Experience

Over the last nine weeks, people - the social worker in the hospital, nurses, strangers, my mom, my husband - have told me I'm an amazing mom; that I'm stronger than they could be; that they could never do what I do every day. I just want to clarify: I'm not amazing. I don't possess incredible human strength. I just have an undying love for the tiny human I carried in me for 28 weeks and 4 days. I don't feel like I've done anything out of the ordinary. I just feel like a mom who is doing everything in her power to care for her son. 

Don't get me wrong - I know this path to motherhood has had bumps and turns and detours, and it's the most challenging thing I've ever experienced. But that does not make me extraordinary. It makes me a mother. 

My path has crossed with fellow NICU mothers who have had it much worse than we have - ventilators, resuscitation, seizures, living hours away from their newest love, not being allowed to hold the part of their heart that left their body. For that I am grateful. If it wasn't for the inspiring stories of these women who have seen their child pounced on by respiratory therapists trying to get a breath exhaled, or stayed nights in an armchair at the bedside following a major abdominal surgery I would have fallen apart long ago. But if these women can keep their daily vigil up for months on end with the scariest circumstances, I can definitely handle driving fifteen minutes to hold and feed my very healthy baby for fifteen (or more) hours a day. 

I have no hard feelings toward God, or the doctors, or myself for our current situation. Jack is the best thing that has happened to our life, irregardless of him coming at term or twelve weeks early.

I so look forward to the day I can bring my little man home, and I pray everyday for the mothers and fathers who never got that chance. We are so blessed to have the medical advances that saved my life, and the life of our baby. 

The prophet Joseph Smith once said, "I should never get discouraged, whatever difficulties should surround me, if I was sunk in the lowest pit of Nova Scotia and all the Rocky Mountains piled on top of me, I ought not to be discouraged but hang on, exercise faith and keep up good courage and I should come out on the top of the heap."

That is the attitude I'm trying to have. 

"..All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good." (D&C 122:7-8)