Motherhood has been a blessing — from the hope of one day having them, to feeling them grow inside me, to finally holding them and a kind of love I had never known. I had never loved anyone so intensely, so deeply. When they were born, it was like a level up in life.
All MY EMOTIONS got enhanced. I felt love the way I never knew it could be felt. The love and the joy were overflowing — but so was the sense of responsibility. These beautiful, amazing, perfect beings were MY RESPONSIBILITY. I had to keep them alive, and "perfect." I became more aware of my own imperfections, and I started to demand more of myself.
While my body was still healing, after my son was born, some personal things happened that were too painful, too hard to digest. It wasn't postpartum depression — but it became the worst depression of my life up to then. (Postpartum depression is real, and it deserves to be seen and cared for. Mine simply began somewhere else.)
Over time, I "patched" my emotions and kept going. I had a son to hold, to love, to raise. But I never fully healed that feeling. For years now it has been a wave — it comes and it goes, sometimes bigger, sometimes gone for a while.
Back in Mexico, I had my support system: my community, my family, my friends — who, knowingly or not, helped me ride those waves.
There is a direct line between my depression and how much time I spend living inside my head. And these last years, since we moved to Texas, my head is where I have spent almost all of my time. Being a stay-at-home parent gives you the gift of being with your kids — but it can also isolate you deeply, if you don't have a community to hold you through it. You go to the park, you make small talk with other parents, but it isn't the kind of connection that grows in a workplace, or even a school — the kind with challenge, and depth, and real intellectual life. If you're lucky, you meet one or two people you click with, who cross your path now and then. For me, it wasn't enough.
That is part of why I began to feel the pull of God more and more — the gusanito, that little itch to go to church, even though I had never done it before in my life.
When a song like "Some Days" by Brent Morgan lands hard on you —
"…some days this place seems better off without me…"
(you have no idea how hard it is for me to write this down, and to allow you to read it)
— and you have two beautiful children you want to be here for, children you don't just want to tell how to live but to truly teach how to enjoy life, not just survive it — then it becomes clear: something has to change. But what?
I do believe God's timing is perfect. I arrived at the church I needed, and it surrounded me with the people and the community I had been missing so badly: Lisa, Kacie, MomCo, the Wednesday Bible study with Jackie and the women. Slowly, these spaces and these people have unknowingly led and modeled my healing path — one that brings me back to me, and to God.
It's not that I didn't have friends or community before — I did. But here in the States, I never opened up about things this tender; my real net, the people I could be cringely, embarrassingly myself with, stayed back in Mexico. Why I did open up in a room with nine women I barely knew, I don't know.
But the love, the understanding, the empathy, the holding they gave me was something wonderful — and it's a big part of where I find the strength to open up to you. Because nobody wants to air their trapitos sucios, their dirty laundry. But showing them is the only way any of us learns we're not alone in having them. So — here are mine. With the hope that, if you've been swimming in those same waves, you'll know you're not alone — that you can reach a remanso, a calm in the water — that there are ways to keep going that are more enjoyable than just surviving.
I'm learning that when something overwhelms me, I can leave it in God's hands. And I have Faith that if I trust Him, I'll make it to safe harbor. I'm still learning — but it brings me comfort to feel Him guiding me… if I'm open to listen.