For a while now, I have wanted to share more than just quick diy projects and easy mom approved recipes with you.
I want to answer your emails and your questions about why we are the way we are.
I want to share my heart.
You may follow our lives and projects more intimately on Instagram, and you may have seen posts about our son, doctors appointments, rejoicing, Specialist visits, his condition and thoughts on looking on the bright side.
You say we seem thankful and you say you wonder how we are able to keep it all together; but the truth is, that has not always been the case.
We are just like you, and pain and trials touch us too.
I want to be real with you here. I want to share the happy and the pretty and the accomplishments, but I also want to share the bad so you can understand why it is so easy at times for us to focus on the good.
It has taken me a long time to get up the nerve to share our whole story, but I will be doing so on here, in installments, as the words come to me.
I’m not sure exactly why we have shared parts and not the entirety, but I am ready, and I think you are too.
I feel that our story, with chapters in it entitled “Anger” and “Doubt” might, in the end, help you form a new chapter in your life entitled: “Hope”.
Because of that, I feel that my words don’t have to be perfect, I just have to start at the beginning and share, though painful and hard, to potentially help you see the bigger picture in your own life.
There is complete heartache out there so big that ours doesn’t touch it. I know this. Your story may have more heartache or maybe less, but heartache and growing pains and learning are what links us all together.
We all have a story.
Our story is one of struggle yes, but one that has a happy ending.
One, I feel, that can offer hope. I know that this story needs to be shared so that searching Mamas and scared Daddys can see that there is always a bright side and that positivity will always prevail.
So, here is where it all started:
The doctors told me my baby, the one that wiggled and kicked inside of me, was not viable.
I could not believe their words. They told me my cervix was opening due to the impact of the car accident and that I would have to be very careful now.
Their eyes said worse.
I went on immediate bed rest after that, and then, my “easy” pregnancy, with the strong baby, was up for argument.
Mornings came, and afternoons came, and night time came.
The world kept on spinning.
Life went on.
Days changed, the forecast changed, and it seemed like everything was changing before me, while the only thing that didn’t change was my mama hand across my growing distended stomach and the glimpses of happiness that followed ,after I felt little squirms and movement from within.
Days came, and lunch time came, and the evening news came, and that “non viable” baby was holding on…we were making it.
We were defying odds.
We were defying doctors and statistics.
This baby, growing beneath my hand and belly, was holding on minute by minute.
I am a dreamer, but a realist. I dreamt of baby coos and chubby newborn feet at 23 weeks pregnant, but I was preparing for the worst.
I did what any worried mama would do in my situation: I began looking for the answers of Life by asking the guru of all gurus: Google.
I spent
too much time reading mother’s memoirs on line and living in chat forums.
During my childrens afternoon nap time, the stories I read would enduce weeping.
I looked fine to the world, and to my parents, and to my husband, but I was slowly getting devoured by the dark hole of the unknown. Google had many stories to tell; the ones that resonated with me, just helped author “Anger” and “Doubt”.
The hours seemed to drag on as the Unknown slowly cast its dark shadow over me and my thoughts. Even when the sun rose in the mornings and cast streaks of precious sunlight through our closed up windows and onto my round belly, the darkness didn’t dissipate.
It has not always been happy here.
I learned quickly that it doesn’t matter how you feel, or what is happening to you, life goes on.
Every day, I would send our five year old boy to school with helpful family, and I would put my two year old girl down for nap time and when I found myself alone, without little eyes watching me, I would shake and cry and wonder about the life inside of me.
Would he last another week? Would he die within me? Would I even find out if he was a”he” or a “she”? Would he be counted as a life if no one ended up meeting him? Would my world collapse around me like I felt it would?
I wondered a lot.
Every day. Every night. Every second. Every minute. Every hour. Every sunset. Every sunrise.
Each night I lay in my bed, with my husband sleeping an arms stretch away from me, and yet, I felt completely alone. Each night, I found it more difficult to reach out to him; instead, I would fall asleep with my hands covering my swollen stomach and my prayers, small at first, headed straight to heaven.
