Our late autumn gift, our new little Peter, has been out of the womb for three weeks as of yesterday. Slowly I am beginning to recall why I started this blog soon after Gabriel was born. With the arrival of a new baby, my physical, emotional, and spiritual life had turned upside down and inside out. What this meant with my first child and what it now means with my second is quite different, and yet there remain a few similar themes, and I think these are what drove me to start recording my mothering experiences. First, there is a constant storm of “second guessing” accompanying every choice I make as a mother–what will this lead to? what habits am I ingraining now that will be hard to change later? am I being too lenient? too strict? etc. etc. Second, there is an inner struggle with negativity towards myself, a negativity I attribute partially to post-partum hormones, partially to exhaustion, and partially to an insidious power that is trying to attack at the heart of where the initial bond with God is formed.Certainly cultivating one’s prayer life is the first weapon in the battle against all this, and I have been trying to take some steps back towards stability in prayer in the last few days. Could the blog be a second line of defense? Perhaps. I have doubted the value of this blog recently, and have several times come close to abandoning the project completely. But I think amidst the hazes of new motherhood, good will come from drawing near enough to certain thoughts to define them, from articulating the beacons of goodness that flash through this fog and are often quickly forgotten.
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