Trigger Warning : this piece is based on the lived experiences of emotional and medical trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and postpartum depression.
February 2025
Dear God,
So here we are, knee-deep in a valley of bones and broken dreams, every fiber in my being screaming for an escape. We need to leave. We need to go. But my feet forget how to move, stuck at a crossroad where the beautiful past collides with the bleak present.
So many good memories here. Is there nothing I can salvage? What a waste.
Logic says it’s safer to go—to forsake everything I once loved.
Forget it all. Forget the old me. Forget the dreams. Forget You.
But as I wrestle with the thought of leaving, Your presence remains. And when You speak, the weight of a hundred stories unravel behind each word.
“If you stay, you’ll see flowers grow over all these bones.”
A flicker of hope dares to spark inside, yet the cost of staying weighs like shackles…
Staying means staring at all these bones without the permission to look away.
Staying means picking at these wounds.
Staying means having painful memories that flood my brain without permission.
Staying means sleepless nights and a broken mind every time a trigger touches my thoughts, spreading poison into my nerves.
A part of me would rather be numb. Dissociate. Why risk it all? How long will it take for flowers to grow and overwhelm this ugly graveyard?
March 2025
My palm slides over my swollen belly. A baby boy rests inside, his little heart singing in a beautiful rhythm. My skin breaks into lines and permanent marks, and I wonder if the cracks in my heart are just as enduring.
I can’t promise him that Mommy’s arms are strong enough to hold him well, or that her mind is whole enough to fully cherish his early days.
Weak sunlight spreads over my mother’s room. I’m back in the haven of my childhood, glad that my parents could help care for me while I heal. The doctor says I must rest in bed, so that the pre-term contractions don’t happen again, so that my baby makes it to his due date. For now, we can’t return to our beloved townhouse, where sunlight bathes the pale walls and embraces each room in a bright, golden light
The last month of my pregnancy passes with a sullen haze. Days turn into weeks at my mother’s home, and I miss that townhouse and the small plot of land it cradled behind it.
I could plant a garden there someday, I tell myself. But our cozy townhouse is empty now, weeds overrunning that grassy square, empty of the floral colors I hoped for…
“You are the God who sees me,” for she said, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”
– Genesis 16:13 (NIV)
One upon an ancient time, a slave-woman’s belly was growing, cradling the son of the master who abandoned her. She slid her shaking hand over her stomach, her feet caked with dust. Sweat clung to her sunbaked skin as the wilderness sprawled around her.
Her mind cycled back to how her mistress mistreated her. Better to run far into the desert than to stay, she thought. Better to run than to die.
But out in the wild, dying was more certain. Dehydration. Starvation. Rabid beasts. Travellers with evil intent? The wasteland was a trap, a death sentence for a powerless, pregnant woman.
But God found her there.
He saw her sitting in the dirt, her frail body collapsing in the heat. He saw how darkness bled into her mind, suffocating her with questions. How do I survive this? What about my baby? Where will I go? Will my baby live?
He saw her alone under the sun’s livid gaze.
He heard the tears falling down her face.
He felt her breaking heart.
And He came to meet her.
His presence walked onto that harsh land with her, turning her wilderness into a holy ground.
“Go back to your mistress. I will bless your descendants, too.“ He told her, his presence a loving warmth around her. “ You will have a son. Name him Ishmael.”
Ishmael—a name that means, “God hears.”
Perhaps that was His way of loving her—by giving her a future worth waiting for.
In the annals of Time etched upon His infinite heart, He saw her running after a ruddy toddler. He watched her calling the child’s name, “Ishmael!” And whenever she called the boy, that name made her remember—she had met the Lord who heard her cry.
“El-Roi,” Hagar, the slave-woman named Him, and she would be the only human in the ancient stories who’d directly name Him this way.
“You are the God who sees me,” she breathed out, wonder and awe mending her heart.
He turned her land of suffering into a sanctuary. And so, she returned to her mistress, believing that God could use her master’s family to protect her and her son for the time-being.
After all, El-Roi saw her, and he was with her. And that was enough.
April 2025
My newborn is sleeping in his crib, his small body snuggled in a blanket. A line of sunlight drapes over his sheets.
Finally, we’re home.
But my belly is still swollen, stitched up and wrapped in a binder. And my mind is still torn, ravaged by violent, intrusive thoughts. Memories remain like live wires writhing underneath my skin, worsening the sleep deprivation of the newborn phase.
And the townhouse is suddenly big and new and hollow—until I see the colors outside.
Flowers. Beautiful, tiny purple wildflowers. They rose through the dirt, delicate petals bunched at the tips, like little paintbrushes dipped in pastel.
I ask the townhouse caretaker, “Who planted these flowers?”
“No one did,” the caretaker says. “The wind carried the seeds. That’s how the wildflowers grow.”
“Remember when I said that I’d grow flowers over the bones…?” His whisper returns, and a dam breaks inside my torn heart.
I watch the small flowers fill the small plot of land behind our house, how they stand tall enough to greet me through the windows. Remember El-Roi, they seemed to proclaim. The One who still sees you.
The God who saw Hagar is the same God who sees me now.
The God who beholds the bones with me.
The God who sees my tears every night.
The One who sees every layer of pain.
The lost dreams.
The intricacies of heartache that I can’t name.
And He stays through the regret, guilt, and shame.
My newborn son has yet to see the colors of the flowers, but I take him to the windows to feel the sun’s radiance.
I don’t know how long healing will take, I think to myself as the baby rests in my arms. But as long as El Roi sees me, I will have the flowers I hoped for in this wilderness.
Photo Credits
- Mourad Harkat (header image)
- Nicole Gusto (backyard purple wildflowers)