Each tiny prayer that came from my lips or just felt in my heart, seemed to pierce the Darkness a little bit.
Only the slightest bit, at first.
Sometimes my prayers would be angry and full of accusation, and other times they would be full of thankfulness and humility. With each little prayer though, my world received a small sliver like gleam of light in return. With every prayer I was able to look outside of myself and to focus on my Maker. With more spoken or heart felt prayers, I began to feel like the Darkness wouldnt be able to hold up against the rays of light that seemed to warm my cold Mama heart.
Eventually, I felt like the Darkness didn’t stand a chance at all; the Light was slowly illuminating it into extinction.
I wasn’t alone.
In my darkest moments I was reminded that I was NEVER ever alone.
God
never left me.
Infact, He used the Darkness to draw me into Him.
I recall a doctor saying at one point to me that I “Should enjoy the time I had…”
It was meant to encourage me not to worry about the unknown. At first though, I was upset and discouraged by her words, and then….like a blanket over a new baby…I had peace about it.
She was actually right.
Life is all about perception.
With a slight change in mine, I realized that I didn’t know if I would one day holda thriving baby in my arms, but I
did have the experience and the happiness of having a baby growing
within me. I felt those first stages of nauseousness, experienced the days I would fall asleep beside my dinner plate and those first butterfly flutters deep in the bottom of my belly.
I had experienced life. My babies life.
That would never change. It didn’t matter anymore, for how long.
During the moments when life felt dark, and even during the times when my heart began to grow the idea of hope, during all of it, I was always a mama to this baby.
I was this baby’s Mama.
Regardless of the outcome, I was experiencing one of the greatest gifts ever offered to us. I was experiencing loving another more than myself. I was experiencing great GREAT love.
Shortly after that realization, I began to gain faith.
Faith as small as a mustard seed.
I prayed more, prayers of gratitude and less accusing ones, I looked at what I was blessed with and I finally became thankful for everything that I
did have and stopped focusing on what I didnt have.
In every area of my life.
Gratitude is funny like that.
It occasionally takes loss or potential loss, to realize what you do have, and to be grateful.
Unlike so many similar stories, ours has a happy ending.
Right here, this part in our story, is where I pray, that if you are on a dark and daunting journey, googling away your days, that you will be able to start a chapter in your life called “Hope”.
After months of pleading with God and promising Him my babies life with all the “if onlys…” attached, we beat the statistics and gave birth to a full term baby boy.
Joy does not describe the feeling I had the moment I saw him take in his first breath. The moment was more than I had hoped.
I was elated and ecstatic and forever deeply moved by Gods power and grace when I saw that babies face.
Looking back, it is clear that we endured the tough chapters before our babies safe arrival into this world, because all of it was preparing us for what was about to be discovered. We endured them so that we could become more positive and share that with you.
Happy endings though, they are not all that they appear to be.
Our baby was born alive, breathing, screaming and full term. All that I had ever prayed for!
THIS was our happy ending, no doubt about it.
But Life is no fairy tale, and like I have learned, one beautiful chapter might close and another frightening one might begin.
There are always more chapters to follow in Life.
We had no idea then, seeing that brand new baby, and being filled with so much happiness about his safe arrival, but we were going to quickly close one happy chapter and jump right into the next.
Thankfully, we don’t write our own stories, The Author of this world has that grand job.
We didn’t know it then, but the next chapter of our lives wasn’t going to be simply scary…it was going to be mama terrifying.
Mamas can slay boogie man in the dark, and scare monsters from under the bed, so that is saying something too.
We were about to open a chapter called “The Test”.
Thankfully we had learned many lessons from “Anger” and “Doubt” and it was now perfectly clear why we had to endure the Darkness and the unknown.
We were being changed in those times, we were learning and we were drawing closer to the Light.
“The Test” would prove just that.
