I recommend this song to pair with the post below (but also, the whole album really).
It’s been seven years.
Seven years since I suffered through the worst nine months of my life. Seven years since I became knowledgeable of terms like “antepartum depression and anxiety” because they’d become my reality. Seven years since I was thrust on an arduous personal journey I survived but was never the same afterwards.
My pregnancy with my daughter completely derailed our families trajectory and way of life. It’s what put Jonathan and I firmly unified in making the decision for “no more babies” because of how my body reacted to growing a new life. It’s what wounded us individually in ways we just learned how to name together in 2024. Seven years later.
In 2017, eleven days before our daughter took her first earthside breath, I asked Jonathan to take a picture of me. Yes, I was heavy with child and heavier than I’d ever been in my life. Yes, I was swollen and exhausted and depressed but I still wanted a picture. I wanted to remember being where I was. I wanted evidence of being here—of living through this.
While driving home on a country road, we stopped alongside a field of wheat dancing in a westering sun. I didn’t know if these would be the last ‘nice’ pictures of me pregnant with her, but her due date was fast approaching. I didn't want to risk missing our narrowing window of maternity pictures. Jonathan took a few quick shots and we hopped back in the car.
Little did we know what was waiting for us when we got home (it was good, promise).
We exited the car and started to schlep ourselves and our 2 ½ year old up to the front door when I saw it. There, slicing open the sky in a slender half-blade of color; a rainbow.
I scooped up my firstborn and told Jonathan to grab the camera again as the sun was flinging the last of her light into the northern hemisphere. We watched as its rays tangled in a net of droplets and, against a backdrop of periwinkle and slate. The rainbow arched into a bright band of colors just beyond our house. I hefted my son up on my bump. I heard the snick! of the camera shutter as the living prism framed our bodies in the rosy send-off of a late June sunset.
The picture Jonathan took would become a touchstone for me. It was evidence of beauty in a brutal season. I was here. I lived through this.
11 days later, she was born.
The baby growing under my heart in the picture above turned seven last week. She’s got her daddy’s eyes and my love of the animal kingdom. She’s spunky and weird and hilarious and compassionate. Everything we went through to meet her was worth it. We’d do it all again to know her (and I’m really, really glad we don’t have to). In the history of our little family’s life, there’s a distinct ‘before and after’ surrounding how she came into the world.
We spent her birthday at the zoo with family and friends at her request. She flitted from enclosure to enclosure as if she was a blue morpho escaped from the butterfly exhibit. In an act of mercy, God gave us an overcast day to shield us from the blazing June sun. Rain threatened all day but only grumbled on the fringes of our birthday activities. We eventually came home, put a gold candle on a vanilla cupcake, and sang our daughter into year seven. It was a good day.
As I was putting her to bed, she happened to look outside. My observant girl noticed how the sun in the west was diffusing its light against a cast of clouds settling in the opposite direction.
“I bet there’s a rainbow, let’s check!” she exclaimed.
“Ok!” I put down the hairbrush and followed her lanky-big-but-still-little frame into the living room.
My girl was right.
We immediately put on our boots and ran outside. My husband and son joined us. We thought the rainbow would fade quickly, as they often do, but this one stayed. For over twenty minutes, it lit up the sky. It remained long after the sun had sunk behind our valley’s hills. At one point it was so bright that it hurt to look at and stayed imprinted on my vision even if I looked away. It was the most vibrant rainbow I’d ever seen.
I’m the kind of person who doesn’t believe in coincidences. But I do believe in an intentional God. You can’t convince me that a rainbow showing up right before my baby was born in 2017 and then—seven years later—another rainbow appearing in the same spot, at the same time of day (almost down to the minute) on her birthday didn’t have some Divine thought behind it.
As a writer, I’d love to tell you I burst into fountains of happy tears over this. I’d love to say I felt warmth in my chest at the sight. But as a human, I’ll say I didn’t feel any of that. I simply took heed of the obvious: God ordained for a rainbow to appear on the evening of my daughter’s seventh birthday. She even had rainbows on her pajama pants. He knew what all of that would mean to me. Sometimes you don't feel the truth, you just know it.
Standing out there with my daughter, I couldn’t help but think of how far God had brought us; how far we’d been carried. The wounds of growing her in my womb and the subsequent mental suffering left deep scars on my mind and body. But I’m still here. We’re still here, together.
Our family is a little slower, more easily worn out, a bit more cautious with who and what we commit to because we know it is to lose bandwidth for anything beyond survival. The complications of my second pregnancy was a storm we weathered against our will and it upended the way we experience the world. But that’s the thing about storms, they don’t just upend things. Sometimes, they make rainbows too.
I won’t hide the pain of walking through a broken world, and I can’t deny the beauty of existing in it too. Here I am, living through this.
Meanwhile, God is tipping my chin upwards to see it: every shade of faithfulness He’s painted in the sky.
Amen.
Amen.
Chills and gentle tears and such beauty and wonder, faithfulness and healing.