Sandy Jorgenson

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

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.

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.

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

So, women, I’m talking to you — give yourself permission to love every inch of you. Honor your body, and meet it where it is. To those of you who’ve given birth: you’re forever changed. Relinquish the idea that you need to get your body back to looking the way it did before your baby was born.

This article is the second in a two-part series.

Everybody who’s a parent can attest to the fact that the lives they once knew are far behind them.

...[O]ur very responsibility is to equip them with everything they need before we shove them out of the nest and watch their wings spread far and wide... But what, then, is left for us?

When a bereaved mother is left alone, how deep into the recesses of her mind does she wander? Does she surface for air? Does she want to come out at all?