the certainty of motherhood

  

i had not intended to write today... or any time soon, for that matter. but i found in myself an urge to write down my thoughts as {and shortly after} i nursed isaac this afternoon.

you see, i had cried while i was nursing him. in four months, this was a first. i have cried while holding him, gazing at him, sitting alone and thinking about him. but never before today had i cried while nursing him. and it's not that the thoughts i was pondering, leading me to cry, were entirely new. i was thinking about the fact that i am what sustains my child... without me or the nourishment i give to him, he would not survive. of course, i know he could live by another means if he was not able to nurse on his own mother's milk. he would have to. but it is by me that he is nourished and has been these four months. i am the one... my own flesh is what has allowed him to thrive as he has.

like i said, there was nothing new to my thoughts. but they were thoughts that, today, brought tears to my eyes... even slight whimpers to my breath. and that is because it hit me differently today... today, while in the midst of a couple battles against things that are much bigger than me... while dealing with quite a lot of disappointment in so many areas of my life, while feeling overwhelmed and completely inadequate at keeping up in every area, while wanting all that is wrong and broken to be right and mended and while feeling as if absolutely nothing in life is certain or guaranteed. today, while nursing, i felt so anchored in the fact that there is one certainty that cannot be denied... i am this boy's mother, and it is i who has literally kept him alive and sustained.

though this could be viewed as mere fact... simple biology... i saw it as more than that. i saw in it a great purpose for my life right now. and with so much uncertainty all around, that was one giant, yet still, small certainty that brought me to tears. i can't express what a comfort it was to me. but i can try to explain... and that i have done.

nursing is always such a tender and intimate moment for me that i treasure anyway. today, it was all the more. not every time that i nurse are the surroundings silent and peaceful {though i strive for that}. but today, when i cried, they were such. and it was a markedly different experience nursing than all the rest. i will always remember it.

that is why i decided to use these photos for this post. normally, i like to limit the photographs that i use here to the ones i have taken myself... since it is a blog for my photography {and writing}. but today, not only would i not have been able to take shots like these if i was to be in them {unless i used a tripod}, but i would not have made images quite so beautiful and telling the way my dear friend stacey could.

i was amazed when she sent these photos to me as a birthday gift... utterly amazed. i cried when i saw them, because they captured one of the most incredibly beautiful acts that i have ever been privileged to do... nurse a child... my child. and she wrote about it beautifully, herself, here.

you might remember me writing about stacey recently... how i had the honor and privilege to meet her in person for the first time when she visited chicago. i took isaac to the city with me to meet her for lunch. afterward, we decided we'd like to walk to the lake, but i knew i had to feed isaac first. she was kind enough to allow me to use her hotel room to nurse isaac before we went walking. it was very unplanned to have these photos taken, but she saw an opportunity to capture a cherished moment, and she did so beautifully, in my opinion. i was in awe of the way she used the light in the room to tell such a quiet and tender story. she is an amazing {one of my favorites} photographer. how honored i am to have been photographed in this moment by her.

can you see why i just had to make use of them today? actually, i had intended on just providing a link to them in a post, back before i decided to stop blogging regularly. but i never got around to it. today, it seemed fitting... not just to link to them, but to actually post them with my words. i really wanted a place to come back to where i could find these thoughts from today paired with the images from a few weeks ago.

. . .

here are a few more she took.