because we are scarred and stained by sin, even the highest calling and the most blessed person will experience pain and suffering; because God is entering into that brokenness to redeem and renew all things, even the deepest pain and the greatest sorrow can be woven into the beauty and joy of His plan.

Posted in musings

waiting 

Posted on by kristinabean

I thought we were going to meet our baby girl today. I’d had contractions all day yesterday, and they started right back up with some intensity first thing this morning, so I figured active labor couldn’t be too far away. But alas, a check at the hospital revealed that the time was not near and my body was still just slowly working through its preparation for labor.

So it’s back to waiting, indefinite waiting. I hate the waiting.

But that is part of the warp and weft of Christmas, is it not?

Mary waited, as she journeyed with Joseph to Bethlehem, for the birth of her child, not knowing the day He would come. Israel waited, as they suffered under Roman oppression, for the coming of the promised King and Messiah to rescue them, not knowing even the year of His advent, much less the day or the hour. We wait still, now, for the One who will bring  eternal hope into the brokenness and despair of our world, lasting peace into war-torn nations and disconnected communities, true joy into hearts numbed by pain and wracked with sorrow, and genuine love into a world defined by systemic oppression and individual hate and indifference. It is a long and weary wait.

Christmas is coming, the King is coming – the One is coming who will set all things right. Just as I know this wait for our baby girl will be over eventually, with all the concomitant joy of new life that a birth brings, so we know that one day our wait for Jesus’s return will be over. It just doesn’t always make the waiting easier.

Posted in family life, musings

God the Rescuer (and learning from my three-year-old)

Posted on by kristinabean

O Leader of the House of Israel,
giver of the Law to Moses on Sinai:
come to rescue us with your mighty power!

We’ve been using the Advent season to read through the stories of the Old Testament, using the Children of God Storybook Bible by Archbishop Desmond Tutu for our Advent candle devotion time as well as the Jesus Storybook Bible for our bedtime reading. One of the themes Rondel’s picked up on and really loves is that of God rescuing His people – I’ll ask him which story he wants to read (because we’ve already read through them all in order) and he’ll literally say, “The one where God rescues His people!”

So we read the stories where God parts the Red Sea, David trusts God and kills Goliath, where Esther speaks up to the king on behalf of God’s people, where God rescues Daniel from the lions and Jonah from drowning, and, interestingly to me because it’s more abstract, where God promises to send the Rescuer after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. He hangs on every word.

It’s not a theme that has often caught my attention in the past. I’ve never needed rescuing in any significant way, after all, and other themes in the Bible have seemed more relevant or more attractive. (For example, I would say yesterday’s antiphon, with its emphasis on wisdom and knowledge, is one of my favorites, and represents a characteristic of God and of the Church that means a lot to me). So I’m appreciative of Rondel’s attention to it, because it is opening my eyes to the way God works with power on behalf of both nations and individuals.

And in a world filled with refugees, with the poor, with the unjustly imprisoned, I want my son to know that God is a Rescuer, and that he can labor in that work with God.

Posted in family life

brothers and friends

Posted on by kristinabean

Rondel and I were playing outside during Limerick’s nap, with his dinosaur figurines. One of them had put another one down to bed, only to wake him back up a few minutes later.

“Why isn’t he just letting him sleep?” I asked. We never intentionally wake the boys up so I was wondering why his toys were modeling that.

Rondel had his dinosaur grumpily explain that he wanted to play. That gave me a suspicion.

“Do you wish Limerick would wake up to play with you?” I asked. “Do you miss him?”

“I do” Rondel answered sadly.

Even one-on-one playtime with Mommy is lacking without his little sidekick and accomplice, these days – and it makes me so happy to see their friendship deepening.