The Backstory
I always said I wasn’t having children. I grew up an only
child, never having really spent time around babies and small kids. I had no
little siblings to help take care of.
As an adult, I never really made the effort to spend time
around children either. I shied away from babysitting or helping at the daycare
at church. I didn’t like to hold other people’s babies. And I never made the
effort to factor a dream of child rearing into my other adulthood dreams.
Occassionally I did dabble with the idea of someday having children, but it was
always in the distant future in my mind.
When I met Maxwell, we fell in love quickly. I had wanted to
be a wife for some time, so the idea of marriage was put on the table within a
few months, even though that was too soon. We would put it on, then take it
off, then put it back on the table a few times between 2009 and 2011. In 2011,
it was decided that we would marry by October 2012. That never came to pass.
Instead, we broke up at the close of 2011. We got back together in 2012, but
too close to our previously established wedding date to make it work. In fact,
when we got back together we were just content to be in each other’s company
for awhile. Finally, in 2013 we both put a foot down and said it was time to
plan a real future. Our wedding date was set for 2014, and this time it came to
pass.
All throughout the relationship, the concept of having a
baby was brought up. But we could never pick a stance. Sometimes, Max would say
“there’s too many people in this world” or “I don’t want to bring up a child in
this messed up world”. I could definitely agree about the world being crowded
and messed up, but when he would rule a baby out, I’d feel a little let down.
Other times, he would say since he came from a big family, he wanted one too.
He’d usually say that when I was adamant about not having children. I would be
adamant about it when I thought back to the difficulties my mother had and
wondered if I would have the same ones.
One time, early in our marriage Max told me he was
considering a vasectomy. He wanted to get it since I didn’t take birth control
so we could enjoy intimacy without worry. Something about that immediately
struck me wrong, despite my “I don’t want children because I’d probably
struggle as a mom” stance. “I can get it reversed if we change our mind” he’d
reassure me. But it’s easier said than done, sometimes.
At our pre-marital counseling, we agreed together before the
counselors that we weren’t going to have children. “It will be just us forever”
I told them. I just couldn’t really picture purposefully trying to get
pregnant, or being one of those women who was almost desperate for a positive
pregnancy test. We did agree, however, that if it happened by accident, we
would go forward and raise that child and accept it as God’s plan for us.
Finding Out
2017 Had been a rough year for my marriage. That is another
story for another blog on another day. When the year finally concluded, we went
out for a nice long New-Year’s celebration, ringing in 2018 with as much
optimism as possible that by the time the next New Year’s celebration came
around, we’d have a better year to look back on...at least for our marriage. At
the time, I was working temporarily in retail. I had lost my banking career. I
wasn’t making enough money. Max had just withdrawn from school a few months
before for mental health reasons. He wasn’t getting paid by Veterans Affairs
for attending. We were struggling. We had almost gotten divorced in 2017, or so
it seemed. We had lost a good car, given away pets, sold possessions and were
about to enter a bankruptcy. The chips were down seemingly about as low as
chips can be down, save for homelessness. So of course just a few days after
New Year’s, I started a prayer regime. Known as the Daniel Fast, it was three
weeks of lent-like sacrifices of meat, starch and sugar and the same three
weeks there was a rather deep, involved prayer each day. One of the topics was
my marriage. I wanted God to revive it, rejuvenate it and make it stronger than
ever. Of course I had no idea what God’s means of doing that could be. When you
surrender to God’s plan, your life can change in drastic ways.
My period was due within days of New Year’s. It should have
arrived by that weekend. It did not. There weren’t even cramps. After a long,
hard year in 2017, I had lost a decent amount of weight for my small frame. My
healthy weight was about 120 lbs., but at that point I was just barely above
100. I was a size 00 and no longer had my characteristic feminine curves. When
the weekend passed and the period never came, I began to worry but for a
different reason. I wondered if my failure to eat more than about 800 calories
a day out of stress while working hard on my feet at the store had resulted in
me no longer getting my period. I started to worry that I wouldn’t get it for
months, and that other healthy body functions would fail with it. Of course,
this concern would come to my attention during a fast. By the following
Wednesday, my period was more than a week late. That’s when two friends told me
I should take a test. I agreed to try that, but doubted pregnancy was the
issue. I was too thin and too stressed to get pregnant, right? More
importantly, Max and I had practiced rhythm for our entire marriage and nothing
had ever happened. I was convinced that I was probably infertile, even more so
now that I was underweight.
