How a maternal body can reveal the maternal heart of God
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| Body/heart. Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash |
I think I might be one of the few, fortunate women in the U.S. who has spent (most of) her life (mostly) at peace with her body. I long felt right-sized for my height and lifestyle, at home in my clothes and in the space I occupy. Even when pregnant, I felt like a bigger, bolder, more fecund version of myself—powerful, confident, abundant.
The wheels, however, started to wobble after my second child was born, when I was 39. Compared to my first postpartum experience, I nursed less, was slower to lose weight, felt more tired with a toddler on hand ... oh, and we were still in the midst of pandemic, which necessitated a lot of emotional-support carbs.
So, children + pandemic + aging + hormones + gravity = my body at the heaviest it's ever been, not only by the scale's empirical measurement but also by my personal experience. For the first time in my life I feel like too much for my frame. I sense drag when I walk. My face looks puffier in pictures. My Italian flags are flapping.
The heaviness matches my overall feeling that I am truly carrying more. The weight of parenting, the weight of work and community responsibility, the weight and stress of the world (be gone, cortisol!)—it's accumulating more quickly as I inch toward my mid-40s. The more weighted I feel, the more I struggle to love the mobility, strength, and health I enjoy in my life. And the more I struggle to love these gifts, the more I struggle to thank God and to see God in my softening body.
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| The fabulous Elizabeth Berget |
In this moment of personal tension with my body, which has changed irreversibly as a result of motherhood—softer pooch, wider rib cage, saggier boobs—I approached reading Love Like a Mother with excitement for Elizabeth but a touch of apprehension for myself. Where would I see my experiences in this exploration, if I saw them at all?
I needn't have worried, because what I encountered were visceral, embodied, incarnate images of the full-body experience that is parenting. Elizabeth's book helped give me the language to name that my body has been jumping up and down on the side of the road for some time, shouting, waving, arm flaps flapping, begging me to heed what it's communicating to me from and about God. And with that communication more clearly in mind, I am better able to reframe my relationship with my God-given, image-bearing form—and reconnect with God as a result.
The Q&A below with Elizabeth builds on some of my favorite passages from Love Like a Mother and invites her perspective on the themes that spoke most to me. I hope you enjoy our conversation and seek out Love Like a Mother for anyone you know with a maternal heart.
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| My copy of "Love Like a Mother," with evidence of parenting in the background. |
“God loves us with a womb-like love that is overflowing with emotion and intervening action. It is caring protection, inextricable oneness, and constant provision.”
Julia Rocchi: The concept of a “womb-like love” immediately made me feel warm, safe, and comforted, and your explanation of its root word in Hebrew (rahkum) fascinated me. Tell me more about what led you to rahkum. What was your experience in discovering and/or exploring this word and concept?
Elizabeth Berget: The idea for this book found me around eight years ago, and for the first few years, I read my Bible and studied related books and resources, trying to answer the question, "Does God love us like a mother?"
Then in 2020 as the world shut down, we found ourselves watching a lot of Bible Project videos with our kids for the version of home church we were doing during the first year of the pandemic and shutdown. It was one of their videos that first introduced me to the fact that the word compassionate that God uses in the very first self- description of God’s character within Scripture (in Exodus 34:6) has its roots in a Hebrew word (rakhum) that is closely tied to the Hebrew word for womb, rekhem.
This indicates that the compassion of God is womb-born, an intimacy that drives God to come to us when we call, with intervening action, just like a mother would to a baby she has carried and birthed. I was floored and immediately scribbled it down in my growing outline of ideas around this topic!
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"Consider how God might long for you to be taken care of in this ongoing work of emptying yourself: What do your body, your mind, your spirit need to avoid burnout in the long game of mothering?"
Rocchi: The use of passive voice in the first part of the sentence made me pause and ponder: Is God not taking care of me directly as well? And if so, how? I’m curious to know from you—how do you personally envision or experience God as an active caretaker in your own life?
Berget: I think for some of us, we’ve grown up in spaces in which there is an underlying belief that the more exhausted and overworked a mother is, the closer she is to God. And that’s just not true. In the book, I talk about how God doesn’t want us running on fumes. God is not asking us mothers to be martyrs. And in urging readers to consider how God might long for them to be taken care of, I’m gently nudging them to ask for help from the hands and feet of God—their surrounding families, friends, communities—to remember that in the marathon of mothering, as they pour themselves out for their kids, they need to be cared for and filled up too.
That said, I do believe God is actively caring for us. One of my favorite verses is Psalm 38:9, “O Lord, all my longing is known to you; my sighing is not hidden from you.” Just as we know what our kids look like when they’re hungry, tired, or scared, and know exactly what they need, God is already familiar with our heavy hearts and full hands. God knows what we need and asks us to turn to him, assured of his answer.
