Good McLean Fun

  Thank you for checking in on me! Pregnant, at 39 years old, 40 in December...with my 6th baby, and we're 36 weeks today. I wrote a blog post in 2014 about how bittersweet it was to be in my last pregnancy ever. But now, surprise!! Here we are again!  This is my 5th pregnancy. All pregnancies had led to healthy living babies. I have never had a miscarriage. I have never known that pain, I have never lost a child, I have never known that grief. But I know so many of you who have had both, or either, and so I write with all the sensitivity and sympathy in the world. Please know I don't intend to highlight your pain when I write about pregnancies and babies.  If it hits too close to home please abandon ship, you don't need anything extra to sort through and I'm just praying God will answer your prayers because He is good and He is able.  So this particular blog won't be full of clever metaphors or jokes, I just wanted a place to document what I'm experiencing and...

(Originally written in 2018, finally published, in 2022.) I don’t have the words to sum up the last 9 months of my life. Actually that’s not true. I have too many words. And some of them just cannot be shared on this blog. 2018 ended with heartache, and 2019 started with heartache. And it hasn’t actually gone away. That’s the thing about real, deep heartache. Time doesn’t ever fully heal the pain, does it? It can be dulled, it can be momentarily forgotten, it can be lost amongst the more pervasive moments we must deal with day to day. But the heartache doesn’t leave completely. And I’m struggling because I know that so much healing lies on the other side of sharing these heartaches—on the other side of eyes red and raw, on the other side of sobs and gasping for breath type crying, there is opportunity for healing, for empathy, for a willing soul to share in the grief. But I’m struggling because these heartaches run too deep. They cross over into many lives. They have already ...