I bought two tests. I wanted to rule pregnancy out. Because
a few people had brought it up, I was stressing about this now too. I wanted to
rule it out so my only concern needed to be eating more and sleeping more to
gain weight back. No huge, life-altering events for me. At this point, if
wanting children was one end of a spectrum, I was as far on the other end as
possible. I decided to take the first
test on January 10th. My period had been expected on January 3rd or as late as
January 5th.
I followed the instructions for dipping the test in a cup,
timed it, and then set it on the counter. I was fully expecting one blue line,
in the “not pregnant” window. If one showed up in the other window, it meant
pregnant. Almost right away I started to see the second blue line form. I
panicked. I flipped the test over and left it face-down on the counter while
the two minutes ticked by. I called Max in to look at it. Somehow, I thought
when I flipped it back over the line that was forming would have faded away
again. It was still there.
I know I should have been overjoyed at what this signified.
But I lost my career, Max lost half his income, we were filing bankruptcy, and
we had almost gotten a divorce the year before. Things were still rocky. This
was seemingly the worst possible time for a change of such magnitude as
bringing another human into the world. I was mad. I was scared. I think my
words were “Dangit Max there’s a line!”. I think he was in disbelief. I was immediately thrust into a new vortex of
chaos in my own head.
How was I going to deal with this? I had already made a
promise to myself and Max and God some time ago that an unplanned baby would
still be brought into the world. “Taking care of it” was not an option. Giving
it away was not an option. My only choice, at age 30, as a married woman, was
to raise my child. But I was in no position to do that. Or so it would seem.
God can do a lot with eight months.
I took the second test about four or five days later. It too
came up with an immediate second blue line. This time, I brought Max into the
bathroom before I dipped it in the cup so we could try to approach this in a
more positive way than the first one, but it wasn’t any less scary. I wanted
this to be a fluke. I wanted it to be some chemical imbalance in my body that
would straighten itself out. Still, I had two positive tests and no period. So
I had to treat this the way someone who was planning for a family would treat
it. I cut caffeine, alcohol and a few other things out of my diet. I went to my
OB-GYN and reported the issue. They told me it was too soon to look into it
just yet. They made me an appointment for the end of January. At that point, if
I was pregnant, I’d be nearly eight weeks along. My regular practitioner
ordered a blood test. That too was positive. And by the time I had gotten the
blood test, I was starting to feel very queasy and light headed every day. In
fact, it kicked in at what the doctor considered to be six weeks. At this
point, We were starting to talk to people about it.
Even though I still wished it was a fluke.
The First Ultrasound
January 29th was the consultation with the
OB-GYN. It was not a good day for Max and I, though. It was a very tense day,
actually. Not because of the doctor, but because of anger between us over
various things. Feelings of betrayal from 2017, loss of income, stress about
the future were weighing on us. We paused from the discourse for awhile to go
to the appointment. In the doctor’s office, the technician took us into a room
with a monitor and a machine and prepared us to see what was inside of me. A
“camera” had to be inserted inside of me to find this tiny life force, but there
it was. On the screen we could see the dark space that was my uterus, and in
it, a mass suspended in fluid. It didn’t look human-shaped. It was difficult to
tell what I was seeing, but I knew it was an embryo. It had a tiny
two-chambered heart that was beating steadily on screen. Max took my hand, and
despite the storm going on in our lives, we stared in awe at it for a minute.
The moment faded quickly, unfortunately. While this little
life force was seemingly getting along fine, the doctor found that my left
ovary had some sort of huge mass on it. It was most likely a cyst, but it was
larger than 5cm...enough to be concerning.
Because of that, the doctor wanted to assign me to some
specialists. My emotions were running rampant and my head was spinning, so it
sounded to me like maybe I was going to die or something. The rest of the day
was full of tears and emotion over this. But there was one ray of sunshine and
that was the collection of still pictures I got to take home and magnetize to
the fridge. There was life in my womb and it was only the size of a blueberry,
but it had a heartbeat. And that heartbeat was enough to change my outlook from
“I hope this is a fluke” to “I want you to be alive”.
