We are in California now, living just an hour from the beach in beautiful spring weather while much of our family and friends are still sporting heavy coats and scraping ice from their windshields. We are taking walks in the sunshine, swimming on the weekends, and taking drives along the coast. I think about this and my nose gets all tingly and my eyes water because I longed for this so much. I wanted it so intensely at times, and here we are living in it!
At this very time last year when our days were hazy and our home was surrounded in mounds of snow for months on end with hardly a temperature above twenty, I laid on my couch with my growing belly under mounds of my own darkness. Pregnancy has a way of intensifying emotion, and I was struggling to get out from under it.
But I changed in those months. I grew, closer to Him. I reached up to the Savior and pleaded for His help, more than I ever had before. And He lifted me. In quiet moments I felt strengthened, inspired, and encouraged and I can’t even pinpoint exactly how, but I remember those feelings. They brought me closer to heaven and closer to Him.
So as much as I am heart swellingly grateful for this time in the sun, I am deeply grateful for the darker days that brought me here and brought me to Him too.
At the end of my pregnancy I updated my blog with some of these experiences from my journal and the crumbly feelings I was having. They were so raw at the time I first wrote them that I didn’t really care to share them. But ultimately I felt the desire to because I think there is value in sharing the struggles, and if it can help someone, the sweet strength I felt along the way too. You can find these under the category, “pregnancy,” which is on the right side on a computer or scroll all the way to the bottom on a phone.