By Claire Fyrqvist ‘05

We found out we were expecting a baby just weeks after our wedding day.

My husband, John, and I had both agreed that we wanted children whenever God gave them to us, so we were excited to begin the parenting adventure, but honestly I had absolutely no idea what pregnancy or the early postpartum time would be like. I turned down an offer of graduate school, and we plunged in with laughter and hope. I experienced a great sense of God’s presence through the growing life within me—it was a time of joyful anticipation.

The birth of our first child was a miraculous event. My husband and I, fledgling newlyweds, had never experienced such intimate vulnerability, trust, or courage as that first, totally new window into the world of birth. It changes you.

Regardless of how hard or how easy a woman’s birth experience is (and it can be very hard—even traumatic), there is nothing more bodily, more incarnational. To be thrust into the timeless, eternal moment of co-creating with God, recognizing your complete humanity in both your power and your weakness, is something I cannot fully describe. Praying, crying, leaning on John, leaning on God—all I could do was go through it, say yes to it, so that I could bring forth the life within me.  

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to give up at several points, but I couldn’t. I honestly don’t know what I would have done without John and the loving and encouraging midwife and nurses around me. Holding our son, Joseph, to my chest after all that work and pain was glorious and peaceful and satisfying—like nothing I’d ever experienced.

As life-giving as this birth was (and our subsequent two births since then), the postpartum time came for me like a desert of emptiness and struggle. Having experienced the raw physical and emotional work leading up to meeting my child for the first time, it was confusing and painful to be plunged into a season of loneliness and sometimes despair in the months that followed.

I wept for no reason. I could barely think, much less pray or rejoice in my child. I felt abandoned by those who loved me, even though they were nearby, and I found myself unable to reach out or ask for help. I cried out to God on many occasions, wondering why I felt so terrible when something so wonderful had happened. I even experienced anger and betrayal.

I now know, pregnant with our fourth child, that this is a common experience for women. It’s a big deal to have my body—during and after pregnancy—be filled with and then emptied of hormones that throw off all emotional stability, and all of that compounded with intense sleep debt.

Sharing this with other women and hearing from older women has helped me to understand this season of bearing children. It is so hard to feel vulnerable, needy, and helpless when I am used to feeling self-reliant, successful, and confident.  

I’ve learned I have to go through a kind of reconciliation process with my body, allowing it to be ravaged by the physical scars of birth as well as the emotional scars of feeling alien to myself during the hardest parts of pregnancy and the postpartum experience. This has involved forgiveness, a letting go of my old body, my old self, for one that, similar to the body of the risen Christ, now bears the wounds of love. I have had to trust that God’s plan for our family is much greater and more beautiful than the one I have, and that each child God brings us is exactly who God wants to be on this earth.

Through pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, I have experienced in my body the cross of Christ, my only hope. Not to sound dramatic, but women have to die to self in order to give life to their children. It’s hard. I am so grateful for the three (soon to be four) children who put their faces on this God-given reality in our family.

The contrast of the dying and the rising involved in the process of motherhood has consistently drawn me closer to God and the people closest to me (though sometimes it is two steps forward, one step backward). My prayer as my husband and I go through our fourth birth soon is that I can fully say yes as Jesus did, as Mary did, to all that will come.