Surrender, and Never Surrender

On suffering and surprises

I don’t know how to start this, but I am burdened this past week with with a phrase. I hear it over and over at when I’m falling asleep, and periodically throughout the day.

Surrender, and never surrender.

Something the pastor said on Easter Sunday got to me. He said when you believe, you have to surrender. You have to nail all your sins and suffering and grievances to the cross, and then you have to take up your own cross and follow Him.

Though I already walk with the Lord, the words still spoke to me in a narrower sense. I have struggled against surrender for too long. It’s only been this past week that I’ve really been undone—that I’ve really accepted that this is happening to me. My soul has been strangling itself through vain resistance, a Chinese finger trap of metaphysical proportions.

This essay is not an easy read, and it wasn’t easy to write. It’s here in case it helps someone.

Surrender

When I found out I was pregnant with an unexpected fourth child, I took it very poorly. I was done having kids, and the only reason we hadn’t taken any permanent measures to prevent pregnancy was the slim chance we might change our minds later.

And by we, I mean me. I’m the one who struggles through months of nausea and fatigue in pregnancy. I’m the one who had a years-long knot in her forehead from the stress of caring for babies and preschoolers (I’m not optimally wired for it).

Yet here I am, nineteen weeks pregnant. I’ve felt the baby kick since fifteen weeks. Even then, it was hard to accept.

In my mind, there’s a lot I’m giving up. If you’ve made it out of the toddler stage with all your kids, I don’t need to explain it to you: Sleeping in on the weekends, no diapers, actually being on time for things, more date nights, real vacations, less stress all around. We just removed the booster seat from one of the kitchen chairs because the five year old doesn’t need it anymore.

You probably think I sound very selfish, and that’s because I am. I liked my life. I am terribly selfish, so much so that my overwhelming dread at seeing a positive pregnancy test surprised even me. If it weren’t for my faith in Christ, I would be the perfect candidate for an unspeakable organization to help me convince myself to do the unspeakable thing. I am selfish, but not so proud to think that in any universe I’d be above it.

I must surrender all of it. My plans, my body, my comfort. There is no way to make it through this with my mental and spiritual health intact, without first letting go of the life I had before, and accepting the trial I am currently undergoing. I acknowledge that this is happening. I am pregnant. I am sick. I am having another baby.

I surrender the future I had sketched out. I surrender the control I thought I had over my own life. I surrender to the possibility that my child may not even be healthy (I really don’t know—my third almost died as a newborn) and that together my husband, our family, and our church will figure out how to deal with that. I surrender to the uncomfortable, miserable physicality of building an entirely new human inside me, as the woman with the worst pregnancy nausea and fatigue of any mother she’s ever personally known.

I surrender. I nail it all to the cross.

None of this is me fearing I won’t love my child. I’ve believed from the beginning that I will love my child. That love is dormant but real, like a tulip bulb waiting to emerge and burst into color. But this knowledge cannot paper over the struggle. It would sound nicer if I told you that it did, that it’s all that matters. You’d think better of me. I’d think better of myself. But underneath that verbal salve would still be all the dirty uncomfortable issues I have to work through, all the stuff I have to nail to that cross, every day.

Never Surrender

One of those issues is my struggle with embodiment during pregnancy. Not only am I ill, but my body changes rapidly from the very beginning. Not every mother experiences it this way, but I do. I look in the mirror and hardly recognize myself, and the foreignness builds and builds until my skin crawls with resentment.

And I have often wanted, over the past four months, to curl up under my blankets and fall into a coma, to not have to see or feel my body, inside or out. I want to sleep through the nausea. I want to give in to my fatigue, because trying to outlive it feels impossible.

The more I struggle against my reality, against the body I have, the body I am, the more I try to hide from the discomfort in the stillness and the dark, the worse I feel. In this dark still place, all the anxieties of impending new motherhood come in to smother me. Will I be good enough? Will I keep baby safe? Will I be tense all the time, exasperated, and ashamed of it? These thoughts ensare me in the quiet. At best they’re useless, at worst they’re deceptions.

I trap myself, and then wonder why I feel trapped. For this reason, I have to tell myself that I must never surrender.

I am surrendered to the experience, the things I cannot control, but I must never surrender my agency. I cannot consign myself to being a sedentary lump of flesh. I’d be failing not just my own wellness, but my family’s, too. So I move. I get off the couch when I don’t want to, I do chores when I don’t feel like it. I get out under the sun when the early spring wind isn’t too biting. I hoe compost into the garden when my back hurts. I tend to my seedlings, attuning myself to the changing seasons, reminding myself there is a time for everything, even this, and this too, like the winter, will pass.

To surrender to my baser impulses would be akin to believing that summer isn’t coming, and that I am inching, sliding, into the longest winter, into bleakness and numbness. And for what? If I push away feeling, I push away tenderness and hope. It’s easier for me to say this now that the nausea is abating, but I wish I’d believed it from the start.

Because when I stay in my body, when I am present through the discomfort, I can experience joy. I can smile genuinely at my kids. I can help my husband feel the baby kick. I can accept a sister’s hug with warmth. I can laugh. I can see past my own suffering and anxieties, and in so doing make it an ever smaller part of my life.

It has been a long, dark winter, I won’t lie. But how much of the bleakness and cold has been my own refusal to surrender what’s beyond my control, and simultaneously my willingness to let my suffering render me powerless? I will no longer cower in the darkness. I will seize the light.

Surrender, and never surrender.

Find my sci-fi novels here. If you enjoy thoughtful, layered sci-fi/fantasy that’s still fast-paced, you’ll love them.