metamorphosis

Evelyn has a birthday in ten days. Ten days. These past twelve months have been grueling, sleepless, and backbreaking. They've also been gracious and forgiving and stunning. Welcoming this new person into our family was a leap of faith, and it's paid off a million times over. The thing, though, about first birthdays, is that they're a celebration as much for the parents as they are for the babe. 

I'm a completely different person from who I was twelve months ago. I've spent these last weeks remembering how I felt this time last year, pregnant, uncertain, excited, and scared out of my wits. And now here I am, almost 365 days later, remade. I'd like to think that this version of Charlotte is a better, slightly improved version. I've learned how to let go and how to hold on, how to ask for help, how to ask for forgiveness, when to adjust my expectations and when to raise them.

I had moments over the past year when I felt that I'd lost myself, and I didn't know how to find me again. But I did find myself, through a thousand small ways I held fast to the irreplaceable parts and found new ones. Bit by bit, side by side with my Savior, I remade myself. This Charlotte is a wife to her best friend and mother of two beautiful children. She's a sewer and a reader. She loves chocolate and slacks on laundry. She loves to learn and create. This Charlotte is maybe a little softer, maybe a little sensitive, maybe a little self-doubting, maybe stronger than she thinks. And I like her.

Motherhood, more than anything in my life, has compelled me to come to terms with self-acceptance, what it is and what it isn't. Something that's so terrifying to me during pregnancy is the knowledge that I'll never be the same, that this person I've spent years--a lifetime even--crafting will be altered permanently. And that can be overwhelming. But then when I come out on the other end, rebuilt into someone slightly different but still me, I'm humbled by the grandeur and simplicity of God's plan for me.