A long becoming

What you find of God when you least expect it

Welcome to many new readers after my last essay on Eucharist. Turns out a lot of us are sick of being yelled at in church. Today I’m sharing this new essay by way of introduction to my work. I’d love to know more about you, and I'm glad you’re here.

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Matrescence is underlined in red squiggles on my screen. New enough to be unknown by spellcheck, the word is akin to adolescence. Matrescence is the anthropological term for becoming a mother, defined as the physiological, physical, emotional, and developmental process that a mother goes through after the birth of a child. 

Hormones change, bodies change, identities change, relationships change. 

To have been pregnant seven times, to have given birth six times, to be raising five children is complicated math. You can measure the grief between the numbers. But having many children also means a long matrescence. 

I birthed babies in 2009, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2020. I nursed babies in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. (Such sentences alone make me laugh; “advanced maternal age” and “geriatric multigravida” indeed.) I have known pregnancy and birth in three different decades, a ridiculous bit of trivia which explains why I am often tired. 

Motherhood hit me hard, like a load of hormonal bricks. I couldn’t understand why it made me feel like a mess, inside and out, while other women seemed to be glowing, blooming, growing into a new stage of life with cheer and charm. I adored my baby, I was so grateful to be a mother. And yet I could not get my bearings, alone and adrift on an unknown sea. 

Years later, I realize there is never a shore to reach. As soon as your feet brush bottom, the sandbar shifts and you are swimming again. Through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, through each new phase with each different child, parenting remade my personhood, reorienting me toward the other(s) in a way nothing had done before, not even marriage.

Motherhood rewired me from the inside out.

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Grief rearranged my molecules. 

I heard myself saying this to friend after friend in the months after my twin daughters died. I felt like a new person, carrying grief in my cells. How could anyone expect me to jump back into business as usual? Only my skin seemed the same, minus the c-section scar. But inside it held back a burgeoning new reality, a metamorphosis.

Over the years since their deaths, I read about biologies of grieving, how mourning changes the brain, how the entire body is impacted by grief. None of it felt surprising. The bereaved know this in their bones.

I grew up with grief, after my older brother died when I was 10. I never wanted the same for my children. We do not get to choose most of what happens to us.

Yet strangely, I felt myself becoming a softer mother after grief. More present. Less irritable. More anxious, sure. But also more grateful, astonished and awe-filled that any child could live, grow, and stay. 

The piercing loss of death did something else, too. It tore a hole in the veil between here and there, heaven and earth, whatever flat words we fumble to use for the colossal mystery looming beyond what we know and see. 

Everything stayed closer: God, my girls, everyone I love who had died. I don’t write about this much, because it sounds crazy. Even my nearest and dearest have laughed: You’re talking to ghosts?!

No. 
Yes. 
Maybe?

Grief undoes everything. It also remakes, in its churning wake.

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Cancer changed my chemistry. So did the treatments to kill it. 

To be diagnosed with breast cancer without a family history, when you are young and healthy, is such a shock that I can tell you truthfully, over a year later, that I still don’t recognize myself as a cancer patient, let alone a survivor. None of it feels familiar. 

I never felt sick until I started treatment. Chemotherapy, immunotherapy, mastectomy—the whole wretched endeavor felt (ironically) like an out-of-body experience, like I was watching it happen to someone else, some other poor young mother.

Only now, when I carry a new exhaustion in my bones, when I reach my own limits by day’s end in a determined, defined way I never knew before, do I realize and remember again:

Oh, right. I had cancer. Everything is different. 

I lost my hair, my breasts, my reproductive organs. Inside my anatomy was permanently altered; outside my appearance was, too. The chemo curls may relax back to waves. All the scars will surely lighten and fade. But I left parts of me behind that will never return.

You cannot walk through hell and come out unburned.

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My life has been reoriented three times: by motherhood, by grief, and by cancer. Along the winding way I have met many whose lives were justifiably transformed by any one of these. To carry so much, to bear all three, has felt bewildering. But this burden has also become directional, urging me onward. 

Mosy of my theological work has been born from these three particular experiences, trying to understand what we know of God through motherhood, through grief, and through suffering. Which is to say: the relationships that shape us. The losses that unmake and remake us. And the mortality that each of us must face. 

What ranks among the defining features of what it means to be human.

It is not lost on me that my three recreations have been born in the body. Far from mere intellectual exercises, the enterprise of surrender and subsequent meaning-making has been visceral, corporeal, embodied. I bear physical scars on my skin. My cellular makeup has been changed. Beliefs, worldview, even temperament have been transformed—and like my children armed with a 2-liter Coke bottle and a pack of Mentos, the combination can be explosive.

But here is the truth, the rub, the parabolic twist toward resurrection that reorients the Christian life. I have found more of God in becoming, and unbecoming, and becoming anew. 

Verily, I say to you, would that it were the opposite! Would that we were given full knowledge of divinity, conveniently pre-packaged upon arrival on the planet, safely prepared for our consumption. Instead suffering, loss, grief, and even the plain old pains of growth—these are what bring true education and formation. I spent three years in theological classrooms, but nothing revealed God to me the way everything awful did outside those safe doors.

(Believe me. I would lobby hard on everyone’s behalf to reverse this if/when I get to discuss such matters with our Creator face-to-face, but I am 100% sure nothing would change.)

Because if up is the way to know God, then who gets the upper hand? The rich, the powerful, the beautiful, the safe, the lucky, the healthy, the fit, the few, the free. But if Incarnation’s downward mobility is the way God chose to come closer to all of us, then we can encounter the divine each time we fall, too.

I am never, never going to tell you that postpartum depression or traumatic birth or infertility or miscarriage or infant loss or cancer or chemo or surgery or any other terrible suffering is holy, good, or beautiful. God does not cause grief or desire the death of any of us; thump your Bible for that truth if you need to see it writ plain. 

But I will also stake my life on the claim that the Lord comes close to the broken-hearted. That more of humanity and divinity are mysteriously, maddeningly found during life’s worst moments. And that no quick course, self-help best-seller, internet influencer, wise mentor, popular priest, or world-renowned expert can teach you more than walking through this hard world with eyes and ears open, willing to let your heart be broken from compassion, allowing your own life to speak about your own calling to love and grow from love.

Becoming is an ongoing verb. (Gerunds are a gift like that, to name all that continues and lacks any neat and tidy finale.) I have been a work in process, in progress, for my whole life. You have, too. But the beauty of seeing and savoring our own long becoming is manifold. 

You learn to chill out about your own shortcomings. You get better at forgiving yourself and others. You start to see everyone else as half-finished artworks, the undone parts still draped in possibility. You let go of younger illusions that the world will be understandable, humans will act logically, and answers are available. You find more mystery, make peace with paradox, and understand how much you will never understand. You bump up against the profound, palpable presence of God, simultaneously hidden and revealed everywhere you look. 

So tell me this, if you care to share a sliver. What has your own long becoming revealed of God to you?

I am convinced that the more we share from our own experiences, the more we learn to notice, name, and nurture what we have known of God. (This, perhaps, remains the most succinct summation of my theological work, with and for others, here and here.) 

And if you have known a long matrescence, a lasting grief, or a lingering suffering, you are in good company. Most of us are taking more time than we thought, too.