Brittany L. Bergman

Savoring motherhood, building marriage, and living simply

Stealing Joy

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Right around this time two years ago, I was expecting my first child. One of my biggest fears was that I would get sick right before my daughter was born, leaving me contagious and unable to kiss her tiny lips or breathe in the scent of her newborn cheeks. I was due around Advent season, which also meant the advent of cold and flu season, so my fears weren’t unfounded. And sure enough, I caught strep throat for the first time in my life just a week before my due date, and in one swift moment, my joy was replaced… Read More

A New Kind of Question & Answer

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On Good Friday of this year, I mustered up every bit of gumption I had, called my friend Randi, and quietly spoke these words: “I think I’m reconstructing my faith.” I lay there on my bed, lights off and fan whirring, hoping to drown out the sound of the words I had been too afraid to say. I’m not sure who exactly I was trying to hide those words from. My husband? No—I definitely wanted to tell him. God? No—he already knew. As my words settled into the darkness, reaching through sound waves from my bedroom in Chicago to Randi’s… Read More

Five Practices to Navigate Touchy Conversations

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Dinner conversation looks a bit different than it used to for me and my husband. After our daughter was born, many of our mealtimes were marked by few words—not because we were angry with each other, but because we were exhausted new parents just trying not to fall asleep in our soup. But for the past six months, we’ve been talking more often and more deeply about things like spirituality, theology and politics. Part of this change is because we’re in a gloriously stable season of not being sleep-deprived and overwhelmed. But part of this change is because I’m neck-deep… Read More

There’s Still Time

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Two nights in a row recently, I had dreams about pregnancy. Specifically, about being pregnant with my second child (which I absolutely, certainly am not). In both of these dreams I found myself suddenly at the end of pregnancy, just days away from giving birth, and I don’t even know how I got there. It’s not that I didn’t know I was pregnant, but more that I figured everything would come together after the baby was born. (And all the moms laughed.) When I (Dream Brittany) realized how crazy that was, panic overtook me as I frantically tried to set… Read More

Armchair Chats // A Fake Break

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Shauna Niequist, one of my favorite writers, coined the term “fake resting” in her latest book, Present Over Perfect. She defines it as that phenomenon when you are doing a bunch of tasks around the house, but you’re wearing pajamas, so you tell yourself you’re resting. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, but I’d say it went even a step further: I took a fake break. I’ve been in a season of big changes and too many things on my plate—many of which, unfortunately, I can’t drop or delegate. Instead of intentionally taking a break from the things I… Read More

By the Hand

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Selah reaches up for her daddy’s hand, wraps five of her pudgy fingers around a single one of his, and begins to pull him to her play area. Her fingers are literally wrapped around his, and he is proverbially wrapped around hers. This is a game that plays out countless times every day. She reaches up and leads him away—to where it doesn’t matter so much. Sometimes I’m not sure if she even has a plan or if she just wants to know she has power as he trails behind her. We had friends over for dinner recently, and we… Read More

Armchair Chats // Permission to Revise

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This month brought a pretty big change for my family: daycare. Since I went back to work a year and a half ago, Dan and I have been tag-teaming childcare, even though we work full time. It was a great money saver, but a sanity saver it was not. Dan and I both work fairly flexible schedules, and we were each able to work from home two days a week, with my mom making up the gap one day a week, and his mom helping us out regularly too. Even though Selah is a much happier, easier kid at nearly two… Read More

It’s Too Dangerous to Love Myself

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My story is not unlike those of countless other postpartum moms: pregnancy changed my body in ways I didn’t expect, and even once I lost most of the “baby weight,” I struggled to accept that my body had rearranged itself. My hips had widened and never narrowed again; I had lost muscle tone and gained a permanent belly pooch; a few new stretch marks had shown up on the fleshy parts of my thighs. And I couldn’t seem to find the motivation (or time or energy) to do much about it. But instead of acknowledging the reality that I’d grown… Read More

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