Second Trimester
I first saw the ultrasound around eight weeks. The second
trimester began at 14 weeks. In just that six-week span of time, from late
January until mid-March, I had began to regain some lost ground. I was able to
leave the hectic temporary retail job with the erratic hours for a less taxing
retail job with more dependable hours. This began around Valentine’s Day. By
the beginning of March, I was also interviewing for a bank job. A bank job is
what I had for nearly six years before and what I had lost in 2017. Since then,
I had been to interviews for five other bank jobs and all had ended in a closed
door. This one looked more promising. By mid-March, there was also far less
discourse between my husband and I, and he had agreed to move his belongings
out of the second bedroom to make half of it a nursery. The other half was
still his office. At twelve weeks, I heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first
time. It was also around twelve weeks that I obtained a second hand crib and
changing table, making this journey seem even more real.
At the fourteen week mark, I was scheduled to see the
specialist for the first time. Their main office was in downtown Jacksonville,
at the very top of a large hospital tower, overlooking the river. The long wait
in the lobby seemed less frustrating because of the view. I was always queasy,
so I snacked on gummy candies and dry cereal for what seemed like hours but it
was only about forty-five minutes. Max and I were called in to talk to someone
in an office. We sat at her desk and answered questions about health history on
both sides, insurance and discussed what they would be monitoring through my
pregnancy. We went across the hall to a darkened room with an ultrasound
machine and television screens. There, we got to see the baby for the second
time. Unlike before, it clearly looked like a baby. Six weeks had made a huge
difference in the growth and development and now this tiny little person with a
huge head was summersaulting and twisting and turning around in my womb, trying
to avoid the ultrasound equipment. From what they could tell, the baby’s
anatomy seemed to be perfect. “Do you want us to tell you the sex?” the
technicians asked us. “You can tell that??” I said, feeling shocked. It was
only fourteen weeks and I knew that generally, the sex couldn’t be determined until
closer to twenty. I looked at Max, asking him if he could keep quiet. I wasn’t
going to have a gender reveal party of any sort until the end of April. That
was the plan. He would have to sit on the knowledge for six more weeks. He
agreed that he could do it. So I told them to go ahead and tell us. They found
an angle where all you could see was part of the baby’s butt and back of one
leg, and pointed to something sticking out in the crotch area. “It’s a baby
boy” She said.
I was open-minded about the baby’s gender. Though I had
daydreamed a bit and pictured my future with a baby girl, I had imagined it
with a boy as well. I had thought of a few names that could belong to either
one. Either way, I knew nothing about parenting and didn’t think I was better
equipped to handle a girl or a boy.
I would have to take it all one day at a time, from the
beginning. I took in the news with an open mind, happy just to know which way
my life was headed: dinosaurs, trucks and superheroes? or frilly dresses and
princesses? Some say that a boy is easier. They are easier going, less
maintenance and easier to raise all around.
God must have seen what was coming ahead in the next several years, and
known this was what Max and I would handle best. Maxwell, on the other hand,
was ecstatic. I think almost every man out there wants a son. He’s a man, so he
knows how to teach someone else to be a man. He wants someone who can carry on
the family name. He wants a protector for the children that come after the
first one. Max was a first-born. This baby would basically follow his same
model in the family dynamic.
The specialist was also there that day to look again at the
cyst. They pulled it up on the screen. It had grown a slight bit, but not
drastically. It measured close to eight centimeters on one side. They told me,
matter-of-factly, that they would keep watching it in the coming months. If it
ballooned quickly or caused me pain, I would need to have it removed while the
baby was still in-utero. If it stayed the same or shrank at all, it could wait
until the baby was born. Eventually, I would need surgery to remove it. I had
known about it for six weeks at this point and I was able to digest it without
crying this time.
A pelvic MRI was ordered for me. Towards the end of April, I
would go to a local imaging center and lie in the claustrophobic tunnel in a
large machine that made so many strange noises while seemingly doing nothing.
It was actually taking x-ray type pictures of the cyst. I was able to see the
pictures on a screen afterward. I could see the baby, suspended upside down
that day, and the outline of his skeleton. I could also see my cyst off to the
side. It was a whitish mass in the picture. “That is all fluid. That’s a good
sign”. The doctor would come back later to reiterate what I was told. It was
mostly fluid, minimal solid matter and nothing that indicated to them it was a
cancerous process. I was temporarily in the clear.
