Five years ago, Lauren Eberspacher, a mom from Milford, Nebraska, posed for a photo with her newborn daughter Nora.
“I was physically exhausted. Mentally drained. Emotionally done. Hormonally raging,” the 31-year-old wrote in a Facebook post published earlier this month. “And I was so scared.”
In her post, Eberspacher recalled all the negative thoughts that were racing through her mind as she sat there smiling through tears in 2012. “‘Your baby can’t breastfeed. You are Failure.’ ‘Your baby is losing weight. Your body is failing you.’ ‘Your baby won’t stop crying. You must be doing something wrong.’”
When the picture popped up on the Eberspacher’s TimeHop, it took her breath away. “I remember feeling all those emotions that I felt that day on the couch come rushing back over me,” she tells Us Weekly. “I wanted to reach through the picture and give that new mama a hug.”
The mom of Nora, 5, Andersyn, 3, and Deacon, 8 months, shared the photo in hopes of comforting other frightened parents.
“I wish that I could go back 5 years and tell that new mama on the couch how much she was worth; how much she was created to be this baby’s mom,” she wrote. “Now three babies later, I’ve seen most of it — exclusively pumping, supplementing, exclusively breastfeeding, vaginal births, c-section, chubby babies, skinny babies, babies with colic, and a baby who doesn’t make a peep . . . each one has been so different. But with each one, something remained the same. I was enough for them, and God was more than enough for me.”
Her message struck a chord with others. As one mom wrote: “I wish somebody had told me this.”
