Bracing for Impact

Guest Writer: Lauren Franklin

As an adult, the patterns of life that forms us were less likely those positive aspects of our childhood, and more so those that created unknown wounds. How can we know? Simple. Whatever you react to is a wound that needs to be healed.

Motherhood starting out for me was chaotic to say the least… We have Irish twins, just shy of 10 months apart, and my husband worked out of state during the week until this past year. I did not have a village, though my mom helped when she could. I am also an only child, my husband and I both are, and have had zero experience in the kid department.

Back-to-back pregnancies was never on my bingo card of life aspirations, but God is God, and I am not. Just 8 weeks postpartum that pregnancy test lit up like a Christmas tree, and fear overwhelmed me. Fresh out of building a whole human person and having him ripped from me in an emergency C section where he was being delivered just before anesthesia kicked in- you read that correctly. All my birth plans and dreams got tossed out the window into a flaming dumpster fire. Here I was, questioning God, being crushed and molded into a person I didn’t know.

Both of our boys were C sections, and both pregnancies had complications, hypertensive stroke watch, and preeclampsia. My body, mind, and soul were all altered to an unknown state, tossed into an abyss where the only thing tying me to this world was my Catholic faith.

The perception of joy and excitement in motherhood was robbed from me. Post partum depression after consecutive pregnancies was like falling down a pit of despair, grasping at air, interiorly holding on to a prayer. If I chose to let go, I knew Hell would await me with open arms, and there was no way I could let the minions win. The Seven Love Languages of the Church, the Sacraments, sustained me.

When the boys were toddlers all the woundedness from my life came flooding through in the form of reactive and dissociative behaviors (fight or flight). You can imagine the scene here, it was not pretty. I was alone, deeply depressed, wasting away their formative years and watching the cute cuddles fly by like vapor all because of an excruciating cluster of wounds I did not know were there. I just knew I was miserably exhausted to my core and didn’t want to exist.

My adolescence in general could be best described as a persistent state of fight or flight. Bless my momma, she was a saint through it all as I gave her daily whiplash in return. This concoction of emotional destruction led to addictions to escape in effort to suppress these BIG emotions I was not allowed to have; yelling to be heard, inability to trust, a need to control- OCD which manifested in adulthood, forcefully blunt to others because it was the truth, dissociation, and always ALWAYS bracing for impact. The list goes on, but I digress…

I won’t go into all the details of reckless and destructive behaviors that arose from adolescence to adulthood, but there is always a reason for rebellion, and it’s cloaked in ‘freedom’ from something or an absolute need for a sense of ‘control’. The enemy really does a number on kids even in the most subtle ways.

Then Grace stepped in…

A few years ago, I was delivered from alcoholism which was a ‘medication’ that numbed the pain and lessened the triggers. But what were the triggers? This took some deep diving in examining, “Why do I do this?”. As our kids were around the ages 5 and 6, I was shown glimpses of myself through them… I could had taken a metaphorical sledgehammer to that mirror. The many nights I have cried to Jesus after having this illumination and begging for healing with a firm purpose of amendment to do better, just to wake up the next day and repeat the same mistakes and beat myself up more.

The number of prayers to undo what I had done, the critical words said, the accusations, assumptions, unrealistic expectations, and realizing how much time or missed affections I squandered because I was broken and just trying to survive by escaping or lashing out… But as Jesus once told me, “I am patient with you, you are not patient with yourself.”. You don’t know what you don’t know until you do.

Through deliverance practices with lay faithful, my priest, and now on my own accord through Our Lord Jesus Christ, renouncing spirits that had attached and rejecting the lies told to myself or from others is a process. Jesus shines the light on one area at a time, peeling back layers gently.

The weight of life that crushes us is our cross, but we often do not know or recognize this spiritual reality. It is permitted to crush you to get your attention, and your cross often resembles your spouse, your children, ect. Jesus says that His yoke is easy and burden is light. This is only experienced when we notice His cross compared to ours, joining our sufferings with His. We then see how small our cross is in comparison to the one who took on ALL the sins of the world. Yet here we are making mountains out of mole hills.

C.S. Lewis famously stated, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world".

St. Gemma Galgani reminds us, “If you really want to love Jesus, first learn to suffer, because suffering teaches you to love.” 

The Holy Spirit in recent months revealed to me that everyone in our lives is on loan to us. No one, not even our children ‘belong’ to us, but to God alone. Everyone is placed in our lives at a particular time, with a particular purpose. Their flaws, temperaments, and attributes, all for one eternal reason: Sanctification. Your Sanctification… It is not by chance that your spouse is who they are, or your children. It is entirely for a reason. How you respond is what makes all the difference. Dying to self is hard, your dying… It’s not comfortable, but it’s necessary.

When I look back, there are two things I was not doing then that I do now; Pray the Rosary & Angelus daily! It is hard to get started and stick to it, but my reason was BIG. This prayer prescription gave me the weapons to fight back against the darkness in and around me. Even with all the gaping wounds, the more healing that was done, the more I can Trust Him, love my husband and children better, give mercy. You can’t give what you don’t have, and as a Catholic, it is through participating in the sacraments with intention that I am able to receive more grace, which in turn allows me to give more grace.

The practice of imitating Mary has been fundamentally transformative as a wife and mother, remembering, “What would Mary do?” before reacting. Whatever we do not choose to heal in this life, must be purified in the next with far greater severity ingulfed in flames of love. We must become like little children again, pure, innocent, trusting, detached.

This Advent as we prepare for Jesus to be born into the world, contemplate your choices, behaviors, triggers of who you are in your own will versus when we are intentional in relationship with Him, conforming our Will into His. Who am I when I go about my day in my own mind lost in all the distractions, and to do lists? This shows you our absolute need for Jesus to who is found in the least likely of places- just like finding a newborn King, in a manger, sleeping in a pigs feeding troth, in piercing cold. Allow Him to enter into your brokenness, the piercing cold places of our hearts where the pigs feed. He is the great physician, and the best at heart surgery…

"Do you want to be healed?" – John 5:6

God Bless you all,

Lauren Franklin

Guest Writer: Lauren Franklin

Catholic Convert

Owner of Southern Saints Designs LLC

https://southern-saint-designs-llc.square.site/s/shop

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