You were openly praised when your shoulders spread. When your bones grew, when you moved from young men to adulthood, your shoulders spread; your back was stronger. You gained everything you needed to carry me— your wife, your woman— but I did the very same thing, except my spread happened in my hips. It wasn't a grown woman spread; it was letting myself go. My hips spread. I didn't gain weight. My body is physically bigger. My bones are denser; my pelvis bones are wider. My stance is different. My shoulders may have changed because of the way my hips are now shaped, but it wasn't because of a grown woman spread. It was because of neglect. I neglected my body, and I gained weight. This was after I bore a child. My body changed and transformed to prepare for new life. My hips widen, my organs move, my skin stretched past its limit, leaving permanent marks. All the while, I'm constantly instructed to eat less— not for nourishment, but for appearance. Make sure you— after you have the baby— you snap right back. My new body was ignored. My old body was remembered. You're a grown man. Your shoulders are wide. Your back is strong. You carry me and our child. The wonderful miracle blessing of a child enters the world. My body, left in shambles like a filleted fish laying on the table as everyone rushes to the miracle. My breasts are bigger, my hips are wider. My bones are stronger, but it's only because of neglect. I neglected my body. I let myself go. I'm instructed to immediately start lathering myself in every oil and cream available to erase the scars of trauma. No one needs to know how hard it was; if you suffered, do it in silence. My baby is born and I start to feel things— undocumented, unmeasured, untracked— language was never formed around it. My organs are moving back into place. My uterus is shrinking. My lungs have room to breathe now. My bladder is permanently damaged. Five years it'll take me to get back to who I was. But my bones won't change.

We never focused on sight words; it was always about the love of the story. In a world that is obsessed with metrics, levels, and early achievement, we took a different path. We treated reading not as a skill to be mastered, but as a fun experience to get lost in. Storytelling and reading were never about “reading”—they were about the magic of the story. When we read, I never turned it into a challenge. I never put her on the spot or said, “You can do it, keep going,” while she struggled with a word. I didn’t want the mechanics to interrupt the anticipation. She knew she was just reading a book with her mom, not doing a reading lesson. Instead, I just picked up where she got stuck and let her continue when she felt confident. I was there to keep the story moving, not to test her ability. Sometimes she just sat and listened to me read; sometimes I just sat and listened to her read. It wasn’t about the act of reading or who was doing the work; it was about the story. I remember laughing so hard at Fox in Socks—it was our favorite. Those words were repeated and read so many times with fun and laughter that I never had to worry about whether she was memorizing them. She could recite the book without even looking at the words. I simply instructed her to follow along with her finger to identify the words as she read. As she grew and started reading chapter books—Captain Underpants, Daughter of the Pirate King—that rhythm stayed the same. We would lie in bed together, and I would just listen to her read. If she got tired but still wanted to know what happened next, I would continue reading for her. There was no pressure to finish the page or prove endurance. The story always came first. It isn’t an ironic coincidence that she has always been two grades ahead; it was a precise strategy. This didn’t just happen. It was designed. I intentionally focused on the joy of learning over the mechanics of the task. I remember when she started writing papers in 7th grade and struggled to keep a thought moving. It would take her a long time to get anything down. So, we turned it into a game. We wrote sentences together, one word at a time. I’d say “Bob,” she’d say “went,” and we would go back and forth.

A father does not give birth. He does not carry the physical weight for nine months, nor does he feel the internal shifting of organs or the years of physical recovery. But as the child is born, a different kind of weight falls—a boulder dropped from a mountain peak, landing squarely on his shoulders. The weight of provision. If he has been grinding, if he has been preparing, he will feel the impact and he will brace to hold it. But if he has no idea of the gravity that fatherhood demands, that weight will crush him. It is in that pressure where a man decides to stay and stand, or to break and leave because he doesn't know how to support the sheer mass of it all. While the mother thrashes through the waves—the tides of emotion, the physical trauma, the raw pain of healing—the father begins to calculate. He calculates the safety of the car and the fit of the car seat. He calculates the security of the home and the rising cost of the groceries. He calculates insurance policies he never thought much about before, the distant reality of college funds, the necessity of retirement, the weight of the mortgage, and the emergency funds for the things that haven't even broken yet. He begins to think—not just about providing—but about what will remain if he ever cannot. He becomes a silent architect of safety. For nine months, he watched the woman he loves become less independent, growing and changing until the day she pushed her body to the brink. Now, she is different. Her mind has found a new depth from the experience of childbirth; she is a protector, expectant and hurting, fiercely strong and dangerously fragile all at once. His arms must become the parallel bars for her recovery. He is stepping into a role that demands perfection and complete support, even as he navigates his own metamorphosis. He is the stable mountain, holding the world steady as they both grow and evolve into a deeper, purposeful version of who they now know they were always meant to be.

