Grief Blessings (eBook)

Chapter 2

Motherhood

A baby is born. She is perfect. Ten fingers, ten toes, skin soft as rose petals. A bundle of love and hope. A world of possibilities all held within that tiny body, those delicate features. When we experience the miraculous blessing of childbirth, we don’t imagine what could happen or what we might do if the baby we have longed for might become ill or, worse, die. It is a time of celebration, occupied by staring at this new life we have created with increasing love that we never thought possible.

Life can take some difficult and unfortunate turns. It is during those difficulties that we find out we don’t control what will happen, only how we react to adversity. When I think back about the time I tried to get pregnant, I am in awe that it ever happened. It seemed like it took an eternity. I had experienced difficult and sometimes painful infertility tests for over a year, and eventually it became clear that getting pregnant naturally was not going to happen. One day I had just had enough of the painful testing and the medication that made me feel out of control. I watched my cycles closely every month, and every month my period came. I was just coming to the realization that I may not be able to ever have children, when a few months later, I found out I was pregnant. I was shocked. I did two pregnancy tests just to be sure. Sure enough, it had finally happened. I was going to have a baby!

My pregnancy was wonderful but uneventful in the beginning. In April 1988, when I was about four months pregnant, my mom told me she was having a lump in her breast checked out over one of our many long-distance phone calls. I didn’t worry about it at the time. We’d been down this road many times before, and always the results had turned out benign. However, this time was different. Days after her appointment, she called me to tell me it was cancer, and she was going to have a mastectomy. I traveled home from Texas to Indiana to see her in the hospital post-surgery, and something just didn’t seem right with her. To me, the incision wasn’t healing properly. However, her doctor sent her home anyway and said he’d follow up with her in his office. Once all the pathology came back, she would begin chemotherapy. Reluctantly, I traveled back to Texas, looking forward to the baby’s birth in five months and having my mom come spend time with us to help me adjust to being a mom myself.

During several phone conversations over the next few weeks, I noticed that her speech seemed slower, often slurred to the point I’d have to ask her to repeat herself. I spoke to her husband, who said she seemed tired a lot and was sleeping a great deal of the day. Then one day a month or so later, I received a call from a nurse who clearly knew my mom, which I found odd. It was in that call that I heard the words I never thought I’d hear so soon in my life.

“Your mother is doing poorly,” the nurse said, “and I think you need to come.”

I found out later that she’d been taken to the hospital because her husband was concerned she was “unresponsive.” At the hospital, the team of doctors and nurses worked on her fervently, but the prognosis wasn’t good. Finally, one of the doctors told me the hard truth: She was within days of dying. My knees practically buckled, almost dropping me to the floor, seven-month pregnant belly and all. How could this be? The oncologist explained that her cancer had spread to her brain, bones, and liver, which explained her current state. I’m still not exactly clear about what happened between her mastectomy and chemo treatment. It didn’t add up for me, and I suppose I’ll never really know what happened.

I arrived on her 48th birthday, and three days later, on September 16, 1988, I watched her take her last breath. I sat by her side for hours, telling her it was OK to go. That the baby and I would be all right without her. That we would miss her, but we didn’t want her to suffer. This was what the hospice nurse told me I needed to tell her because she was holding on. It was the hardest day of my life so far. Numb and in disbelief, I said goodbye, picked out her coffin, arranged her funeral, and left home without my mom, forever.

My mother was my best friend and confidant. We talked almost daily, and she was my role model for everything a mother should be. She’d accomplished so much in her life with almost nothing. She’d given birth to seven children and raised six of us with little to no help from our father. Often, she worked three jobs to make ends meet, her struggles all focused on keeping us off welfare and in our home. She never knew that through it all she was instilling in me that, as a woman, I could achieve whatever I wanted, no matter the obstacles, if I simply gave my all.

How do I become a mom myself, having just lost my own? I need her now more than ever.

I spent the last two months of my pregnancy in a fog of depression. I don’t remember much about that time, other than I was so struck with grief that I didn’t eat much or even speak for two months. I just sat in my baby’s nursery, rocking in the rocker I’d bought not too long ago with all the joy and anticipation of an expectant mother, and stared blindly into space. Finally, my OB intervened by telling me I needed to quit thinking about my mom and start thinking about my baby. So, I did. I forced myself to prepare for the arrival of my baby, my heart hopeful that I’d learned enough from my own mother to be a good mother myself.

Brittany

November 19, 1988, was my estimated delivery date, but the baby had other ideas. The evening before my 42nd week, November 29 in the evening hours, I went into labor. After 12 hours of an extreme up and down labor, the nurse said I had a fever, and it was beginning to influence the baby’s heart rate. In addition, I was not progressing past 9½ centimeters. It became apparent that a cesarean section was the only way to deliver my baby safely.

My doctor had told me that the baby was a boy, but as it turned out (I am sure by divine intervention!), I had a beautiful baby girl. I remember being shocked in the delivery room when my doctor announced, “Congratulations, it’s a girl!” I was sure that God had His hand in this because having a girl was all I ever wanted. I grew up with boys, boys, and more boys. Having a daughter was everything. When I held my newborn daughter in my arms for the first time, all I could think about was how much I loved this tiny creature. How perfect she was. How overwhelmingly beautiful it is that the heart can love so much so quickly.

Brittany. My daughter. My joy. My aching heart, still bruised from my mother’s death only a few months ago, felt a little lighter. Here was her legacy, and my opportunity to honor everything that she’d done for me.

Once home and recovering, I developed a post-operative infection. This required daily visits to the doctor’s office, baby in tow, for wound cleaning and dressings for three long and difficult weeks. It seemed like it was taking an incredibly long time to recover, and on top of all that I was unbelievably lonely. I lived far away from my hometown and from friends and family. I was still reeling emotionally from my mother’s death and the trauma of childbirth. Nursing was not going well, and after six weeks we converted to bottle feeding just to ensure Brittany was receiving adequate nutrition. Eventually, it all took a toll on my health, and I began to lose too much weight.

In hindsight, I had all the signs and symptoms of post-partum depression. Nevertheless, I had a baby to take care of, so that’s what I did. Over the next 10 months, Brittany began to grow and flourish despite several months of colic, any parent’s worst nightmare. For me, sleep deprivation was the norm. Nonetheless, things smoothed out, and Brittany grew into a healthy and funny baby. Her personality began to form, and even then, it was clear she had a funny and entertaining side to her that I’d come to cherish later in her life.

Brittany had this way of making you smile, even when you didn’t want to, and during those first months as a new mother there were certainly times when I didn’t feel like smiling. The moment she heard music, she would dance, clinging to furniture with her tiny, chubby hands as she steadied herself on wobbly legs. Her laughter would fill a room, her free spirit echoing against the walls and permeating your soul. She was such a happy baby as she grew and approached her first birthday. I remember shopping for a fresh cut Christmas tree right before her first birthday. She was standing in the shopping cart, smiling, laughing, and dancing throughout the entire store. When someone would walk past us, she would turn on the charm, and they would stop and talk to her, which only encouraged her to continue her shenanigans. I’m sure she knew perfectly well that she could wrap people around her little finger with just a smile and a laugh.

She was around 11 months old when Brittany developed a high fever that we could not get under control at home. I had no idea at the time that it was an event that would change our lives forever and place us on a course we never could have imagined. After several frustrating phone calls to the pediatrician, she advised us to take Brittany to the emergency room. Once we arrived, it was clear the doctor was surprised to see that she was, indeed, very ill. She was having tiny seizures, possibly from the high fever, and she was making very weird movements throughout her body. They kept her in the ER for approximately...