Final Reflections on Little t's Birth

Sorry I am slow in finishing up reflections on Little t's birth...we have had internet issues here...Here are some final reflections I wanted to share.

Two years ago, I held my first child for the first time after a whirlwind labor and delivery.  I had been waiting 8 months for this moment, but still was not ready for the weight and beauty of him being placed on my chest.  There he was, in all of his sticky glory, much much larger than life. 

It blows me away to watch him now and realize how far we have come.  He socialized like a pro with a group of 15 adults tonight; ate chips, danced to Michael Jackson, gave kisses and said goodbye to every single person at the end of the night.  He is such a little man and it makes me smile big. 

He has taught me so much and I am so thankful for that.  So much patience and humility and grace have been lacking in my life. Each day with him I am reminded of how much better/more loving/nicer/gentler I could be…especially if I gained a lot more of that patience and humility and grace. 

I can definitely say that parenting is nothing that I thought it would be.  It is better in so many ways, but has completely destroyed me in others.  Our flexible, adventurous ways have routinely been put on a halt for a child who craves order and consistency and his own bed.  My drive toward perfectionism has been dashed as each day he messes up the norm (I think usually on purpose just to irk me) and makes me put my perfect ideas and plans on hold for what really is…a beautiful mess. 

As I reflect on these two years, there are too many lessons and thoughts to share here, but I wanted to quickly share my reflections from the days after Little t was born…being that it is Christmas and they were so significant to me at the time. I find myself reflecting on them often these days. 

As you read in Little t’s birth story here, here and here, things didn’t exactly go as planned. That was hard for us.  As deliriously happy as we were to have our beautiful boy with us, wrapping our head around reality was a challenge.  Suddenly, we had to come up with baby stuff (all of ours was 13 hours away), we had to deal with the nightmare of hospital billing and insurance, we had to find a place to live, we had to try to get into the Christmas spirit, and not to mention deal with a baby who wasn’t getting the hang of nursing and was slow take a bottle.

10 very stress-filled days spent in the hospital with our baby boy in the nursery wasn’t exactly in my ideal birth story.  I found myself discouraged and defiant and tired (so very tired)….and sad.  I felt like a failure as a mother – I couldn’t figure out to how to nurse the kid and even when I did consent to giving him a bottle he couldn’t take that.  One of the two times that I left the hospital in those 10 days, the nurse called to say that Little t had woken up early and was screaming hungry.  She wanted permission to start his bottle early and then I could try to nurse him when I got there.  I missed the call.  She was not happy, Little t was not happy, I felt awful. 

Every three hours one or both of us would walk down to the nursery to feed Little t. Sometimes at night I would have A.P. go and I would just pump and go back to bed instead of both nursing him and pumping (an ordeal that took about 1 ½ hours…leaving me about an hour to sleep before I woke up to do it again).  We were so tired, but determined to get the kid to eat. Eventually he came around and slowly began to take the bottle and nurse.

In those days I thought a lot about Mary. It was Christmas, after all and that is what you do, right? I found myself relating a lot to her situation.  So alone and clueless. stuck in a strange land, trying to get the hang of this Mom thing.  I found myself identifying with her in that it wasn’t exactly the way I had planned to welcome my first child into the world. I kinda doubt that as she grew up playing house, she role-played getting pregnant out of wedlock (by God, no less) traveling by donkey to some strange land and giving birth without any family around in a stable. Maybe she did have a vivid imagination though… I know that ‘her soul magnifies the Lord’, but part of me has to think that the human part of her wondered what she had gotten herself into.

The more I reflected on this, the more bitter I became about it. I mean, really.  Haven’t I done enough already?  We work where we work and sacrifice a lot to do it.  We love it and find great joy in what we do, but it is still hard.  Shouldn’t I have at least earned a good/easy labor and delivery (I got that) and adjustment into life with this kid?  I was a little irked at God to be honest.  Where was the break I felt I deserved for being a good person, for being someone who serves Him, for being…me. 

As the days passed and I wore a path in the carpet between my hospital room and the nursery, the plight of Mary haunted me all the more.  The more I thought about her, the more God brought the faces of women from this country to mind. A thought began to pester me. 

“Why, T do you think you deserve any better than these women? Why should you get an easy, clean, fancy birth and then skip home with your perfect baby while they struggle to survive and count it a miracle if their children live past a few days?  What makes you so special?”

God deeply broke me in those days as I realized my vulnerability and who I really was.  He spoke to me a lot about walls I had put up around myself. These walls were mental/emotional/psychological and in essence put up to create distance between me and the very women who were my neighbors and potential friends.  He reminded me of times when I had acted better than them…usually without even consciously doing it. 

I began to realize that the beauty of Mary was that she was an ordinary woman and God used her because of that…not in spite of that.  As I sat there in that hospital, at one of the most broken and vulnerable points of my life, God began to speak Truth about my situation. Yes it was hard and frustrating and discouraging, but it also gave me something.

It deepened my story and my experience. The wounds weren’t something to cover up, but to share with others and make efforts to pursue healing together.  God began to help me realize that those days were a gift to me in order to better serve.  I could now cry tears of pain and frustration along-side mothers and know what they were going through.  My tears would no longer be sorrow only felt for them, but sorrow shared with them. For that I became deeply grateful.

And God also used that time to show me hope.  God seemed to say, “take your broken pieces and help others mend. Use this time to not only weep with other women, but help them find healing. Take every tidbit you have learned in late night feedings, with the lactation consultant, in the books you have read and put it into practice for those who can’t do it themselves.”  My deep interest in women’s health and midwifery was opened up to include breastfeeding as well. Obviously, I need a LOT more training and experience to adequately help, but I do what I can and look forward to getting more training in the future. 

I look back on the first few months of Little t’s life and am profoundly grateful for them. They were so painful and vulnerable and intimate. I was humbled deeply and challenged to the core. 

Please don’t read this and hear me saying, “waah, waah, woe is me! My life has been terrible.” I really hope it doesn’t come off as that.  I know that our situation was nothing compared to the pain that others go through.  I sit here fully acknowledging that when I talk about being able to weep with women because I have experienced what they are going through, my experience is miniscule in relation to their hurts and hardships.  Not a day goes by that I am not smacked full in the face by the issues of the poor and suffering around me.  And each day that smack stings with the reality that I will never fully grasp what it is to walk in their shoes.  And honestly, that leaves me speechless, and sad, and thankful. 

The biggest thing I learned is how normal and undeserving I am.  I had never realized how special I thought I was. Like I said, earlier, it was usually unintentional and something I didn’t even cognitively grasp, but my life and actions reeked of selfishness and thinking I deserved better than the next person.  That vulnerable place of having a child (and the situation surrounding that) has taught me so much about putting others first, about what it truly means to serve. 

I am reminded this year of how undeserving I am as I think about the One who gave me the ultimate Gift.  How did I get so lucky? A no one like me…given a beautiful family, an amazing life, health, happiness…and most of all – the gift of Hope.  I guess Love has a lot more to do with it than luck does.