Giving birth is beautiful. It is wondrous. It is holy in the way only creation can be. You meet your baby for the first time and everything shifts. Your world becomes smaller and bigger all at once. You marvel at what your body has just done—feeling broken, relieved, and complete all at the same time. There is joy. There is gratitude. There is awe. And then, almost instantly, the world starts waiting for the snapback. A return. A reset. A sense that now you should be “back” to who you were before—as if you didn’t just push your body to the very brink, as if you didn't taste death to bring forth life. But there is so much more to the story than that. You can love your baby deeply and still feel unfamiliar in your own body. You can look put together on the outside while navigating the "surprises" no one warned you about. The way a simple laugh, a sudden sneeze, or a light jog becomes a gamble with your own bladder—a reminder that your foundation has shifted. The reality of peeing yourself like the very toddler you are trying to raise. You feel the strange, internal movement of your organs finding their way home, and the heavy pressure of a body that is still re-centering itself. You sit in a small room, nursing or pumping, and you realize that bonding is a revolutionary act of the physical self. It is the most profound form of nurturing there is: your body continuing to be the bridge for theirs. You aren't just giving your time; your child is literally sucking the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients out of your own body to build their own. It is a beautiful, fierce sacrifice—a literal pouring of your physical strength into their life. Both things are true. The beauty and the cost. Nobody tells you the number. They don't mention that it can take five years for a woman’s body to truly recover from the work of childbirth. Instead, they tell you to go home. They tell you to get started on the work of being a mother. They tell you to "get back to it." But the math of your body doesn't care about the world’s schedule. If you have a child every two years, you are racking up recovery on top of recovery. You are living in a constant state of healing for a decade or more, even as you are expected to be at 100%.

“I’ve already been through it.” For a woman who hasn’t had children, the idea of marriage is often a dream of the unknown. But for us—women who have a child and have survived relationships that damaged us—it isn’t a dream. It’s a memory. And a deep desire to make new ones. We have done the work. We have renewed our minds, our souls, and our bodies through Christ. We know we are pure. We know we are new. Yet the challenge of the wait is often navigating a world that sees us as “leftovers” or our children as “mistakes.” It is the frustration of being a transformed, healed woman in a society that wants to label your history rather than honor your growth. If you’re reading this as a single mother who has done the work and is still waiting—you’re not alone. --- The “Sarah” Laughter Think about Sarah. When she was told she would have a child at ninety, she laughed. Her laughter wasn’t about confusion or a lack of faith. It was the reaction of a woman who was old and wise. She understood the true gravity of what it meant to have a child at her age—the physical cost and the years of life it would require. She wasn’t naïve to the process. She was a woman of deep experience who understood exactly what that journey would demand. As a single mom, your desire for a husband is real—but you aren’t looking for a “fairytale” first-time experience. You are looking for a promise that honors the wisdom you now possess. You understand the gravity of building a family and the reality of the walk. God didn’t need Sarah to be a blank slate. He honored the woman she was in that very moment—wisdom and all. --- The Abigail Standard Then there is Abigail. She was a woman who had already been through the fire of a marriage to a “fool.” She didn’t come to David as a “fresh start” with no past. She came as a woman who was already a protector and a leader of her household. David didn’t see “baggage” or a “second-hand” woman. He saw a woman of good understanding. He recognized that her value wasn’t in being untouched by life, but in being refined by it.