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"...our bodies are places where we can meet God. [...] we can connect with our Maker simply by staying present in our bodies, which reflect the image of the Divine."
Rocchi: This idea really landed with me at a moment in my life when my relationship with my body is less confident and secure than it has been in the past. Can you describe for me your relationship with your own maternal body? How has it changed (if at all) in the course of writing this book?
Berget: I love this question. When I started working on the ideas of this book, I was on the tail end of having had three kids in four years, plus nursing, sleepless nights, and endless toddler viruses. My body was decidedly not my own in that season. I admit that at times, I grieved the loss of clothes that didn’t fit anymore and a pelvic floor that seemed markedly lazier than before, but I also felt powerful for the ways I had carried and birthed and sustained my kids with my body.
Now, I’m 43 and seem to be entering the early stages of perimenopause, which has been its own wild ride of hormone shifts and symptoms. So the stages and seasons my body has gone through while working on this book feel like a massive pendulum swing.
I think the biggest change has been a move toward self-compassion. I grew up in the '80s and '90s culture of diets and rail-thin models, and as someone who generally moves through life with high standards, I’ve always been very hard on my body, frustrated when it wouldn’t cooperate. But in seeing the ways my body has sustained me through four decades and given me my kids, I think I’ve started to cultivate a lot more gratitude for all she’s been through. What began eight years ago—wondering if God could meet me in my body, and communicate to me through my body—has become a blessed assurance that God can and does.
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"Know that for God, you are the other side of pain and sacrifice; to your Maker, you are the joy."
"I wonder if God is like a mother who has just delivered a baby. A postpartum God who lies on the cross, arms outstretched, reaching for us with the last of his breathless strength. I wonder if, when we arrive in heaven, God will stretch toward us and then pull us close, holding us tightly and covering us with kisses and hot tears, exclaiming, 'Oh you’re here! Beautiful One, you’re here! I’ve been waiting for you!' speaking these truths over us again and again until we finally believe them."
"Picture how you delight God. Picture God stretching forward to bring you closer. Picture God crying over the joy of knowing you. Picture God receiving you into new life–like a mother, crying, 'It is good, it is good, it is good.'"
Rocchi: Not only did these passages place me right back in the transformative emotions of my own labor/birth experiences, but they powerfully recast how God might regard me. When in your own life—as a woman, a mother, a writer/creator—have you needed these reminders or reframes?
Berget: Sometimes I wonder if on my tombstone, I should have them write, "She finally learned that God looks at her with kind eyes." Realizing that God loves me with the same all-consuming love and joy with which I love my own kids has been a transformative and sustaining truth this past decade.
About five years ago, I got incredibly sick with an intestinal infection that basically left me unable to eat for over a month, and in bed for most of that time. I was so weak and often felt too tired to even watch a show. I just stayed in my room, door closed to try to limit the highly contagious nature of my germs. The kids were still little, and my mom came up for a couple weeks to help keep the ship afloat while my husband Eric worked and solo parented. She or Eric would come in, help me sit up and drink a little broth and eventually applesauce. They managed my meds. My mom bleached the shower every time I used it to try to keep anyone else from getting sick.
There I was, around six years into motherhood, having spent the prior years meeting a whirlwind of needs, and I found myself in the position of being intensely cared for. As someone who had built an entire personality around productivity and earning gold stars, in that season, I just learned to be seen, known, cared for, held. I relearned what unconditional love was in a deeply embodied way. I think if anything, I hope this truth, which I tried to weave throughout the book, gets infused into readers’ bones, that they walk away knowing that God truly delights in them, just as they are, just as they delight in their own kids.
Prayer #421: El Shaddai
"When the Hebrew Bible was first translated into Greek, the interpreters based El Shaddai [a frequently used Old Testament reference for God] on the Hebrew word shadad, meaning to overpower or destroy. [...] But biblical scholars ... contend that to interpret El Shaddai only through the lends of a power dynamic is like using one finger to play a note on a piano when you could use two hands to play a full, resonant chord, because in Hebrew the word shadaim is the word for breasts, and dai means enough or fulfilled sufficiency."—Berget, Love Like a Mother
None of us humans know what true omnipotence feels like. But all of us at some point have experienced a hunger pang, longed for water, felt empty or unsated.
Which is why when language comes up short, our bellies step in, speaking to our multitudinous bodies rather than our constrained brains.
And our beautiful bodies in turn testify:
Our heft is enough.
Our breath is enough.
Our life is enough.
For to God, we are fullness incarnate. We suffice. We are enough.
Amen.
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Looking to grow your own heart three sizes? Check out the chapter titled "What About Love?" in my book, Amen? Questions for a God I Hope Exists, for more prayerful and poetic inspiration.