Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series!

I don’t consider myself a particularly anxious person. Yeah, I definitely have those, “My parents are calling after 9:00 pm– oh-my-gosh-who-died!?” moments, but I don’t typically lay awake at night worrying over things, and I’ve never had even a hint of a panic or anxiety attack.

That’s why I’m still surprised that, as I approach the final month of my fourth pregnancy- the time when baby is safe and would be healthy if delivered today- the anxiety I feel is at an overwhelming high.

I didn’t experience this anxiety with my first two pregnancies. They were both textbook smooth and, aside from an unplanned C-section with the first, both babies and I were healthy and happy. We grew our family at just the pace we had planned.

[Read more…]

Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged.  Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series! 

I am a pediatric cardiovascular intensive care nurse, which means I take care of babies & kids who have life threatening heart conditions. Being a pediatric nurse has been one of the best, most humbling, and challenging experiences of my life. There have been beautiful miracles and horrible losses. 

Sometimes the patients have a very ‘easy’ to fix problem. But more often than you would expect, they have extremely complicated hearts and sometimes even need an entirely new heart via transplant.

[Read more…]

Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! I “met” this week’s guest poster Susannah when I started following her blog about a year ago.  I love her heart to encourage women in their faith, their marriages, and their parenting and have already learned so much from what she’s shared about her journey with her sweet boy.  Make sure to check out her blog, Simple Moments Stick! 

I always knew I wanted to be a mom.  As a little girl I would carry my dolls with me everywhere and, as I grew up, my “dolls” became human babies.  Anytime a parent let me I would commandeer a baby and keep him or her as my own until the parent absolutely needed their child back.  I could not wait to have a child of my own.  I couldn’t wait until I was the parent who would be able to take my child back after he or she was loved on by someone else.

[Read more…]

[Read more…]

My heart for this blog is that it be a place of sobremesa, a place where we gather around the table and share our hearts and our stories.  And if just one person does all the talking while we sit around the table, it doesn’t make for much of a conversation.

I started the Womanly Wednesday series to give other women a chance to share their stories in this online space, to open up the conversation to include other voices besides mine.  I emailed friends from my childhood, from my college years, and from my life here in Kansas City and asked them to share a part of their story.

The very first Womanly Wednesday post was by my friend Haley and she described her struggles to reconcile being a “grownup” with following her dreams and chasing adventure as a humanitarian photographer.

[Read more…]

Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! I met today’s poster, Kylie, when I was a paraprofessional in her classroom during my first year in Kansas City.  Our in-class chats became weekly coffee dates, and we both got engaged, married, and pregnant pretty close to each other.  She is one of my closest friends in Kansas City and I am so grateful to share life with her! She’s also started blogging recently, so make sure to check out her blog and follow along! 

At the beginning of 2014 Brad started talking about there being a high chance that he would have to leave town to work for a while. That is just part of his job and I knew this getting into a relationship with him. However, knowing it then and it becoming a reality now was two completely different things!

[Read more…]

Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! This week’s poster, Leigh, is a friend whom I met through my church small group.  Leigh has a deep heart to thoughtfully and intentionally love people and I have learned so much from my friendship with her these past two years.  She’s a fellow writer whose passion and love of language I deeply respect, so make sure to check out her blog too! 

I experienced my first rejection around age 5 or 6.

What I remember most from this rejection story is that I noticed it easily. Maybe more easily than a child should, but then again, children are sponges and aware of way more than that for which we give them credit. My Grandmother (my Mom’s Mom), from as early as I can remember, favored my Dad and my Sister over my Mom or me. My Sister was more even in personality (not hyper-active like I was), very smart where she didn’t have to try at school subjects, and quieter – more behaved. My Mom and I are more emotion-on-our sleeves people. I was all over the place growing up. Loud, hyper-active, talked so fast and rarely sat still. I spoke before I really thought about it and laughed at high decibels.

[Read more…]

Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! It is always an honor to have women share their hearts in this series, and this week’s post really touched me with its honesty and rawness.  Autumn, a blogging friend from Stay Gold Autumn, is opening up about her experiences growing up with a sister with many mental health issues.  I can relate to some of this from my own extended family and some of it from friends and their families, and I hope that anyone who’s in Autumn’s (or her sister’s) shoes is encouraged by her words here today. 

A Doctor approached my dad in the hospital.  “Is this your child?”  My dad replied.  “Did you adopt your child?”  My dad replied.  The doctor looked back and forth from my sister to my father and said: “I wouldn’t have bet a penny on this child’s life a year ago.”

My parents adopted my sister at the age of 3, but she had almost died from malnutrition multiple times before being placed into foster care.  A year or two after the adoption, my parents were in an abuse seminar when my Mom realized that they were passing my sibling’s pictures around as examples; in that meeting, my parents found out that my sister was placed into foster care after being in the worse child abuse situation the state said it had seen.

I’ve always been very cautious about talking about my sister’s experiences, and my experiences as her younger sister, because I did not want to add to the stigma of foster care adoptions or perpetuate stereotypes of children who are adopted having “problems.”  Instead, I want you to understand that my sister’s illness is indicative of being severely neglected and abused, having severe psychiatric illnesses, and that I forgive her.

[Read more…]

Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! I met Danielle through a friend when I moved to Kansas City and have been so impressed by her joy, honesty, and sense of humor in the midst of what has been a really hard few years.  I’m so grateful to have her here on the blog today sharing about what it’s looked like for her to find a new plan after her divorce! Thanks for sharing your heart, Danielle!

It is what it is. In the last 6 years this has become my motto for life. Wait, let me back up. Here’s my story…short and sweet. High school best friends fall in love, date for four years while he is in the Marine Corps, deal with two tours in Iraq, get married, deal with PTSD, and three years after that have a son. That’s where the fairytale ends.

[Read more…]