twenty weeks

20 weeks. 5 months. Halfway there. 

It is still so surreal to me to even accept that there is a real live life growing inside of me, that these words feel even more foreign. 

I know it's there. I've seen it, I've felt it, I've heard the heartbeat. I've seen the ultrasound pictures of its profile and tiny big old foot already reminding me of its daddy. I feel the little flutters that couldn't possibly be anything else. It's happening. I am growing a baby and I'm going to be a mom. Life won't ever be the same. 

I am 32 years old. When I was growing up I didn't really picture myself getting married, I thought it would be nice and if it happened it would have happened when I was in my mid 20's but it wasn't a requirement. I thought I would be a doctor, or a scientist. And eventually a mom--either a younger mom like mine was if I did happen to get married, or if my dreams of a career in STEM panned out, I would adopt, single, around 30. I always knew I would adopt. The whole get married and growing kids thing seemed pretty unlikely and that was fine. 

 But here I am--32, no illustrious life saving career, 2 years into a sweet marriage I never could have predicted, and growing a baby at an age I thought I would probably be done with by now. 

Isn't it funny how we think we can plan our lives? That we have some control? My whole life I have fought blindly and desperately for control and every turn God has shown me it isn't my wheel to steer. I have been reading the story of Joseph (yeah, the coat-of-many-colors guy) in my 5 minute morning devos (yeah it's only five minutes but it's something, right?) and his story is amazing to me--one day his life was planned out--favorite son, great coat, dreaming the dreams and living the dream--the next, boom, betrayed by his own family and sold into slavery and that's just the start of his careening wheel of craziness in life. But. Every step, God saw him. God helped him. God knew his destiny was greater than he could ever imagine. Until suddenly he's the freaking king of Egypt and his family's bloodlines lead to Jesus, THE Jesus. I wish I could go back and ask him how often he was scared and how many days he felt unsure and unprepared like me. 

 I have never felt more unprepared for anything than I do to become a mother. I am surrounded by great moms. Waiting til 32 for my uterus to get the message that hey, we're supposed to grow a kid maybe? means that the majority of my closest friends and family already have their own families. Our church especially knows how to "be fruitful and multiply" like none other (so much so that if you're NOT being fruitful and multiplying it can feel lonely and weird, but that's another season and another story--but I've been there and I know there are others and you are in my heart.) At church every Sunday I look at all these women who already know how to be a mom and I want to hyperventilate and just yell "HOW!? How do you do that thing with your fancy nursing cover and not show God and everyone your business? How do you wake up and get here and look gorgeous and your kids look like amazing Baby Gap ads and I have no kids but there's peanut butter on my jeans and I don't think I remember how to straighten my hair?! How do you carry that bloody baby carrier like it doesn't weigh anything AND hold your 2 year old on your other hip? My back hurts in these flats wth no kids to carry!..." It's a good thing my church doesn't know how crazy I really am. :)

My two best friends have beautiful kids whom I've doted on for years. I've seen them struggle and fight every day for the good of their families. They are amazing and terrifying to me because well, I'm pretty selfish. I do what I want when I want to do it. I like to buy expensive coffee and nail polish not baby things or pay extra bills when I have extra. But I want my kid to not be selfish. How do I teach it that? When I don't get it right? And most of all--How do I teach it how much God loves it when I can't wrap my own head around it sometimes? When I can't teach this, God's love, the biggest truth EVER to some of the people I love most, at least not so they hear/understand/listen/believe?...further more how do you teach someone to talk? Walk? Eat? Serve others? Love to read? That Batman is the best superhero (after Jesus and Daddy)? To want adventure and not settle for the status quo? To not give up no matter how many times your mommy has in her life. That Taylor Swift is an awesome and amazing musical visionary and human being no matter what anyone else says? To truly be like Jesus when I'm not even sure how myself some days. Every day I truly wonder why God is fashioning this creature in my womb and entrusting it to me for life when He sees what a mess I am inside. Like, are you SURE? Sure your sure? Seriously, God? Me. Me? Cause no one else truly knows my dark and twisty innards like my Father. If I were God, I would be the very last person I would give a baby to. 

 I will never forget July 14th, standing in that bathroom at our friends house (we were dogsitting) and watching those 2 lines actually turn blue on the billionth stick I had spent money to pee on. I have never felt more shock in my entire life. I drove to work that morning with the radio off, or maybe just on low, still disbelieving, and I remember asking the void inside me that suddenly wasn't maybe a void, "are you really there? Are you going to stay? Well I don't know if you are and I don't know what I'm doing, but I promise I will love you and keep you safe." 

