Love What Matters Makes The 2018 Chartbeat List Of Most Engaging Stories – Twice
In February, we launched Love What Matters with the dream of building a community around hope, support, compassion, healing and …
‘YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS.’ I decided enough was enough. Now, I was really scared. Here I am, 19 years old, with a kid – a special needs kid at that – and totally alone.’
“I go to check on Jason before bed. I find him – twitching and unresponsive. I run downstairs, yelling at my dad to call 911. Little did we know, he wouldn’t make it back for his last week of school.”
-‘My honest thought when I first saw her was, ‘It wasn’t supposed to be this bad.’ The nurses were silent. Emmy was silent. It was eerie and terrifying.’
“I told my husband something was wrong and they weren’t telling us. When she finally came back after what felt like an eternity, all she said was the doctor was waiting for us. I could hardly get on my feet.”
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‘SAY IT RIGHT NOW – Say the nice stuff, the uplifting stuff, the encouraging stuff, the emotional stuff. Pick up the phone. Start texting. Drive to their house.’
“I was filled with so much regret afterwards that I’d waited until after he was gone. Why do we wait? Why do we have such a hard time telling people what they mean to us?”
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‘Mommy, when will I have a sister?,’ she asked. As my eyes welled up with tears, I said, ‘I don’t know honey. You’ll have to talk to God about that.’
“Although I was pregnant with what I believed to be a baby girl, I knew I wouldn’t be for much longer. Shortly before dropping my daughter off at school that morning, my water had broken.”
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‘The doctor knelt beside my bed with our baby. ‘There are things I want to point out to you.’ Those words hit me hard. ‘No she’s perfect. That’s not possible – she was already tested for that.’
“This was not how it was supposed to be. I was grieving the perfect baby I had in my head for 10 months. I felt pity for not only myself, but her. I wanted to know ‘why us?’”
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‘As I looked in the mirror, I immediately started critiquing myself. Then I heard my daughter tell my husband, ‘She really IS Wonder Woman.’ My heart just stopped.’
“I go to bed and beat myself up for all the things I didn’t do perfectly that day. They go to bed with smiles, and I fall asleep with a panic attack. I see scars everywhere from the life I’ve survived.”
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‘The first thing he wrote down was, ‘Was it my fault?’ I ran out of the room to get his mom. We all took a deep breath.’
“His coworker saw one of their work trucks in a bad accident on the highway. My heart started to race, and I frantically continued to call Brian over and over again. Still no answer.”
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‘I’m finally happy, and now I’m going to die?’ I was losing blood from somewhere. My heart sank. I was terrified. All I could think about were my children and my husband.’
“My periods were out of control, I did nothing but bleed constantly. I would fill overnight pads within an hour. I stayed in pain, it was unbearable. My husband came home on his lunch and found me doubled over in the floor, unable to move.”
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‘To the 18 year old kid I stopped, you were minutes away from an unspeakable Christmas tragedy. If not only killing yourself, you were on your way to killing an innocent person.’
“You said you didn’t realize how fast you were going. That’s a lie. You were scared when I stopped you. You were visibly shaking and breathing hard. Unfortunately, you were scared for the wrong reason.”
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‘Mommy! I’m going to ask Santa for a baby in your belly!’ Doing all I could to keep it together, I replied, ‘That may be a hard promise for him to keep.’
“‘Well,’ she paused. ‘Five days is a long time. If it were me, I’d want to know.’ I could not get her words out of my head. I purchased the finest pregnancy tests 8 quarters could buy.”
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