I exercise just enough to satisfy my doctor at my yearly visits. But when I do, I prefer a ballet barre, because I’ve always loved a good plié. When I focus on leaning into it with the right technique, something inside me shifts.

“No one can really spare a woman the process of labor,” the doula muses. Pale and dehydrated, she herself is hooked up to an IV in an overflowing labor ward, nearing the end of her own excruciating pregnancy.

The final storm is approaching;

Hellish stressors, diseases, and lies.

The dreams we held as human rights,

Torn from us, pulverized.

It’s been 23 years since these words first pierced me with promises I didn’t understand: “Ask the Lord for rain in the time of the latter rain.” (Zechariah 10:1a)

When did the sense of adventure wane? Had I become so adult and responsible that maintaining the daily to-do list was my highest aspiration? Sure, what seems natural to so many women:

Like the pressure of a slowly approaching tropical storm, this was a year of gradually increasing weight on my aging shoulders. Too much for one so clumsy in life, still learning to be an adult despite the spiderweb of lines on my face.

I have informed my Maker of this on countless occasions.