The Big Reveal
The specialist had another office on the very southern
border of Jacksonville, an easy 20 minute drive up I-95 for me. I was able to
go there for the remainder of my appointments. At 18 weeks, in mid-April, I
went for the official anatomy screening. They looked at the baby’s bone
structure, hands and feet, brain, heart and of course a verification that the
other office had been correct about his gender at 14 weeks. They were. Now a
bit bigger and easier to spot on screen, I could see his male parts. By this
time, I had begun organizing a party. My parents and Max’s parents were invited
first. Later, we invited some friends. To make it all easiest, the party was
set for the upstairs in a local restaurant. At lunch time on Saturday, April
28, we would gather everyone around and cut into a cake. Since Max and I knew
the gender, I would make my own cake.
My cake was a special design, a combo of three concepts I
saw on Pinterest. I bought gluten free cake mix for myself and three of the
other guests. Three thick layers of chocolate cake were stacked together on
icing that was blue towards the middle, and white on the outside edges. I cut
out the center of the bottom two layers, and filled the hole with blue
m&m’s. I covered the hole with the top layer, iced the whole cake in white,
and wrote “he or she?” on the top in some blue and some pink icing.
At the event, everyone ordered their meal first. We all
enjoyed lunch, in suspense. The cake was sitting right in the middle of it all.
Finally, when lunch was cleared, I asked for a volunteer. My own mom decided to
volunteer, since she had cut cakes at weddings before I was born. I went around the table and asked everyone
whether they thought it was going to be a “mini-me or a mini-Max”. There were
both sets of parents present as well as Max’s little sister and five friends.
Only two people thought it was a “mini me”. The video was rolling, and she
definitely played on the element of suspense. It took her a good two minutes to
cut the cake properly, especially since it was so thick and had crunchy candies
in the middle. Finally, she removed a hefty slice, and the rest began to kind
of fall open, letting some of the m&m’s slide out. Everyone cheered. “It’s
a mini-Max!” I shouted for the video, but it was barely audible over the
cheering.
Third Trimester
In the months following the reveal, I went to training for
my new job at a bank in Ponte Vedra Beach. I was finally back to a nine to five
with benefits. The bank that hired me despite my pending bankruptcy. The bank
that I was planning to tell about my pregnancy sometime during training, but
that looked me up on Facebook as they were preparing to offer me the job and,
upon finding out my “news”, informed me that they already knew about it but
were still looking forward to my first day with them. For a short time, I kept
the other retail job on the weekends, but quickly tired of working so much. As
summer came on, I had my weekends free again.
In mid-May, my husband inquired with a car dealership that
offered special financing for people going through bankruptcy. I did not expect
it to get anywhere, but somehow Max worked out an agreement that could get us a
brand-new Toyota Corolla if we were willing to pay a little more per month than
someone with good credit. He told me about it one day while I was at work,
saying it was approved. I thought it meant we would go that weekend to a
dealership to test drive cars and, while standing on the lot in the hot sun,
get in arguments about interiors and safety features and then do paperwork for
most of the day. Instead, the man in charge of special financing called Max and
told him they would deliver a car to us that same night. At nearly ten PM on
that stormy night, Max and I went to a McDonald’s to sign a thick stack of
papers and a dark blue-gray Corolla was dropped off to us to take home. It replaced a clunker bought with a minimal
amount of cash from the payout we received when our beloved 2003 Corolla, still
with quite a bit of life left, was totaled by a truck in October 2017.
As June was coming to a close, I entered my third trimester.
I had at this point been free of the all-day queasiness for some time. My belly
was growing and round and no longer just looked like it was bloated. It was
obvious it was a baby, but it was still small enough for me to wear
predominately regular clothes most of the time. In the final week of June, as I
had just passed the third trimester threshold, I had to go to an all-day
training event in Tampa. It was a one-night stay and then I would drive back
home after the training. I decided to go alone, since Max didn’t have a reason
to be in the heart of the big city, there wasn’t money to spend on shopping
which was all there was to do there. It wasn’t long enough for a “vacation”,
and we didn’t want to pay to board his dogs. So he stayed behind. I would sleep
at a hotel alone for one night, but I would see my Lakeland friends for dinner.
It was a little nerve-wracking going back to the hotel to sleep without Max
that night, but I knew my baby was with me, which somehow made it less so.
Everywhere I went, he was with me, like a little best friend.
At this point in the pregnancy, I was looking back at my
attitude when I had found out about him, and lamenting that he didn’t get the
celebration he deserved. I watched
YouTube videos about people who were trying to get pregnant getting to show off
the positive tests to their spouses and the emotional celebrations they shared.