And really what else can I do? I haven't read a single parenting book. We haven't even started buying onesies, pacis, or a car seat yet. I'm so overwhelmed by the thought of registering for all the tiny hundred baby things that I can't even. My pregnancy has been filled with high risk twists and turns (again like my life--no control, what a surprise :) and I've just stopped trying to keep up. Every day our baby gets bigger and we get a step closer to meeting it. The fact that something could go wrong is always at the front of my mind after having far too many friends who have lost their little ones, but no matter what happens, I am now a mom. And I believe with all my heart that every baby is God's design so this one is His plan for me. 

Joseph in the Bible was a dreamer. I've been a dreamer too, a girl who likes to make big dreams and plans but seldom follows through on them. God gave Joseph a life beyond his wildest dreams, and through God Joseph even saw his dreams come true. I haven't made much of my life but now I have this chance. This scary beautiful chance. God did great things with the bloodline of Joseph's family, with Judah's DNA leading right to the man who would fix everything. I never became a doctor. I didn't finish college and I never saw my later dreams of being a paramedic come true. And that's ok, I'm settled where I'm at. But for this baby...the sky is the limit. God can use this critter growing in my tummy for anything. This little arrow, with God's help, can be thrust in any direction. Scary and beautiful big dreams for a little baby who's not even breathing air outside of my belly yet, but...if we do this whole parent thing right who knows where that arrow will go. I want it to dream big, like Joseph. Like me. And maybe baby your dreams will come true. Mine are, in a different way--a dream I didn't even know I had really. 

So. I'm not prepared and I don't know what's going to happen and I'm scared but I know God is already there just as He has always been. My whole life I see His hand. This family I've been given is a gift, starting with my wonderful husband and now this tiny life. I don't deserve either. But I'm trusting. And I will do my best to keep my hands off the steering wheel. 

the fatherless, they find their rest

"Oh, my dad passed away." "My dads dead". "It's just me and my

Mom." "Oh, I don't have a dad." We all come from two parents. That's just biology. A fact that is rooted deep into who we are, one that comes with stories and pasts and intrinsic facts of what makes us, us. So when you're a girl without a dad, you get used to the explanations. Because life is telling our stories to each other and our stories start with our parents. 

 I've been fatherless since I was 11. That's 21 years without a dad, 21 Father's Day's without anyone to buy a card for, 21 years...

I'm not the first girl to loose her father. I'm not the first girl to loose her father in a really crappy way--thought really any way you loose someone you love, is crappy. (And sometimes you have a dad and it's not good, he's abusive or absent or something is just not good, and if that's you I'm sorry, your story may be more like mine. I had a step-dad for awhile and that's how it was with us, and that is a whole other world of hurt.) 

But I am alive and my dad is not, and one of the things I want to do while I'm alive is tell my story, and remind other people how beautiful life is, because when you loose someone you love you're even more acutely aware of the beauty of life. So. 

Hopefully you have a dad to buy a card for and things are good. Hopefully you don't know what it's like. Once when we were dating my husband asked me what it was like to grow up without a dad and I told him it was kind of like always being scared, all the time a little bit, in a way. I watch my best friends kids, the way they look at their dads, with a confidence and a security--a knowledge that they will be safe and loved, that someone strong has their back. A bond with mom is so so special but so is this bond with dad, it's palpable and I can see it when I watch my friends son hug his daddy goodnight, when my goddaughter grabs her daddy's hand and pulls him around the zoo, him smiling with pride down at her little blond head; when I hear my husband talking to his dad on the phone...when your dad is in the world you're not afraid. You have moments of fear, sure but in general you know that the guy a part of you literally comes from, he will always have your back, and there is a power in that. 

I miss it. For 21 years I've missed it. 

So that's what it's like, not to have a dad for 21 years. There are days when it's not a big deal and days when it is. Just like any loss, some seasons of life it's felt more acutely than others. It was the worst around my wedding--once I went to David's Bridal to make a payment on my dress and saw another bride trying on her dress for her father. He was in tears and held her as he wept, calling her his 'beautiful baby girl'...I barely made it out of the store, I was so overcome with grief and anger and jealousy that it was like lead. I prayed hard that the other bride would soak that moment in, and that she would realize how unbelievably blessed and favored she was, to have her dad there, in the David's Bridal salon with her. To walk her down the aisle.  

