Your Trauma is Welcome Here

Alternate title options: Birthing together, Let us weep, and/or Women are freaking amazing.

Your Trauma is Welcome Here -

Let’s normalize the bullshit

we walk through

day after day after day

let’s normalize the cat calls

and the side glances

even though we’re pregnant

and it feels taboo

that he’s looking

let’s normalize the no’s

you cannot preach

you cannot teach

because

you are not welcome here

is on many a pulpit tongue

let’s normalize the trauma

the big T and little t

the experiences that we

have in a female body

if only so that we can lay safe

in one another’s arms

and weep

like Jesus did.

Jesus Wept by Georgian Artist Brian Micheloe Doss

Allow me to reintroduce myself: I am a Christian feminist. Last night, as my husband and I sat sharing our highs and lows from the day - I looked at him with a half smile… You know that angry feminist poem I wrote about our old pastor? I finally posted it. He responds, Maybe you should change your name to Angry Feminist instead of The Barefoot Preacher, now? I laugh out loud. No darling, this is me preaching.

Over the years the trauma within womanhood and motherhood has reached a boiling point more than once. In my late teens years, I left the Catholic church. My childhood priest and my middle school teacher were both imprisoned on charges I could not rectify in my body, mind. Pursued paganism and explored my Jewish roots on my father’s side. I couldn’t connect with life without God, though… and then one day God came and found me anyhow. A colleague brought me to a Black Baptist Church. The one in the neighborhood that my parents feared. The preacher spoke with such ferocity, I headed forward without a second thought at the altar call. Hello God? It’s me… Jennifer. And while the rest isn’t quite history, it feels a bit like a dream now.

Come Dream with Me by fellow cancer survivor Wyanne Thompson

A watery-edged memory that I cannot quite pin my soul upon. But I know… I know that I know that I know… I haven’t left God since. Though my view of Them continues to evolve with each passing day.

I went back to Catholicism once more.

I gathered with Jewish friends and celebrated the high holidays; felt my spirit sing as she recovered from the deep loss of my Jewishness.

I entered into (unknowingly) the Evangelical church.

I left when patriarchal culture and spiritual bypassing both clawed at my insides. My trauma sprung up in such a way that I cringed at my own partner looking at my body.

These are the things no one talks about, by the way.

Amen?

And, these are the things we must talk about. How the body keeps score, how our faith lives can maim if not kill us if we do not gather, circle up, normalize, and set the past ablaze. Fresh soil made for new spiritual lives to grow. I have barely lifted up my Bible in these few years since leaving the Evangelical church, loves. And yet, God is with me and in me and my relationship with The One Who Mothers Me (and parents me in general, yes) is the most deep and profound it’s ever been. Beyond scripture, I have - once again - found good and God in everything. Hope where there should be none. Even in the midst of the loudest grief.

All of this to say…

Your trauma is welcome here.

Presently, I spend my days unpacking a lot of trauma. My own. That of the world. In my prayer life, parenting, caregiving work, writing. I think this must be why birthing another book can be so difficult, by the way. That we must go back into the pain story, remember to breathe, let it out into the world… and then find the space to recover.

As I am welcoming this birth… I want to offer just one tiny shred of advice here:

Find yourself a midwife.

Find yourself someone who will stand alongside you in the flame, walk through the ring of fire with you and then, congratulate you on what or who you’ve called in on the other side.

If you need one who writes to you a few times each month (or each week if we’re on social media together), I would love to be her. I would love to recognize the power in you, the Divinity that shines through - dances with you as you offer up your tear-stained face as prayer and pause.

I’ll end here with what I posted yesterday…

Women of all places and spaces and faiths, beautiful holy sacred rays of light, may you RAISE YOUR VOICES even louder with each passing day. You are valuable. Worthy of more than you've seen thus far. Perhaps more worthy than what you'll ever see in this lifetime. Hold your vision. Hold your ground.

Good and God are coming… already here.

Do you know someone who needs to hear this? Your best friend, neighbor, wife. Please, take a moment and share these words with them. We need each other so very much.

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I am thankful to be woman, darling souls. To raise a young woman. To speak life into countless women day after day after day. The best is yet to come for you, us & all of humanity. Every single bit of it.

Squeezes,

J. 🌻 @thebarefootpreacher

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