I suddenly felt sad. I couldn’t go back to do it over, but I could celebrate
his life going forward. Next, I watched a few YouTube vlogs by women who lost a
baby. One had lost her baby when she was just weeks from his due date. I felt
sad for them, but also a little afraid. I had wanted this whole thing to be a
fluke when I found out. Now, I knew that if something happened to him and he
didn’t make it into the world alive, I would be devastated. But God hadn’t planned
for me to go through that, and I thanked Him every day for sparing me from
that, especially after the painful things that I had been through in my
marriage. The baby would keep on growing, kicking, moving and his heart would
stay strong every time they listened to it at the doctor’s office.
As July approached, I received a rhogam shot. It was
determined that I had rh-negative blood and that it could be a risk to the
baby’s health. Rhogam would protect him from our blood mixing in an emergency
situation, resulting in his tiny body getting attacked by my immune system.
Somewhere around that timeframe, I also saw the specialist for another monthly
visit. They looked at my cyst, and were happy to report that it looked smaller.
It was shrinking some and my ovary could be seen for the first time. The cyst
hadn’t engulfed it.
July came and went without incident. We would have a cookout
at my friend’s house for July 4th, which was my 30-week mark. At the
end of the month, our bankruptcy would be discharged. We were given a clean
slate. August came and went. On the 14th, I was given a surprise
baby shower by my coworkers. It was a huge blessing since my family was in
other cities and states and my local friends had hectic lives that were
preventing them from planning a big event. My job had only been in my life for
four months at this point, and they already felt like a family. At the end of
August, I celebrated turning 31. It was on my 38-week mark. The opportunity to
meet my baby was right around the corner.
I had a large baby bump, but not so massive that I could not
walk around or function fairly normally. I had succeeded at not gaining weight
much of anywhere else. But I had gained weight. When I found out I was
pregnant, I was barely 100 lbs. I was profoundly underweight for me. By the end
of the pregnancy, I topped out at 145 lbs. I had put on more than 40 lbs., but
I was only about 25 lbs. over my normal healthy weight. Women would call me out
in public left and right saying I looked “amazing” or “so cute”. It was a new
kind of self-esteem boost.
Labor day weekend arrived, but instead of relaxing I
was thrust headlong into a
home-reorganization project that Max came up with. Without me asking for it, he
decided to surrender the rest of the second bedroom. His big computer desk
would be moved into the living room. Another computer desk would be
consolidated and removed from the dining room. Book shelves would be moved
around, boxes of items he was storing would be stowed away. He would remove his
clothes and bins of personal items from the closet in the room and put them in
other closets. By Labor Day itself, the entire second bedroom was my baby’s.
The crib and changing table stayed by the far wall, but I could spread out his
various bouncers and a baby gym I was given. A play pen was set up on the
opposite wall, by the door. In the corner, we placed a gliding rocking chair.
It was white with denim fabric. We had to drive half an hour to Palm Coast to a
vast, winding suburbia to claim it from the mother who’s children had outgrown
it. She only wanted a mere $30 for it. Pictures were hung up on the walls in
the nursery. The closet was filled with boxes of diapers and extra blankets and
pillows. My mother-in-law had sent the mobile for the crib, it was made of
spinning fabric stars. The nursery was done.
The big day
Maternity leave began, per my design, a few days prior to my
due date. This was a precaution in case of strange early labor symptoms or
other complications. It was not technically necessary as I had none, but a few
days to tie up loose ends was a blessing. My due date was Wednesday, September
12. I had a check-up with my OB-GYN that day, also per my design. He determined
that there were a few signs that labor was imminent, like my cervix beginning
to dilate. But there weren’t enough signs yet. And I was very uncomfortable.
The baby was full term, there was no need to worry. He wanted to see me be
induced. This meant the element of surprise would be almost completely removed
from the process.
It has always been a bit of entertaining suspense trying to
guess the arrival date of other people’s babies. You can make a game of betting
on it. When it’s your own baby, however, there are so many more serious things
to think about and it’s not so fun of a game anymore. “Where will I be when my
water breaks? Will I suddenly be in excruciating labor pain in the middle of
the night? Will I have time to get everything together and go to the hospital?
What about the dogs? They have to be taken to the boarding facility. I can’t
have that slowing us down.” For someone like myself who worries habitually, it
is not so fun. Inducing the baby would take the Christmas-morning-like
anticipation of “when does God say it is time?” out but it would also take the
guesswork out. For me, that was a
perfect solution.
