“That morning, I picked up my mom for a routine dental cleaning. As usual, she was happy to see me. Nothing stood out as odd. She joked with the receptionist about me and walked out the door with a smile. As soon as the sunlight hit her face, she turned to me. ‘You never told me.’ ‘Told you what?’ I asked. ‘Who you were.’ All in a couple of seconds, I realized this was very real. She was terrified and begged, ‘Take me home.’ I soon realized ‘home’ was her childhood house. My mind was racing.”
“I woke up feeling uneasy. As I drove in, I just knew something was off. The ultrasound tech was silent and white as a ghost. ‘Is everything okay?’ She replied, ‘You need to wait for the doctor,’ and walked out of the room. At just 25 weeks, the twins were both dying and on their way. The OB-GYN whisked me to the ER. ‘Jeremiah is not big enough to survive. You have to leave him in!’ The entire day, I had been bleeding out internally and no one knew.”
“I was written off as hormonal. My husband frantically demanded I be intubated. He kept screaming, ‘The oxygen levels don’t matter. She’s in a Myasthenic Crisis!’ I tried to take a breath. It was too late. All my muscles started twitching. I was flopping around on the hospital gurney uncontrollably. Suffocating. I was dying and no one was listening to my husband’s desperate pleas. I heard Code Blue called over the intercom and faded away. I didn’t wake for 2 weeks.”
“He has been up till 2:00 a.m. every night the past four nights. I can see the exhaustion in his eyes, but his brain is on rapid-fire mode. I feel like a horrible mom sitting on the floor in the hall outside his room, which is locked, listening to him.”
“My daughter cried for a birthday party. To be honest, I didn’t want to throw one at all. There were so many expectations as a mom to have everything perfect. I gave in. ‘My son Nehemiah would be 8-years-old today. Hold your baby a little tighter today.’ It was my daughter’s 8th birthday. I broke down in tears.”
“I was at the beach with my kiddies when I saw a woman crying. She left from yelling at her 15-year-old son and went for a walk because she didn’t want him to see her tears. She found out he has been bullying a girl at school and took his phone. Shaking, she showed me the group texts.”
“This was the text that would change my life: ‘When you get home, I think we need to go to the hospital.’ I stormed into the hospital, ‘My wife is in labor!’ The nurse had a leg, I had a leg, and I was about to help deliver our son. I remember saying, ‘That was the craziest sh*t I have ever experienced.’ I would kill for him, and I mean that in the sincerest way.”
“I received a call from my social worker. ‘Can you take in an 11-year-old boy, just for the weekend?’ His birth family abandoned him at 2 years old and now, his adoptive family of 9 years left him at a hospital like some disposable object, never to return. All their promises of a forever family were thrown out the window. Helplessly crying tears of anger, I asked, ‘Where will he go?’ There were no family members to contact, no foster homes available. ‘He’ll be placed in a group home.’ There was no way I could let that happen.”
“Life seemed perfect. Everything was falling into place. Then a tragic, freak accident changed everything. ‘Your bones resemble a scrambled jigsaw puzzle.’ I am learning to walk again. ‘Whatever happens, we are in this together.’ He had to lift me up, carry me around, bathe me, and feed me. His life changed just as much as mine did.”
“I was in the best shape of my life when I got pregnant with our rainbow baby. Holding my 8-day-old baby, all I saw was that belly. I felt like a failure when the weight didn’t fall off a month or two later.”
