I am all over the board emotionally these days. Chalk it up to pregnancy hormones or whatever we’d like, I feel a bit like a ping pong ball. One minute I am so deeply challenged by our ever-changing kiddos, and the next I am falling all over myself out of love for them. I know that this is the dichotomy of parenting, but the contrast from day to day is especially strong in our house right now.

My sister had a baby girl on Friday and she is so far away. I am loving all of the photos and updates, but at the same time, I’m aching to be there. I’d love nothing more than to be snuggling a fresh new babe and helping my sister in all of the newness and change. There’s so much joy in thinking about my new niece, and about my sister traveling down this new path as a mom to three, but it’s all kinds of hard not to be a part of the joy in person.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been on a bit of a roller coaster regarding plans for our next birth, which has been an emotional trigger, too. We were saddened by the news of our friend and doula moving away, and I had to hit the reset button on how I picture the birthing space we’ll create for baby when he or she is born. Our doula was with us for both Henry and Eloise, and she had become a fixture in the vision of that day in my mind. I needed to plod through a few weeks of praying and sorting out how I really want things to be come September, and I needed to process a little grief over the change.

As of today, I think we’ve landed on a peaceful new scenario that puts my heart and mind at greater ease. I didn’t realize how heavily this was weighing on me until I looked through a few birth photography images this afternoon. When someone else’s brand new baby made me burst into tears, the lifted burden became wildly apparent. My heart needed to settle somewhere new regarding our baby’s arrival, and now it can.

After yesterday’s rough patch with the kiddos and with my own disposition, I was really ready for today to take a different direction. Thankfully, the plans on the calendar lent themselves to refreshment from a variety of sources, and I’m sitting in a different space tonight than I was just twenty four hours ago.

In this stage of raising two small humans and growing another, I know that there are going to be days that feel particularly hard. I also know that they’ll be followed up by respite from any number of directions. I’m so thankful that thoughtful, praying friends are only a text or a phone call away–I’m not sure how we would all dance through these up and down seasons otherwise.

My heart feels a bit like a marionette, and that’s okay. Some strings tug at it from a life-giving place of hope, and others yank back in a darker direction that I have to be intentional about shutting down. Prayer and rest, worship, heart-led conversations, and quality time with the people I love all help to settle the strings and tone down the antsy dance that can otherwise begin to well up in me.

A (decaf) latte and some time to reflect can do wonders.

Pregnant or not pregnant, there’s plenty right now to draw me toward spaces of stability, positivity, and truth. I need to keep fueling my heart and mind with these, so that the hard days have their place, but they don’t bleed over into all of the good.

My heartstrings are getting their exercise, which simply wouldn’t be the case without plenty of highs to contrast some of the wearing lows. There are just spaces in life that feel far more like peaks and valleys than even terrain, and this is one of them; while I don’t get excited about experiencing the valleys sometimes, I certainly do appreciate that the mountain tops are lofty along the way.

willing tomorrow to be filled with life-giving nudges anew,

mm