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Ask my husband and he'll tell you he's glad I'm done having babies. While he was gentle and even longsuffering during each of those three 15-month periods (pregnancy plus nursing) that changed our sex life, these were hardly highlights of our intimate history. As much as he loves each of our kids, he does not love sharing me. And, for my part, I don't miss having a basketball-sized belly that made our alone times more awkward than romantic. Or gaining 44 pounds with my first pregnancy and saying good-bye to my once-flat tummy.

I can still feel those anxious moments when I'd push my husband away because a child had pulled on, or nursed on, me for most of my waking hours. And how intensely I would hope he would not be too disappointed.

Having babies also changed my intimacy with God: I would sit in my pink glider rocker, open my Bible and a journal, pick up my pen and get ready to reconnect with the God who loves me. And then I'd hear my baby's bleating cry as she woke up.

Before kids, I had been mentoring a friend during a weekly Bible study and leading groups at our church. Once I had Tyler, I found church frustrating as his sensitive temperament meant my attempts to leave him in the nursery failed 90 percent of the time. And, when it did work, he'd often get sick, and then I'd have to miss church the following week.

Childbearing put barriers in my intimate times with Frank and with God just as surely as it changed my ideas about how I "earn love." Because there wasn't enough of me to go around, I could no longer do the things I thought made me more lovable. The sheer lack of being able to connect in the old ways forced me to let myself be loved in ways I didn't think existed.

In my marriage, I went from being afraid I'd disappoint or even lose Frank if I wasn't available or at my most attractive to being assured that he really loved me, for me. As I saw my husband's patience, I learned he loved me even if I wasn't "all that." This changed sex from performance-based to being more about loving him as best I could. And it also made things a lot more real, freer and more fun.

In my spiritual life, I went from legalism and grand ideas about what it means to connect with God to agreeing with Brother Lawrence who said that flipping an omelet could be worship, if we do it for God. I learned to grab bites of time, to carve out devotions in my car and to pray by phone with a friend after our kids were in bed. I put a through-the-year-Bible in the bathroom, posted a coffee-stained Bible verse on my refrigerator and pointed my glider-rocker to look out a window that inspired me to thank God for his creativity and beauty as I nursed. Jesus went from being the one I reached for, to the one who sat right there beside me. I found the "Lover of my Soul."

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