Nicole Berlucchi, Writer on a Mission

I woke up this morning thinking about this. It was nothing that had been on my mind previously, but I felt it deeply and wanted to record it and remember it and come back to it. I woke up thinking how pregnancy prepares us for everything that comes in motherhood. I thought about how all the changes are analogous of what comes later. I also thought of adoptive mothers and spiritual mothers and women whose body doesn’t operate by the book and realized it stretches beyond that.

Our bodies begin preparing us for motherhood at a young age, and it continues throughout our life. God’s design is always revealing who we are meant to be in His creation.

Motherhood is full of unknowns and when puberty hits that’s what it feels like. You have a bunch of adults telling you the basics and how they handled this or that. In reality, your experience is your experience.

Women can tell you how they battled cramps, but you are going to decide the best way to battle those cramps.  

Women will tell you about how PMS will have your emotions all over the place, how you will feel little control as your hormones bounce around in your body. Of course, you really won’t understand it until you are experiencing it.

Women will tell you how their body changed or didn’t and how yours will too. You never really understand the changes until your body is stretching and growing in different places, reaching new heights and widths. Taking you from children’s and juniors sizing into women’s.

This stage of life is also initiating something that remains constant in your life. Even if you don’t have regular cycles or any cycle at all, this central part of you, and by that, I mean your uterus, has awakened something in your body that changes everything.

It may be a steady path. It may be a path filled with testing and pain and questions. It may be a path of frustration and fear.

All of it points toward motherhood—spiritual and physical. Why? Because we endure it. Women endure these physical changes and challenges in its beauty and rawness to prepare us to mother others through the ups and downs of life.

Our love stretches and grows in ways we could never have really understood until we had people we were mothering. Motherhood could have never been conveyed to us as children but was hidden in our bodies’ design. Mothering comes with emotions and growth and pain. It’s all there, written in our bodies.

There are cramps and pain. Mothering is not easy but it is beautiful. It is purposeful.

For those of us that have experienced pregnancy, we know that our hearts have been prepared to feel stretched and heavy and swollen and contracted when mothering those placed around us.

For those of us that have endured infertility, we know our hearts have been prepared to tackle despair and waiting and impatience and broken heartedness when mothering the people in our lives.

In this season of perimenopause, I am experiencing softening that I don’t necessarily welcome, a tiredness that sometimes comes on unexpectedly, a racing heart, a hot flash. Cycles end, mood shifts begin. A whole new physical process full of unknowns.

This is how motherhood continues well beyond those years of managing toddlers and tweens.

My oldest is a junior about to head to college, and already time feels fleeting. I suppose this was what giving birth prepared me for. Every new stage where she seemed to be less dependent and becoming more of who God created her to be….where He plans for her to go. Those first steps, first sleepovers, first dance and on and on…

For spiritual mothers, you experience the same when you see those you’ve walked with through healing grow into a newness of life, step by step. Your walk becomes less hand holding and more a journey beside one another. Maybe in some cases, you’ve graduated them on to another spiritual director or path.

I have friends whose kids are getting married and having their first babies. They are grandmoms now. Some of them have said goodbye to their own mothers becoming a matriarch in ways they had not planned.

God prepares women for motherhood. As frustrating as the changes to my body are right now, I can see that maybe God is preparing me for weightier things. Afterall, walking with adult children is very different than walking with teens and tweens. Maybe God is preparing me for emotional flare-ups and heart-pounding realities I haven’t even faced yet.

I cannot know what each stage of motherhood will hold. I can only trust God has created me in such a way to live it, knowing God created me in such a way to nurture life in this world in a unique and profound way.

Here’s to womanhood and motherhood in all its softness and hardness, its barrenness and fullness, and its pain and joy. Full of never-ending beauty and love.

“She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband, too, praises her.” Proverbs 31:27-28

Thanks for reading! If you liked this article, be sure to check out: This Life is Like a Road Trip – Nicole Berlucchi, Writer on a Mission or The Mustard Seed of Marriage.