The second I set down the television remote, it seems to vanish into thin air. I leave the milk out on the counter, rack up library fines. I forget to pay the water bill, thinking I’ve dropped it off at the municipal office while the check sits undelivered in our entryway for so long we receive a shut-off notice. I struggle to focus on books or articles, to remember words, to remember appointments.
Nearly four years into motherhood, the “brain fog” is undeniable. My mind does not work the way it once did. This phenomenon, referred to lightly as “mom brain,” is a real physiological process deeper than the effects of sleep deprivation, exhaustion or overstimulation. New motherhood literally changes a person’s brain. In reading scientific studies about this, I learned that first-time moms go through a period of profound neuroplasticity. Old neural pathways are destroyed, new synapses are made.
First-time moms go through a period of profound neuroplasticity. Old neural pathways are destroyed, new synapses are made.
When you are pregnant, your mind changes, whether you want it to or not. I experienced this myself, in ways I couldn’t have expected. My mind changed in ways I never wanted it to, that required trust, and surrender. Let it be to me according to your word.
I vividly remember so many moments growing up in church listening to other people’s dramatic conversion stories with dripping envy. The new believers would stand up front and tell their story, and I would feel privately embarrassed at how much my own belief felt like a foregone conclusion. I wasn’t alone in this — most of my friends were just like me, having grown up in Christian families, reading the Beginner’s Bible practically from birth. I never converted. I was grafted in, a little green branch clinging to the tree for dear life. I stayed close, never developed any rebellious desires, a homebody in my beliefs. I think I “asked Jesus into my heart” dozens of times in my adolescence, at every retreat and church summer camp, just to keep it extra tight. But I didn’t need to. It felt like Jesus had been there all along, without my needing to ask or choose. In fact, it didn’t feel like a choice at all.
Conversion visited me much later when I learned I was pregnant with my first son just as the pandemic was locking down our city. Suddenly unable to go to church, I was surprised to feel relief. The forever-moving machine of my faith slowed to a stop. Silence where there had always been business: The quiet enveloped me. And the feeling of relief stayed, joined by two more new feelings — guilt and doubt.
I was growing my baby and losing my faith.
It felt like I couldn’t get the machine running again. I would try to think about God, and I just couldn’t. Something in me was severed. I was growing my baby and losing my faith. Something big was shifting, and I couldn’t bend it to my will. I couldn’t stop my brain from changing. Weeks of denial, of going back to the Bible again and again trying to find what I’d always found there. Attempts to pray. Strange silence, strange shame.
After a few months of fighting the nothingness, I gave in. I remember being freshly postpartum trying to pray and feeling like I was falling into a huge black hole of emptiness. I decided to give up trying and allow the dark night to cover me. I decided to trust that, somehow, God was still there, even though I didn’t know how to begin believing.
Though all of this was certainly troubling, it was not consuming. I couldn’t ruminate on my faith problems, I had work to do! Like cleaning pureed sweet potatoes off the floor and bouncing my baby around a dark bedroom six times a night. There was a strange comfort in the way my brain felt different since my life was so different than it had been before.
In some ways, I could chalk it up to lifestyle changes. “It’s so hard to go to church because it’s right at the time when the baby needs to nap!” and “I wish I had time to pray and read my Bible in the morning like I used to but it’s go, go, go as soon as the baby wakes!” Yet, it was bigger than this, and I knew it, confessing to my husband and closest friends that I really didn’t know what I believed anymore.
I decided to give up trying and allow the dark night to cover me. I decided to trust that, somehow, God was still there.
The destabilization of losing the old pathways in my brain toward belief was huge. I’m still reeling from it. I didn’t know that a faith change could be so stark, like a switch being flipped. So unceremonial, so matter-of-fact.
Throughout my first pregnancy, just as I was losing my faith, I was writing my second collection of poetry about the Bible. In the book, I scattered breadcrumbs of doubt by writing them into poems, unspooling them like silk thread. The book chronicles my pregnancy through confessional poems while imagining and reimagining the birth and fertility stories of Eve, Sarah, Naomi, Mary, Elizabeth, Hagar and many others.
That book has just come out, and sharing it with readers feels particularly vulnerable given my state of doubt. But I am so glad I wrote it, that I had a reason to turn to the scriptures in a moment when it felt easier not to. The Bible’s women and mothers encouraged and challenged me with their desperation, their devotion, their faith, and their doubts. In new motherhood, I became newly acquainted with my own desperation. So many of these stories finally made sense. I found birth all over the Bible, a hidden narrative I could now understand with sense memory. While I was pregnant, my body was learning something new and ancient, praying creation on my body’s behalf. My body was experiencing God while my mind could not.
While I was pregnant, my body was learning something new and ancient, praying creation on my body’s behalf. My body was experiencing God while my mind could not.
Despite all of the rearranging of my brain’s pathways toward faith, I still believe in God. That’s the conversion. A strange inversion of the burning bush experience, the flame of my faith has been smothered, and I follow smoke signals, a scent right at the edge of the wind. At a certain point, belief becomes more daring, more wild and dramatized. I used to believe with effortless sincerity. Now, my belief feels like it is against all odds.
I suppose this might sound like a very undesirable conversion. No one wants to lose access to the faith they’ve always had. But the undeniability of it has been strangely soothing. I can’t muscle my way back into belief. I can’t force understanding. I can only trust. I can only stand in humility and curiosity and acknowledge that I have never truly been certain about anything — that it has been trust carrying me all along.
It makes me think of the last line of Ranier Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” — “You must change your life.” You can’t stay sheltered from doubt forever. Maybe true conversion comes for us all, sometime. We named our baby Thomas, my dear harbinger of doubt. I wouldn’t take this experience back. The new, more tenuous, more obscure belief I am finding my way back to is deeper than the fervor I had before.
It is slow work rebuilding my relationship with God, but it is steady, and made richer by my new experiences of mothering my children.
It is slow work rebuilding my relationship with God, but it is steady, and made richer by my new experiences of mothering my children. I think of all of the nights I have gone to my crying sons in the dark, lifting them up out of their beds while they are still half-asleep, nursing them, then walking labyrinth loops around the room until they are ready for me to lay them back down. I am sure that, in the morning, they don’t remember me coming to them; they don’t remember me holding them and carrying them and helping them fall back asleep. They just remember being frightened and then being calm. They remember sleeping.
I don’t remember my mother doing this for me, but she did. And, I can’t remember God in this season, can’t perceive God’s presence, but God has been there carrying me through the dark of the night. God has been like a mother listening for my cries in the dark. Denise Levertov’s poem, “Suspended,” pulls the thread of this same feeling. “for though I claw at empty air and feel/ nothing, no embrace,/ I have not plummeted.”
I have not plummeted either.
