(Photo by Francesca Woodman, Mirror Photography)

Right after the surgery I felt like a new woman.

So I cut my waist-length dreads to shoulder length and brushed them out. I just needed to feel new all over. It is actually quite common for one to feel the urge to cut one’s hair after a life-changing loss or death of a loved one. It is a sign of mourning, of grief, of newness, of starting over.. I did not realize this is what I was doing then. I was simply driven by an urge. I felt new and free and I had withstood a great trauma and made it out to the other side.

But then a couple months later, the high wore off and I had to face how much it had left me broken, traumatized, and left my identity disoriented.

I went to my parents’ farm for Christmas. My sister-in-law had just had her fourth baby, only weeks after I had had this grotesque life-threatening thing cut out of my body.

My hair was chopped short, the way I always have hated it (I don’t know what I was thinking!), and I had a six-inch scar across my stomach. I was less of a woman now, pieces of my feminine anatomy missing. Gone forever. The rest, blocked and dysfunctional.

Now it set in. The other side of reality. I can be optimistic to a fault. I can fail to see danger. Fail to predict any sort of doom completely. I rarely compare myself to others.

But suddenly, sitting before this other woman, the contrast was startlingly obvious. She had just given birth. She was holding her newborn. Her body was fully intact, functioning now more than ever. Her hair was even long like mine used to be. She was the perfect picture of wholeness and feminine power. And this contrast, out of nowhere, punched me in the stomach.

I have never felt more humbled in all my life. There was suddenly a knife of grief through my heart, and spilling out came all the years of wondering, of waiting, of believing, of barrenness, of brokenness, of humiliation.

I was a broken woman. Would I ever stop being broken? It had just been one thing after another since I was 18.

…and at once I knew I was not magnificent…

A dark hollow grief began to haunt me after this.

For the first time I felt like I was not favored anymore. I felt like a speck of my former self. My confidence, always so sure and calm and at ease with who I was, teetered on the edge of self-hatred. The favor of God I had always felt like a large hand on my shoulder seemed to be removed. I felt like a wretch.

A dark cloud passed over me.

The honeymoon period of After was over. Now I had to face exactly how broken and incomplete I suddenly was. I could see, just ahead, a very dark time of grappling with my brokenness, and what I had just gone through.

I felt ripped to pieces. Needing, once again, to be rebuilt from rubble.

Who am I now? Why did this happen to me? What does this mean for my future? What does this mean for my loved ones? How has this altered my perception of myself… the world around me… God?

The death or loss of a loved one. An accident or onset of an illness that leaves us changed or disfigured or altered or disabled in some way. The loss of a home or job or some other place of security or rest. A sudden change in appearance, such as weight gain, weight loss, clothing style, hair style, the state of our skin. A trauma. An attack. An accident. The abysmal pain of infertility.

Some of these things leave the residue of grief and trauma to deal with alongside the struggle of finding your footing in your identity once again. Some of them are just reorienting yourself after a change that makes you feel or appear different. But no matter how big or small, no matter how terrible or benign, these changes shake up our identity. We must reevaluate and reestablish who we are afterward.

The devil steals, kills, and destroys. Our world is fallen and things just fall apart and people with free will are evil and make terrible choices. Accidents happen. And the circle of life cannot be altered here. It must continue, the weak and the strong often having different outcomes. God is not doing these things to us. He says that in him we will find rest despite them.

For the next several months I was a darker fragment of my former self. I felt strangely insecure. It was like I had trouble finding my footing after a huge stumble. I did not recognize the ground I came back up on. I was suddenly disoriented and less sure. I had to wrestle with who I was now that this had happened.

Several things changed for me all at once, right at the onset of a season change as well, as winter was setting in. It was a very insecure place. I was healing physically from my entire abdomen being cut open from navel to pubic bone. I now would be forever scarred and missing parts of my body. I knew why I was barren and it was permanent. I had cut my hair. I was wrestling with how and why this had happened. I was dealing with trauma left over from a frightening surgical procedure. As planned, my husband moved our bedroom up to our attic and a roommate moved in while I was in the hospital. I just came home to a whole new life.

