The ReeWrite

Flew right past 7 months so had to combine it with 8 and if that’s not youngest child energy idk what it is. We sure do love this gap-toothed girlie 💛

against, amidst, despite all the despair… h o p e ✨

sisters do spring 🌻✨

will now be accepting retirement gifts ✨

just a week shy of her turning 7 months and finally got around to take her 6 month photo 😅😮‍💨

but that feels about right for this season. time is just going a little too fast and we’re doing our meager best to keep up.

it feels weird to describe a baby as joyful because she is, in fact, a baby and i don’t really know if her emotions run much deeper than happy, hungry, fussy, teething, and so forth.

but joyful really is the only word to touch the lightness and levity she so wholly contains and we are grateful to be graced by every ounce of it 💛

ok see yall next week for next months pic!!!

ok, you’re all caught up 🤍

because it’s christmas (and at christmas you tell the truth)…we’re tired.

(but also very, very thankful 💛)

merry christmas — from our family to yours ✨

God has felt so quiet to me this last year. Not absent, exactly. More like that thing where you can’t see faces in a dream.

Glimpses and context remind me He’s near. Penny’s birth, for one. Jo’s pingy voice asking to “hold you” when she wants to be picked up. The jewel tones of fall finally finding Texas earlier this month.

But more often than not, the sheer volume of this season of life drowns out any hush of that faceless Holy. Our house is loud. The news is loud. My long, labored exhales of trying to self-regulate because that’s what good moms do!!!! are surprisingly loud.

Maybe better women than me are able to hear God’s voice above all that.

But not me. Not recently, at least. And with that has come a dull loneliness I haven’t quite been able to name until now.

Advent catches me off guard every year. This holy halt given to us just as I pick up the pace to wrap up quarter-end reporting at work, pull down our winter coats from whatever box we stuffed them in last spring, and, oh yeah—drip the faucets! use my FSA funds! consider the ethical implications of telling our kids about Santa! set resolutions! vacuum the dog hair! eat lunch!

I told my therapist yesterday that I feel like all my neurons are shaking all the time. I wasn’t sure what I meant at the time. But this morning, sitting in the unlikely quiet of a house where everyone is still asleep, the Christmas tree glowing beside me, the dog keeping my feet warm with his belly, I wonder if it’s simply that I’ve thrown all my weight behind all these things—and the abruptness of Advent’s signal to slow down has left my insides reeling.

A whole-body reaction.
The physics of grace leaving me shaky and aware.

Maybe the volume of God isn’t the issue. Maybe He has no interest in competing with the static. Maybe I’ve been sitting here, discouraged and a little resentful, waiting for Him to be louder—and He’s been waiting there, affectionately, inviting me to slow the hell down.

chat has the kindness to leave out all my postpartum unhinged 2am questions and we love her for that 🫶

tell me what yours was!! 👇

when i first told the group chat i was due in august, someone said, “oh you’ll hit the chunky baby 4 month old phase right at Christmas” and they were RIGHT. this is the happiest, CHUNKIEST, squishiest little baby and it is making this season all the more magical. 🎄❤️

we love you, pennygirl!!

Back to work tomorrow after a 16-week maternity leave and it feels like an eternity might not have been long enough. These are just such hands-on days. The needs are so physical. The mess is so tangible. The growth is so visible, day after day. And I’m not sure I’ll know what to do with my hands or my body apart from them.

They’re getting bigger, both of them. And so quickly. I feel absolutely panicked about it but there’s nothing to do. The days are passing without my approval and no matter how many times I whisper, please stop growing, as i lay them down to sleep, they don’t listen.

(Jo is getting great at not listening. Penny’s more focused on rolling at the moment but I know her time will come.)

Motherhood is so strange because for months there isn’t a single part of them that isn’t also a part of you. You are wholly intertwined, in the most visceral way.

And then the moment they arrive, they start the slow, quiet work of unwinding — learning to become their own person through tiny separations that could break you if you looked too closely.

And that’s what I can’t stop thinking about as I consider going back to work tomorrow. That I was supposed to be separating too. I was supposed to be learning how to inhabit my own life again, how to be a whole person on my own.

It just wasn’t enough time. And that’s not a comment on parental leave policies (although it could be!!!). It’s just an admission of fear, and maybe even a little failure, that I don’t know how to be in my body anymore without it being in service of these girls.

I’m sure I’ll learn, as they continue to do each day. And we’ll all adapt and adjust and be fine — because there’s grace, and because that’s what you do.

I just wish I had a little more time to not need that lesson. A little more time to just be a body belonging to them.