I love the way Gabe has his arm wrapped around his baby sister in this picture, like he's holding her with me. There is no greater feeling than to hold my babies in my arms and feel the love in me growing. Lately I've been seeing myself in Emma - in the little things she does. I don't always like it. I'm afraid she's not always picking up my good habits - not sure if I really have any of those these days. It's a difficult thing to see yourself and your inadequacies reproduced - in, of all people, someone you love so dearly and wish for no hurt or harm to ever happen upon. Yet, I can't stop it - just like Gabe won't be able to protect Millie from things as he is trying to here. They are going to hurt and be hurt and it scares me to pieces. I want to cry thinking about having to put two little girls through middle school. To think of Gabe having to be tough and face "guy" situations all on his own. What kind of mom would I be though, if I didn't let them have their own stuff. A selfish one. I am that anyway. I just pray that they will be so secure in the love of their Heavenly Father, so grounded in Him that the day-to-day hurts are nothing but just that.

In other corners of my brain and heart there lives this lingering feeling of something I just can't put my finger on. It's almost as if I've stuffed the person God created so far down in all my self-protection and self-seeking desires that I can't resurrect her. I'm continually haunted with the little girl I was, a little girl who was going to be an astronaut or something. I fought and fought against the norm and would argue my points and passions with whoever until I was blue in the face. I find that lately, I can sometimes barely even squeeze words out of my mouth without fumbling them up. I blame it on 4 pregnancies - lost brain cells, to be funny. But, honestly, sometimes, I think that little girl was so beat down and embarrassed over and over again for standing for what she believed in - for being made fun of for her silly inspirational phrases like "real winners rise after falling." I think those things happened so much that I don't want to let that creature - that woman that God created with His own two hands and loved - that I don't want to let her back out for fear I'll feel the same things all over again. I never really knew it was bothering me that much or that I had molded and shaped myself to society so vehemently, but I have and I hate it and I'm afraid that my daughters will think they have to do the same thing. No, I want them to live in a freedom I never knew and I guess I still don't. To live in a freedom that is Christ.