It was just a LOT.

God wants our identities to be so securely rooted in him that losing things or being frightened or being harmed does not harm our foundational bond with him, but actually deepens it. But this can be challenged. Why God? Why did you let this happen! It’s always a valid question.

After this tragedy that happened to my body and soul, I had to wrestle for many months with my identity. Who was I now? I was changed forever. I would never be the same. I had to decide if that changed person would be a stronger more secure person, bonded more deeply to my creator in the end. Or if that changed person would be fearful, bitter, and further away from relationship with her creator.

Grief discolors our perception. We are swimming through dark water and we cannot breathe and we are asking why we are here if God loves us, but we cannot see him or feel him the same way when we are in this water. This is how grief works.

I cried regularly for many months, having to work through a sense of being let down by him and having to fight this feeling with the truths that I knew.

I wrote to him in my journal…

I used to be your favored one. I used to look at you every day, all day long, I adored you. I used to sing to you. I’m sorry I don’t sing anymore…

I had to find my security in him again, now that another great startling loss had come my way. I had made it through the first Great Loss and I came out with a strong, deep bond with God because of it. I had chosen this. And now I was being challenged again, to go deeper.

We can believe our faith is so strong nothing could shake it, but it is amazing how much damage grief and fear and loss can do. We must be so secure in our identity in relationship with him, that our sense of self, rooted in him, is so strong, so bonded, that it cannot be torn no matter what comes along and wipes out anything or everything around us in this temporary fickle world.

He needs to be the anchor. And if he isn’t, if your clothes, or your career, or your money, or a spouse, or your sexuality, are your identity anchor, then your anchor can be swept away at any given moment and you would be left without an identity. But if it is in him, he is not changing. He is not going anywhere. You are truly secure.

He is redirecting our flimsy human trust out of perishable things and into him. This is a lifelong redirection again and again and again. Because we will always fall back on what we can experience with our senses, see and feel and hear and touch, these things will always feel more concrete to us and we have a tendency to lean on them because we want to believe in and root to something concrete.

The answer is in our focus.

The question: Who am I now?

Option 1: A woman without the ability to bear children, who is missing a third of her reproductive system, who has a six inch scar across her stomach, who has been let down by God because she believed– OH she believed!– she would one day have another baby… And she thought nothing like this could ever happen to her because she worked so hard to live a disease-prevention lifestyle…

Or

Option 2: A woman who is chosen, set apart, honored, protected and loved by an all-powerful creator. A woman who is nestled deeply in the security of a father, freely loved even to the point of death by a savior that pursues her with burning passion. A woman who IS a mother to an amazing son. A woman who is bursting with gifts, talents, joy, peace, love, goodness, and purity. A woman that was created with purpose and is loved with abandon. 

This is the identity I chose. This is the identity I decided to focus on. I do not care more about any other thing to let it determine my core identity. I have chosen to root my identity firmly in my creator and my savior. And to focus with ravenous diligence on these things above all other things.

This. Healed. Me.

God’s truth heals. We just have to choose to hear it, believe it, and live in it.

If I could do this when I lost my entire life including my husband and son, then I certainly could do this now.

I also had to detox the grief and the trauma by expressing it and experiencing it and moving it from the inside of me to the outside over and over again, until nothing was left.

After several months of healing and of seeking God and of finding myself in him yet again, I came out stronger and more secure than before.

Once this dark time was over, it was time to face the fact that I was probably not ever going to get pregnant again. I had physical proof now. An eye witness. And I had a really soothing sense of closure. I made peace with it. I was likely never going to bear a biological child to my husband. I was likely only going to know the joy of pregnancy and birth once, as a nineteen year old kid who had no idea how young she was. And I was okay with that.

It had also been over eleven years since Jadon had been taken from me, ten years since he had been restored to me. I knew we could be approved in a home study now that this much time had passed. I sensed it all intuitively. God was saying our next child was close, very close. I felt this child was within only a couple years away from us.

It was finally our time.

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