So that's what it's like, not to have a dad for 21 years.

A couple years after my dad died my youth pastor was doing a lesson about how we are all different but all parts of the body, on 1st Corinthians 12, and he was using Chips Ahoy cookies as a reference. He used the cookie to point out how we are all different shapes, sizes, colors--and then he looked at me and said "and some of us have lost someone important, or are missing someone, like this cookie with the chocolate chip that's fallen off", and that was the first time I really realized that my fathers loss would always be with me, always be one of the defining facts of me. Like my name, my eye color, my Starbucks order, my health history, my dad died when I was 11. That's it. It's a fact, a part of me, something I can't change. 

So that's what it's like, to not have a dad for 21 years. 

By the grace of God I have come a long way--I can now listen to the song "Cinderella" by Steven Curtis Chapman on KLOVE without being angry; I can watch my friends dance with their fathers at their weddings without wanting to cry and punch someone simultaneously; I can sit while my coworker gripes about her live in boyfriend being overprotective of said co-workers young daughter and not liking the daughters bad-news boyfriend without shaking her, my coworker and yelling in her ear, "she needs him to do that! Let him be that presence for her!" Because that's what I want to do but I don't. 

So that's what it's like, to not have a dad for 21 years. 

And even though I've grown up "in the church", and have grown up praying to God and calling Him 'Father', it took a long time for my heart to call Him Father. Once in Life Group many years ago we were talking about the way God is to us, the ways the Holy Spirit takes care of us, and what ways were easiest for us to accept and what weren't. I have been single for most of my life, I only dated one man semi seriously before my husband and that wasn't for very long. I married at 30 and spent 99% of my teens and twenties as a very independent and very single girl. That being said it has always been easy for me to trust God as my provider, the Lover of my soul, my first love. When I met my husband I was coming off a period of years of being unhappily single and had truly become content, and happy to be on my own with God, single if that's what He wanted. So that side of God, I had down. But the Father side? Nope. That was a hard one. I had to pray for God to fill my orphan heart, to help me trust Him, to be all that He says He is to my daddy-wounded heart. I still have to pray that. It's getting easier though. Because He is good, and He has always been my Father, even when I couldn't see it. 

So that's what it's like to not have a dad for 21 years. 

On an episode of "Six Feet Under", one of my favorite shows (set in a funeral home) a character who was there to bury a loved one asked Nate, the protagonist and funeral director, "why do people have to die?" He simply replied, "To make life important." This is my banner as a girl who's dad died. Life is so important. When you go through crappy things, the more and the crappier the better, the more it makes you realize how every breath you breathe is a miracle. I am so thankful for every moment. I'm introverted by nature and don't have a big group of close friends, but if you are one of my people, I love you fiercely. I claim you and celebrate you with all that I am. You're not just my friend, you're my family. I will pray for you and worry about you and buy you birthday presents. My mom and I have an irreparable bond forged by grief and tears and love. I whisper "thank you God" silently over and over in the back of my head every time I look at my husband's handsome face. My job isn't my dream job but I'm proud to go to work every day and work hard, then punch out and come home to our little apartment that I've painstakingly decorated with joy and love. I savor music, books and coffee. I don't deny myself ice cream. I've stopped worrying people will look at me weird when I throw my head back and sing in church and at concerts. I pray about everything and tear up at almost anything. Because I'm alive. And my dad isn't. 

So that's what it's like. To not have a dad for 21 years. 

Now I'm in a season of life where I'm, we, are wanting to make my husband a father. We are (ironically) on nine months of trying unsuccessfully to make this happen. And I also mourn that this Father's Day, feeling a longing as I walk past the greeting card aisle at Target that I was buying 2 cards, for 2 different types of daddies. But I have hope that someday God will bless us with a miracle and soon as they're out Earthside I will search his or her left forearm and look for a birthmark--a darkened patch of amplified freckles that my daddy had and I have, too. And maybe he or she will, as well.

Happy Father's Day, to my daddy in heaven--I'll see you again. 

To all the dads who are doing so well, to the dads who aren't. You are loved and needed and wanted, dads. Friends, especially daughters--if you have a dad on earth and he is good to you, love him well back. Call him, appreciate him, tell him how much he means to you. Because next year you may not have someone to buy a Father's Day card for. 

Father to the fatherless, defender of widows— this is God, whose dwelling is holy. (Psalms 68:5 NLT)