We have a corner in our living room that is surrounded by a catch-all bookcase and a computer-desk turned TV stand. Everything gets stuck in there. I am trying to be less cluttered in my life, so I decided to clean it out yesterday. I laid Kevin down on a blanket next to me, turned on Tangled (this is the first time I've turned on a movie to entertain her and not me), and got to work filing all the papers back there. I ended up with nine folders--all labelled something prefaced by "baby" or "pregnancy"--and a little bit of flashback anxiety.
I came across one of the booklets that "teaches" you how to handle having a baby in the NICU. I remember flipping through it during one of my many pumping sessions at the Ronald McDonald House while the NICU at Primary Children's was closed. Then, I was in survival mode. Yesterday, I was in "I am going to face this and get over it" mode. Whenever I think back to those three weeks of having our baby girl in the hospital, I sort of get a mini panic attack. I'm only starting to realize how tough it was and how completely NOT over it I am. Some days I forget about what happened, because she is just SO healthy and happy. Other days I remind myself because I really don't want to forget what I learned there.
A friend told me that having a baby in the NICU brings and maturity and a softness that new moms can't get any other way. I believe her. Her first baby was in the NICU for 11 days and on oxygen for a month longer when he went home. Last week he got a little brother that got to come home 24 hours after he was delivered! I couldn't be happier for their family. She said that she didn't realize the nurses left the baby in your room all night. I imagine this new little guy is a whole new ball game. She's finally getting to go to Italy.
It makes me wonder if we will ever get to go there--not Italy, the country, but Italy the metaphorical "everything goes as planned" method of having a baby (see Emily Pearl Kingsley's Welcome to Holland). I am prepared (or at least I tell myself I am prepared) for the reality that with my diabetes, I will probably only ever have NICU babies (it takes IDM babies a while to get their blood sugar regulated on their own). I'm hoping we won't have to spend 24 days there with other other kids like we did with Kevin, but in reality I might not ever get a brand-new baby that sounds like a crying kitten staying in the same hospital room as me.
I guess this leads me to what I've really been thinking about this evening. Sometimes our life doesn't go as planned.
Hah.
That's an understatement.
Maybe it is better to say, "sometimes life doesn't go as dreamed" or "the timeline of my life isn't the tempo I'd like to dance to." In the end, though, when a few weeks or months or years or decades have passed, we see the wisdom of God's timing. When I look back on the things in my life that I wouldn't have chosen (like not kissing a boy until I was almost 21 or coming home in the middle of my LDS mission or graduating from college a full 6.5 years after graduating high school) I see that everything happened when I needed it to happen. Sometimes it was hard to accept the end of an era (like that fantastic junior year of college where I constantly lived and breathed fun for the first time in my life) and sometimes it was even more difficult to accept the beginning of a new one (like realizing that I can't ever go back to not being diabetic).
Right now, I am at the beginning of one of my favorite chapters of my life so far--being a mom. This chapter didn't start at all the way I had planned, but it is a better story and I am a better character because of our unanticipated early beginning. I've learned that sometimes life is a choose your own adventure story--but sometimes you also have to be wise enough to recognize that storylines end and storylines begin in the middle of a book. Nobody wants to keep reading a book where the main character only lives in the past.
So I am filing away the NICU booklet and focusing on my healthy girl. And when we end up in Holland again someday I will take in every detail, count my blessings, and be grateful to leave.
I saw this little saying in a store today. Love it. Photo Credit HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment