Reflecting on our journey so far

 The following was originally written on September 30, 2021 while we were still patiently but eagerly waiting for Ian to come home from the NICU.

Hearing Difficult Things

“Normally at this point, we would terminate the pregnancy,” those are the words that echoed in my mind and haunted me as I went from 21 weeks pregnant with my water broke to 26 weeks and 2 days seeing my precious boy born healthy and doing all he could to breathe on his own and cry, albeit almost 4 months early as a micro preemie.

A need to be saved

I was the one who needed being saved. Saved from a warped idea of what pregnancy and motherhood should be. Saved from a lack of knowledge about what many babies go through just to get home. Saved from my own fears and anxiety about being a mom. It was through this journey with Ian that I was saved from most of those things as I trusted and hoped in God each step of the way.

The truth is, I had always been hesitant to be ready for parenting. Years ago I would look on at babies like they were somehow something so delicate that I needed to have a college degree in childcare just to be safe enough to hold one. I was intimidated by babies in a way, and even more by their somehow all-knowing mothers who seemed to have it all together. 

Boy was I wrong about a lot of things. I didn’t realize it until I was pregnant with Ian and faced many uncertainties, discomforts, and trials just to see him born, and then watch him grow over the months in the NICU. I really began to appreciate the amazing lives of babies fighting for their lives, not as fragile little humans that probably couldn’t think about big things, but as tiny but mighty warriors dressed in the tubes and wires of a NICU veteran who had overcome so much before even being born and then fought his or her way to the very end. I began to really understand what the NICU is, and the people who worked there were not just working but also fighting for the babies, and the parents were just as scared and uncertain as me and my husband were when we arrived - but oh, how wonderful it was to see when parents were by their baby’s bedside and especially when they were getting to go home with their sweet baby.

But that was just the thing that hurt. We didn’t see parents all the time. We didn’t see families going home often. We heard alarms going off for other babies and nurses running frantically to them, the whole room filled with nurses and doctors, trying to help revive a baby who was having a hard time.

The NICU is a rough place to be. It’s a place of difficulty, but it’s also a place of victory. It’s a place of loss, but also of gain. It’s a place of grief and also of joy. Everyone who has stepped into the NICU has their own story to tell, and should, because we all could learn something from it.

Acts against the most innocent 

What I really want to share is how it makes absolutely no sense in the world to abort a baby even at 21 weeks when my son is living proof that he was fully alive even then. 

Anyone who considers an abortion to be completely acceptable at any time of the pregnancy needs to walk through the halls of the NICU and hear every parents’ story. They need to talk to the nurses and doctors who are there in the nitty gritty and there when there’s cause for celebration.

(This portion was added December 30, 2023)

As we live in a world that seems to be more and more divided, and more and more relentless in trying to tear the family unit apart, we need to be fighting harder for the innocent lives of babies - whether in the womb alive or already born into the world - as they are the most vulnerable and most innocent of people. 

Our journey post-NICU has taught us very difficult lessons about how being a parent is more than just bringing life into the world, listening to the doctors and doing the basic things of caring for a child. We had to fight for our son even while medical professionals thought they knew what was best, and we had to be our son’s advocate because he had no voice or words to speak on his behalf. 

For those who think that the world would be better without children, they need to go to China and see the implications of their one-child policy from years gone by. For those who think that we are doing our baby a disservice by letting them be born into a world full of bad things, I would say that the world has always been full of bad things but where would it be if those people who have influenced and changed the world for good had a parent who decided that their baby shouldn’t be born? Our world should be left better than we came into it; we should be full of hope that our child will be the next Einstein or Edison, the next person to lead us to greater good.