In thinking about Mother’s Day this year, I keep thinking of Dr. Bradley’s use of the word “motherlike” in his classic book, Husband-Coached Childbirth. While I’m not a huge fan of the book, I am a fan of this word. To use it in a sentence…giving birth may not be “ladylike,” but it IS motherlike.

This time last year, I was on pins and needles waiting to find out if I was pregnant again (I was!). I attended a friend’s blessingway ceremony on that Mother’s Day and while I was there another friend announced her new pregnancy. And, I’d found out that same week about another friend’s pregnancy as well. These were bittersweet announcements for me as I was happy for my friends, but also felt a pang that it wasn’t me and that I “should” have been full-term myself at that point. Another friend made a very casual, offhand joke about miscarriage shortly after these announcements and I almost lost it completely, feeling at the edge of tears throughout the rest of the event. I was pretty sure that I, too, was also pregnant, but I felt almost paralyzed with fear of being “left behind” again. I imagined all of my friends going on into January and having their babies without me. As it was, the dear friend who had announced her pregnancy that day ended up losing her own sweet baby at a gestation very similar to my own loss of Noah (side note: the 18 month anniversary of his birth is today). My heart ached deeply for her, knowing that now she would have to be the one watching me go on without her and I felt acutely aware of that each time I shared a new pregnancy picture throughout my pregnancy with Alaina—my own sense of “arrested pregnancy” was one of the many difficult post-miscarriage feelings for me (it simply felt wrong to not be pregnant—like pregnancy was my “rightful state” and had been prematurely interrupted).

Anyway, that isn’t really what I planned to write about today, it just came to mind as I began to type. I really planned to just share a couple of new photos! So, here’s one…

At playgroup this week, I asked my friend to take a new profile picture for me and so she took this one:

I love it! She is the same friend who took all of the wonderful pregnancy photos of me 🙂

Alaina keeps getting bigger and bigger! She weighs about 15 1/2 pounds now. She rolled over for the first time a couple of nights ago, but has yet to repeat the feat. However, she has started to act kind of like she wants to sit up. So, we have been experimenting with that and she has surprisingly good sitting up skills for a 3.5 month old!

I think her big cloth diapers serve as a stabilizing influence and I would imagine that if we tried to sit her up without one on, she would fall right over!

Last year, my husband gave me a beautiful ring for Mother’s Day. I received it with some trepidation also, knowing that if my tiny, tentative new pregnancy was to also end, I would associate the ring with that forever (it also has two garnets in it—January’s birth stone). The goddess of Willendorf image has held special meaning for me for some time and I love this ring. I am grateful that rather than being a loss trigger, it instead serves as a reminder of the potency and power of the Feminine. Of being motherlike.