Unstitched

I use to think I was the most honest woman out there when it came to motherhood.  And to clarify, it's not because I wanted to be, I just didn't know how to be anything else.

I entered motherhood with so many questions, doubts, fears, and un-met expectations.  I was so fatigued form a near 28 hour labor that I have very few memories of my first son's birth. I remember seeing his face & feeling the sweeping relief that, "it was over." When I brought our son home, for the first time in my life I was over taken by the fear of being alone. I was in need of people to be with me at all times. I went in to motherhood with my walls down and completely raw. I had no qualms saying that it was hard, that I was tired, and I wasn't sure I ever wanted to do it again. Those first months shaped me and that was the honesty I took to the streets. 

Birth wasn't magical. Breastfeeding wasn't miraculous. My relationship to my baby wasn't this serene snow globe of perfection. 

Birth was brutal (& nothing I wanted to see). Breastfeeding was exhausting, isolating, and immensely overwhelming. I loved my baby in a way I couldn't describe, but I was also afraid I wasn't enough for him. 

So I talked about it. I wrote about it. This blog was birthed from it. My Lips In Stitches...a lifelong need to write because my journals were all I had & the reality of becoming a mother melded into this one place, one title with two meanings.

I stepped away from this place after I lost my second baby. 

That was a season that bore a hole into the core of my self-understanding. I berated my ambition & I could not embrace the loss that came on Christmas Eve. It was a dark & long season all while being blessed & good in it's own right. 

My fingers have been idle. My words have been mute. My desire to pour out dried up.

Time has passed. A LOT of time. I've woven in and out of this place but I always end up back here. I'm addicted. I'm addicted to the need to lay it down and walk away new. I toyed with the idea of another new blog. My husband asked, WHY? 

Good point.

I thought on it. 

WHY? 

Because I didn't want to re-share this old place. I didn't want to relive these old words. I was embarrassed. I was afraid that I could be judged for this place. I wanted to remain hidden to those who could reach me but be known to those I'd probably never meet. And I've been thinking on this...thinking on it the way you kneed bread...mundane, repetitive thought that eventually molds itself into a final product, or in this case a decision: I will write here again. I won't change the name or hide from the years that brought me here. I'll own this. I'll let the past and present mingle here and dance showing me what can unfold from my vintage thoughts renewed. 

I'll be honest here as I always have been & I will share. I will unleash the trappings of my heart and be free because of it. 

So, cheers. Cheers to the second volume of a place beginning to be unstitched!