1 Corinthians 13:7... sorta

I remember the moment my life changed. I was sitting on the toilet in a tiny basement suite, going through a breakup with my boyfriend, when I peed on a little plastic stick and got a positive pregnancy test. It was devastating, and not in the way that the existence of this person was devastating, but in the way that all of my flaws and failures hit me in the face and told me, this baby needs the mother that you never had. How the fuck was I supposed to be what I didn’t know? I think I’m still dealing with the intensity of that moment because I have tears in my eyes writing this. Devastation equals blessing, because the moment I saw his little face my heart expanded into dimensions that I didn’t know existed.

My life literally changed course in a moment, as it’s prone to doing. Life and death do that for us. At the time, twenty-two and broken, I had NO idea what to do. I didn’t have the emotional intelligence or the communication skills to explain how I was feeling to my partner, and I knew I owed him another chance at making the relationship work for the sake of the baby. With very little support, I didn’t know where to turn to get my life together, so I did what made the most sense at the time - I went back to church. I remember sitting there, Sunday after Sunday, alone, but never alone with the life inside of me, weeping in the dark because I felt so unwelcome there. I felt unwelcome but hopeful that even if I was stained by sin, my baby might be loved by God.

In many ways, church saved my life, and that’s why I’ve always had such a difficult relationship with it. Where would I have gone during the darkest and loneliest time if I didn’t have the house of God? Who would I have been if I hadn’t been raised to believe in an angry, judgmental father who reigned down fire on his enemies, of whom I, little Stephie at six years old, was the worst? All I knew was that my baby deserved better than I'd had. And in every single way, he and his brother still do (though baby is no longer the term).

Now that I’m in my thirties, many of my friends are also learning the tough lessons of love and marriage and divorce and parenting, and it’s heart-wrenching to see them struggle at times. The gift of becoming a parent in such a breath-stopping, physically-shocking way, is that from the beginning I have associated parenting with absorbing and transmuting pain for the sake of Love. And that isn’t a bad thing. Love makes room for pain as much as it does for pleasure. Oftentimes the pain comes first.

When the father of my kids and I separated, I had to make the decision to fight for primary parenting, or gently release my kids to a balanced way of living equally with both parents. After spending every waking moment with them since birth, it was no easy decision to make. Again, I’m tearing up writing this because it never actually gets easier. The pain of missing loved ones never goes away, whether in death or the death of what you once knew.

Pain is not evil, it is not from the hand of Satan. Pain is the sandpaper that softens our rough edges and shows us how much we can handle and how hard we can love. Jesus showed us this but I have never heard this discussed in church. We rail against death as if it is the end of all being, rather than the brutal transformation into something eternal and long-lasting. Anyway, this post is supposed to be about parenting, not church, but I guess all things are connected.

Choosing to gently release my kids and trust in the foundation I had built within them was the most difficult decision of my life to date, and every other week I’m still reminded of this. I honestly hate it. I want to have them by my side always (save for a break here and there), but that would not be in their best interests. I am a flawed and broken human and as hard as I try, I will never be all they need. Neither will their Dad. All I can do is release my grasp so that they are given the opportunity for a village of parents to love and surround them and fill in all the cracks. The number of people who love and support my kids is far more than I could give them alone, and I will be eternally grateful for the parents who stepped up when my kids were not their own. Death is not evil, and neither is pain. Bearing this weight of loss within me, rather than placing it onto my kids has shown me my own strength as much as it has shown how loved my boys are in the world. This is church. Real church. Oh look, there’s the connection. 😏

Life is brutal, but it isn’t to be avoided. Running headlong into all that we avoid is the only way through to the other side. Jesus carried his own cross as a bold statement, Death, here I come! I won’t be held back by the things that scare me, and as a daughter of God (in ways that make sense to me), I take up my cross like my brother Christ (his words, not mine) and I declare that pain and suffering are holy, that letting go is the pathway to sainthood, and that Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And because God is love, and we are sons and daughters of the Universe, so do we.

Dive in. It’s all Love. And if it doesn’t seem like Love, hold on to your hats, because your understanding of Love is about to expand beyond your wildest imagination.

✌️❤️