Sandy Jorgenson

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When I check on our daughter before heading to bed myself, I have to do a quick scan around her full-size bed just to locate her. She is almost never remotely close to where she started out. But she is almost always upside down, head jammed up against the wall or her footboard, stuffed animals scattered like confetti all around her.

I know motherhood is hard. Especially new motherhood — those early days are a fog of tears, confusion, and helplessness. But I also know that yearning for something you can’t have, particularly with regard to children, is a feeling far worse. I’ve lived through the pain of childbirth, of a 3rd-degree tear, two related surgeries and a year of recovery, of postpartum depression, of miscarriage and of infertility and my god; I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat if it meant a chance to… Well, to do it all over again.

Childbirth isn’t kidding around. Here are eight special gifts that your blessed body bestows upon you to say thanks for turning it into a baby-making machine.

Welcome to #RavsWriters, an opportunity for you to get to know some of the outstanding human beings who fervently type to make Ravishly the awesome place it is. ​

Two years ago, I had a two-year-old daughter who’d never met her grandfather.

Life is hard work, and I think we all know this with varying degrees of certainty. It’s grueling, it’s relentless, it’s at times unforgiving, and it is always a damn hustle. So if you want a piece of coffee cake, get that cake, girl.

But what can be said for the day upon which I am no longer enough? I dread that day.

You’d have a hell of a time if you ever dared to crawl through the recesses of a first-time mother’s brain.