The Transforming Power of Spiritual Motherhood | An Interview with Nicole Rodriguez

So have you always known your belovedness?

You know, I feel as if that has something that came up with time.

My background coming from a divorced family, that was something that was very It wasn't there in the beginning.

Let's put it that way.

I would say the Lord had his hand on me, though, at 11 years old when I asked to become Catholic and come into the church.

And I feel at that point in time, the Lord knew.

And that moment, my family was shortly thereafter going to divorce.

And he was drawing me into an eternal family, which is the family of God.

And really, I was a normal teenager.

know believed all the lies that our society gives to us in the culture and it was really my early early 20s that i was like something's missing and i knew it was mass and i knew it was jesus so i started having a reversion into the faith which is actually when i met my husband um who at the time was not catholic so my belovedness began to grow And it really grew in my marriage and specifically, this may sound a little bit different, but through each of my sons, through each of my pregnancies, did I really begin to enter into knowing who I am as his beloved daughter.

Can you share a little bit more about that? Yeah.

So with my sons, the gift of being pregnant, I really say this all the time with each one came this beautiful deepening understanding of the sacredness of my womb, of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a beloved daughter of the father.

And I, with our first pregnancy, we were so disappointed with that loss.

And then it took six years before we were pregnant again with Thomas and And really, it was during that loss with Thomas that I grieved deeply and I entered into the sorrow.

And I felt the Lord was asking me, instead of trying to repress the pain and the grief, calling me to enter into those emotions and to experience them.

And as I did that, I would pray when I was pregnant with Thomas that he would know he was a kiss of the Father's love.

And this was something that was always in my heart with each of my sons that I have a different prayer.

And that was his for Thomas.

And I can remember one day just praying and the Lord beginning to speak that truth to my heart that I was a kiss of his love.

And that really spoke to the core of my identity as a beloved daughter.

And it was not only for my son, but it was also for myself.

So that's where it really began to grow as I began to see that It wasn't just for myself or just for my son.

It was also for me.

And that is where it kind of began to spark this growth into who I am as a woman and who I am as a beloved daughter.

And also during that time, I was also reading a lot of John Paul II's writings in The Theology of the Body and all his writings on encyclicals of woman and spoke deeply to my heart.