Labor started on a Monday afternoon in Chipotle. I was halfway down the assembly line about to ask for pico and cheese when I found myself unable to get out the words. I sagged against the countertop, eyes squeezed shut, and waited for the contraction to pass.

“Are you in labor?” the Chipotle worker asked, eyes wide above her mask, one hand hovering over the cheddar. 

“I think it’s starting!” I smile-grimaced back, hoping to sound more chipper than dramatic.  Already I could feel the line of curious eyes behind me and my own face turning red. Tommy’s hand settled on my back. “You okay?”

It was the last lunch for just the two of us, before we became three of us, and I was determined to see it through. Sentimentality, not curiosity, will kill this cat. 

A long afternoon and evening passed, followed by an even longer night, and then a car ride at six in the morning to the hospital. Jack Robert Lyvers arrived at 2:34 in the afternoon, all beautiful 8 pounds, 3 ounces, and 21 inches of him. I sobbed when the nurse laid him against my chest, marveling at how warm and soft he felt. That blond hair! Those long fingers and fathomless blue eyes. He was an undeniable copy of my husband, but somehow also half of me. A miracle. 

Before Jack’s birth, I tried to imagine what I’d feel as a mother, whether joyful or tired or overwhelmed. But nothing could have prepared me for the intensity of it all – physical pain and exhaustion clashing against emotional and mental exhaustion. Water wearing away at rock. Motherhood is far more complicated a picture than I could have envisioned, with the depth and nuance of a van Gogh painting rather than a paint-by-number.

The days pass so slowly and so quickly in a blur of feeding and rocking and diapering and trying to string words together without sleep. In the days since coming home from the hospital, I’ve resented that the strongest emotion I’ve felt is anxiety, rather than contentedness. 

There’s been a newly released fountain of fear inside of me. I suppose it’s a fear that has always existed yet dormant until now. Fear only awakened by a love unparalleled in its immediacy and its purity. Until now, I’ve learned to love something. There has been a measure of choice involved when I fall in love. But with Jack, there was never a choice. It arrived the moment I learned of his existence, like a letter in the mail.   

Jack feels like a slippery teacup in my hands. The harder I try to maintain a firm grasp, the more he seems to slip to the edges of my fingertips, teetering and tottering and dangerously close to falling. Only he isn’t a piece of glassware but a china-fine, fragile, eight-pound being with squishy cheeks and no head control. Delicate. Breakable. 

Already I want to hold him close forever. Fight for him. Shield him against any bad thing that could ever happen to him. But in the very moment he was born, I lost the ability to shelter his body with my own. In that very moment, his world became distinct. 

Although he is never more than a few feet away from me, he lives outside of me now, exposed and unguarded. That’s been a source of anxiety for me, if I’m honest, because I’ve lost a degree of perceived control. 

In these early days, fear has threatened to steal my calm and my joy. I’ve dreaded the thought of someone else holding my son or, heaven forbid, sneezing in his direction. While still in the hospital, I found myself unable to sleep stressing about other babies going hungry or pregnant women laboring in countries without adequate medical care. There have been no bounds or rules to my anxiety. Fountain of fear overflowing, I felt the crushing weight of brokenness that extends across this world, all of it outside of my scope to change or heal in that moment.  

Life bears its pretenses of control remarkably well. We can nearly trick ourselves into believing we’re the ultimate commanders of our fate, that we decide where we go and what we do. Some days we even think we can control what happens to us. We can hardly stand to face how little control we actually muster. How life so often fails to play by our imposed rules or how it seems to careen into a mortal tailspin under the slightest breeze.

In these days of fierce anxiety, a verse from Psalm 94 came to mind, something I must have memorized years ago. 

“When my anxious thoughts multiply within me, Your consolations delight my soul.”

Over and over, I’ve repeated this to myself until it has pressed itself like a drum beat into my subconscious. When I’m anxious, when I’m afraid, when I have doubts – that’s when You’re there. 

There are other teacups in my life besides Jack, other lives I cherish that I can control no more than I can control the sea. Life is painfully fragile in a world with COVID and car crashes and cancer. I can’t carry them all. I can’t understand the why behind them all. It crushes me to try. 

At the end of each day, God asks me to sleep, and He asks me to give it to Him. Even without seeing the future. Even with finite eyes that can’t see the breadth or scope of life on this earth, He asks me to trust that when I wake up in the morning the world will still be spinning.

So tonight, I will tell God about my fountain of fear. I will tell Him about all of the teacups I love. I will ask Him to use me however He will to care for, love, and protect these teacups.   

And I will sleep.