Post-Twenties Bodies, Losing Control & Loving It, and More

A round-up of September articles on beauty, anxiety, and AI—plus a baby update

I come to you from an exercise ball, on which I’ve been bouncing the better part of today.

I have worn out the internet with searches like:

• Are headaches an early labor sign?

• Is stuffy nose an early labor sign?

• Is not being able to tolerate my toddler’s “singing voice” an early labor sign?

In the past week, I’ve had approximately 3,409 people ask me when I am due, and about 90% of them have gone on to look at my stomach in pitying disbelief when I tell them the honest answer. [I could actually write an entire mini-series called, “The Things People Say to Pregnant Ladies,” but as of now it’s all too fresh. Friendly PSA though: Don’t tell a pregnant lady she’s “really big.” I’m not sure there’s a world where that will ever land right.]

Last night, I called my doctor with some promising developments. She suggested we get to the hospital—STAT. I swirled around the house, tidying and packing and making lists and kissing the dog and telling the kids to be good for Auntie Rach. A hundred fifty miles north of us, my sister threw her go-bag in the car and chugged an iced coffee and made her way to us, while a dear, local friend swooped in to play with the kids and put them to bed in the meantime (thanks Riley!).

And three hours and one cafeteria Oreo pudding parfait later, we were back at home—Ethan rubbing my back and telling me it was alright, and me drowning in my dejection that we had come home and yet I. was. still. pregnant.

So here I bounce.

Given my limited ability to think of anything besides impending labor, this felt like the perfect week to share a few pieces that I’ve had the honor of writing in other lovely spaces of the internet this month. September has been a broad-reaching month—lending itself to conversations around everything from anxiety & mental health to beauty in a postpartum (and post-twenties) body to ChatGPT and why I’m not afraid of being called a dinosaur.

Please peruse—I hope you’ll find something you need today ❤️

And P.S.? If you love The Second Cup or read something that encourages you, would you please share it with someone you love, too? To a writer, there is no higher compliment than knowing that their words have landed with someone who needed them.

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What Makes a Woman Beautiful?

I was honored to be part of Deborah Rutherford’s Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder Series this month. Here, I ruminate on what makes a woman beautiful, lament the imperfections that come with aging & child-bearing, and ponder what creates magnetic beauty—the kind which can happily co-exist with gray hairs, soft bellies, and leg dimples.

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I used to think that beauty was dependent on one thing, and one thing only: the degree to which someone else noticed and admired it. To be seen as pretty—especially in middle school—was the ultimate compliment, the one true thing that mattered. Sure, it was nice to be congratulated for spelling all of the words on the list right or for being called kind or intelligent or hard-working, but more than anything in the world I longed for a boy to look at me and think, “That girl is beautiful.” 

That’s probably why I still remember sitting on the school bus in seventh grade and Stephen Jones asking me why I had glitter on my lips, “‘cuz it looked stupid.”

Or the way it still stings when I think of Alex Davis pointing out my buck teeth and telling everyone they made me look like a beaver. 

I remember a friend telling me that my breasts were too low, that my eyebrows were too bushy, and that my backside looked huge in those jeans. She laughed and forgot; I did not. 

Now, as a thirties-something wife and mother, I am older and wiser than my younger self. My brain knows that my value doesn’t come from the size of my backside, and that my worth doesn’t come from whether someone’s eyes are ogling me. But I would be lying if I said that I didn’t look in the mirror sometimes and lament the lines coming alive on my forehead, or mourn the way my hips have widened and my stomach has softened and my clothes serve more as a covering than a compliment these days. 

There are times when we’re in public and I lean over and whisper to my husband, “I need you to tell me I look beautiful right now. I don’t even care that I’m telling you to say it; heck, I don’t care if you’re thinking it. Just lie to me and tell me I’m gorgeous anyway…”

How Can Losing Control Help Our Anxiety?

Nichole Suvar put together a wonderful devotional called Pockets of Peace for those struggling with anxiety. When she asked me to be part of it, my only hesitation was that I had a word limit—so much to say, so little space! As someone who has experienced anxiety myself, I know that it’s not just a cute word for ‘worry.’ It can be debilitating, isolating, and excruciating. Here’s a snippet of my piece. You can read the rest of it—and the entire devotional, for that matter—by downloading it for free.

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“How’s that brake working for you?” My husband laughed and went back to tapping the steering wheel in time with the radio.

The wipers beat at the windshield, and the staccato thwack, thwack, thwack matched the rhythm of my pulse.

I was sprawled across the passenger side, my fingers digging into the armrest and feet groping the floor for brakes that weren’t there. “Can we just. slow. down?” I whispered through gritted teeth.

I’ll admit—I’m a terrible passenger. Most of our car rides are punctuated by my gasping outbursts and manic pleas to take it easy, for goodness’ sake. But it wasn’t always this way. When I was a little girl, I would lean my head against the car window and close my eyes, using these moments in the backseat to dream. From there, I could travel across time—and even the world. My daddy did the driving, and I did the dreaming. Because we were together—and because I knew that he loved me—it never occurred to me to worry about whether we’d get where we needed to be. Instead, my mind was free to hope and roam and surrender…

What are the Creative and Spiritual Implications of ChatGPT (and the rest of AI)?

Since writing is my day job (and night job, and hobby, and passion, and creative outlet, and lifestyle), I have some FEELINGS about ChatGPT. But I also wonder if the direction of AI in general has spiritual implications that are worth considering. In this article for Aletheia Today, I meditate on the question, “Just because we can…does that mean we should?”

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…See, there’s this personal element that makes ChatGPT so offensive. It’s as though it has taken all eighteen years of my schooling, every ounce of constructive feedback I’ve ever received and grown from, and the sum of the hundreds of thousands of hours I’ve spent reading and writing to develop my craft, and laughed and said, “You can’t possibly compete with my efficiency and breadth of knowledge. Your humanity is a handicap. Go find a new day job. That is, until I find a way to do that better, too.”

But there’s something deeper that rubs uncomfortably against my humanity, and it’s the way that AI seems to be moving steadily toward the goal of omniscience. Not only is the very technology that we’re creating moving on a gleeful path to render us obsolete, it is also beginning to seem like an unfortunate reenactment of the scene in the garden of Eden, except with robots.

“No! You (your humanity, your jobs, your creativity) will not die,” the tech gurus assure society. “In fact, God knows that when you eat it (partake in it, accept it, rely on it), your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (see Genesis 3:4-5, parenthetical phrases mine).

"You’re being so dramatic!" the AI proponents will cry. But just as the serpent was so eager to point out the fun points of being like God and failed to mention the rest—being expelled from the garden, being cursed with weary toil and painful labor, facing death—those who push the propaganda that AI is for the betterment of the human race are being irresponsible when they omit the possibility for any negative implications…

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