“He was nowhere to be found. I grabbed the house phone and realized the telephone cable was pulled from the jack. I started to get worried. He finally called, he was on his way home. ‘My friend needed to borrow some money. I went to the bank to withdraw $200 for him.’ Something wasn’t right. I checked the last 5 numbers dialed. One of them I didn’t recognize, so I called it back. It was a woman.”
“The ultrasound tech went silent. ‘Will I be getting my pictures today?’ I asked. I was in such a good mood. ‘No. If there was anything there, I would’ve shown you. There’s nothing.’ She was so heartless, her tone dry. I felt dizzy. I held my husband close, tears rolling down my face. He convinced me to get my nails done to distract my mind.”
“I cut my budget and lived off of less than a third of my monthly salary. (Turns out, packing lunches and not taking Ubers can save you a ton.) I worked multiple jobs at once, my day job and then side hustles. I walked dogs until my feet literally bled. In the cold. In the rain. In the heat. Nothing was beneath me. I babysat. I cat sat. I stayed up for 24 hours straight.”
“Senior year of high school. I felt sick. It spiraled completely out of control. I’m sniffing heroin and smoking crack cocaine like it’s going to get me into Harvard or something. I looked at my father and told him, ‘I need help.’ My dad wanted nothing to do with me, he was done. That really hurt.”
“This morning I was running around like a chicken without her head. ‘Peter is it really only 38 more months?’ A sadness came over me, but my mom brain was busy ticking off my daily to do list, thinking his bus really does pick him up ridiculously early for a school day that doesn’t start till 7:55.”
“We are supported to teach our kids to dream. But their dream is a cure. Firefighter, pilot. ‘Too risky,’ we tell them. The anxiety of death is real. Instead, we train them to get a job with ‘good benefits,’ a conversation no parent should be having with an 11 year old. You’ll find us at 3 a.m., wide awake, just trying to keep our child alive.”
“I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen my grandma emotional. 50 years after she lost her baby, she sat across from her two granddaughters and bravely told the story through teary eyes. Her face was glowing, every emotion so pronounced. 50 years later, and my ferociously strong and stubborn grandma is still grieving. You and I will grieve our babies forever, too.”
“We rushed into the emergency room. I was bleeding so badly I thought I was going to die right there in the hospital alone. My husband was stuck checking me in for what seemed like forever. The events that happened next took place so fast, but as I look back on it now, the initial care I was given makes me so mad and sad. Once she finally realized the severity of what was happening, she ran for back up. I wanted to follow him right up to heaven. I begged God to take me too.”
“When I walked in, he looked at me. I could see the fear in his eyes. He whispered through his tears, ‘I’m scared, I don’t want to go.’ Everything in me wanted to protect him, to hug him and tell him he could stay. That we could figure this out together. With tears streaming down my face and a strength I never knew I had, I said, ‘You have to go.’”
“‘Are you SURE?’ I asked the doc, reading the report. ‘It would be like being struck by lightening TWICE. He’s fine.’ They were wrong. He was SICK. Sicker than any baby I’d seen. I walked into the PICU bathroom, shut the door. I screamed, moaned, punched the mirror, and cried the guttural tears of a mother who already knew how the story ends, because she’d lived it before. I was reliving my worst nightmare.”
