It’s been one month and one day since I delivered my beautiful caterpillar into this world.

How can you miss someone when they’re right in front of you?  With each passing second, I feel time moving all too quickly.  Wasn’t it just yesterday I was in a hospital room with my husband and mother holding me and helping me time my contractions?  How it is that we were already celebrating his one month?  How is it that in my third trimester I was doing everything I could on all the websites that offered advice on how to induce naturally and now I would love to go back to those final weeks, only because then I could relive the first few moments with my newborn all over again?  I know that time is going to pass quicker and quicker and before I know it we’ll be budgeting for his college tuition, so now’s the time to cherish each and every moment without thinking too much about the moment that has just passed.

How can you feel victorious and guilty at the same time?  I look at my little guy and I want to pump my fists in the air and dance to a made up song with a chorus that wails “I made this!” because to me, he’s the best thing ever.  He’s healthy and bouncy and, from what little signs he can give us, happy.  And the next moment my heart aches.  Can I give him enough?  Can I offer him enough support?  Do I have the resources to give him what he needs?  Am I doing the right “method”??  Part of this is the crazies that is postpartum, I know that, but I still end each night praying and asking God to train me to be a good steward of this life He’s trusted me with.

How can I feel this much??  I’ve often been labeled as emotional – or as my sweet husband describes, emotion-full – and feel things intensely.  Yet I have not felt this capacity of love and yearning and joy before.  I recall a friend telling me once that when he held his son for the first time, he loved in a way he never had before and didn’t know he could.  I was fascinated by those words but now I know those were just words, and words cannot describe what one feels when holding their… their theirs.

How can I say the right prayer?  Not the right prayer asking for the right tools; obviously I do pray for those, but how can I speak to God after this?  In my journey to understanding intimacy with this all powerful being through prayers, retreats, inner healing, miracles, worship, study, etc. I knew I had not felt the fullness of God’s love.  I knew that, but I thought I had a smidgen of understanding.  And now I see that as arrogance.  Because when I look down at my little caterpillar, someone I created made in MY image, someone that is alive because of my yearning and desire for him to be alive, someone whom I cannot get tired of whispering love songs to and calling my beloved, someone I would sacrifice almost anything for… because when I look at him, I realize I have not even begun to understand a glimpse of a smidgen of  how my Creator feels about me.  All this time my God loved me in a way that could not be described and I preached and narrated it so casually.  My little guy loves nothing more at this time than to lie against my chest and just listen to my heart beat; to feel my presence and nearness and feel safe and loved by me.  And it makes my heart skip a beat.  For my someone to delight in just being protected and provided and nurtured by me makes me feel love in a way that, again, cannot be put into finite words.  To consider the possibility that the Maker of the universe longs for those moments when I put my full trust and faith in Him by resting against His heart beats… no, I have not yet begun to understand a glimpse of a smidgen.

And… this is only the beginning.