The doctor left the room for a few minutes to make a phone
call, then returned and told us that he wanted me to go to the hospital at 8:00
in the morning the next day (September 13) to be induced. Was this really it?
We spent the rest of the day cleaning, taking the dogs to be boarded and
loading what we needed for the hospital stay into the car. At the end of the
day, we drove out to south Jacksonville to pick up a giant bean bag chair that
we would lounge on in the living room when we returned with the baby. We went
to bed fairly early, and I remember thinking “this is really it, am I really
ready to be a mother?” But I would not really have too much time to mull this
over in my mind since the process was set to begin less than twelve hours
later.
Very early on Thursday morning, when it was still dark, my
phone rang. I didn’t answer it but I got up to use the bathroom and saw a
voicemail notification. The hospital had called and asked me to call them back.
So I did. I was not even really awake. A coordinator from labor and delivery informed
me that too many women had come in during the night in natural labor, which
took priority over inductions. There wasn’t room for me until later in the day.
I felt stressed about it, but hoped for the best. Later I called to check back
in again and they informed me that my doctor wanted me to go in very early on
Friday instead. She said 2:00 am. I wasn’t sure I was up to it, because this
would mean not really sleeping the night before. She asked if 4:00 would work.
I agreed to it. I would have to get up at 3:00, but that for me seemed more
do-able than practically staying up all night.
I now had Thursday with everything in the trunk for my stay, no dogs for
my husband to take care of and nothing to do. I was frustrated, stressed but
also in a strange way relieved. It meant I had one more day to think about
everything that was happening and really process it. We had a big breakfast at Metro Diner. We
took a walk on the beach where the waves were huge and aggressively crashing
onto the shore because of a distant hurricane Florence making its way up the
coast. We went to Target for a minute. Then we went home and spent the
afternoon watching TV and sitting on our giant beanbag. Our very last evening
“just the two of us”.
Friday at around 3:00 in the morning, my phone rang again. I
was immediately stressed. “Not again” I said, imagining they would tell me that
I had to wait until Monday now. The coordinator asked if I would come at 6:00
instead of 4:00. I was more than grateful to get to sleep until 5:00. Two more
hours of sleep were just what I would need to get by. When 5:00 am arrived, the
phone alarm went off. I had been asleep but not so deeply that I needed to
snooze. I jumped out of bed. As I went to the bathroom to get ready, I realized
I felt dizzy and a bit weak. I didn’t know if it was anxiety or something to do
with the pregnancy. I was losing my “plug”, which meant perhaps without
induction, I might have gone into labor in a few days on my own. We got dressed
and I ate a protein bar as we got out the door. It would still be dark when we
arrived at the hospital.
We checked in, got into our room, and I was soon clad in
only an oversized gown and very thin underwear. The day ahead was exciting and
terrifying at the same time. Even getting induced, some women still take over
30 hours to finally give birth. The day flew by. Before I knew it, I was
pushing. I was pushing and pushing and the doctor and Max and the nurse could
see the top of the baby’s head and I was pushing so hard it was a wonder that
my insides weren’t flying like projectiles out of various places but I was
grateful that they weren’t. Perhaps my body was made for this after all. I kept
pushing and then just like that.... he
was here.
I wasn’t trying to get pregnant. In fact, for most of my
20’s I was hoping to tiptoe through my prime years and out the other side
without contracting baby fever. Allow me to prove that “God’s got this”. I
wound up “with child” by accident, but I don’t want my son to think of himself
as an “accident”, so I’ve continuously referred to him as a “surprise”. As this
surprise pregnancy progressed, I looked at the world around me and realized
that there were women everywhere who were experiencing every obstacle in their
journeys to motherhood. There were women who desperately wanted babies, but
miscarried over and over before finally carrying to term. There were women who
had to have in-vitro. There were women who carried a baby almost to term, but
had a stillbirth. A few carried a healthy baby, but the birth went wrong and
the baby wound up with some type of injury. There were women who had preemies,
women who were put on bed rest and women who suffered internal injuries from
pregnancy. I am not by any means suggesting that I am better than any of these
people. Nor am I suggesting that God wasn’t walking with them through their
journeys. I am just realizing how blessed that I have been, as a person prone
to anxiety and worry, to have had a fairly normal and healthy pregnancy. Somehow,
through this whole process, I always knew that he was healthy and I was meant
to have him. And now he’s here, and now a
skeptic who never planned to have children can’t imagine life without him.
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