“As soon as I gave birth, my mother told the doctor, ‘Get the baby out of here! We’re not keeping it.’ That crushed my soul. I was 16 and never allowed to see my daughter. I overheard the nurse say ‘severe infection.’ I cried even more. ‘She didn’t make it.’ 29 years later, after the birth and death of my daughter, I received an email on Ancestry.com. Deep in my heart, I knew. My mind was racing.”
“I should’ve known she was thinking about something by the way she stared with her eyebrows furrowed. But she didn’t say a word until Mrs. Cynthia came back to sit with us. I am usually able to stop my kids from asking these things out loud. I see their wheels turning, and I shush them before the words even escape their mouths. But my daughter was too fast, and I was left there, panicking.”
“‘Isn’t it time for you to be moving on?’ No. I will never move on. My child died, it’s not like I lost an earring. You don’t just pick up and move on to the next thing. ‘God wanted him more.’ This did not comfort me. My doctor said this. He didn’t call Jensen a him, he actually said, ‘God wanted it more.’ My son is not an it.”
“The moment after her birth I had so longed for – the intense emotion I was supposed to have, never happened. The feeling I was supposed to get when she first cried, never happened. The love I was ‘supposed’ to have seeing Dan hold our daughter, never happened. The day she was born, I became a different person. I started hearing and seeing things. These images and voices would pop into my head.”
“Your vagina and stomach are in a world of pain. More often than not, there’s been a cut somewhere. You struggle to get comfortable in that hard hospital bed. You can barely sit, stand, lie down, or walk. A picture really is worth 1,000 words. This is me, roughly 24 hours after giving birth. I have no idea who took the picture, but you can tell how I feel just by looking at it.”
“‘So I’ll only have a baby brother?,’ my daughter asked, confused. I woke up at 5:24 that morning and went to check on her, in Matt’s arms. I was grateful it happened peacefully. I woke him up. ‘She’s gone.’ We each held her, then one another, before calling the nurse in. We kissed her perfect little cheeks. ‘Goodbye, sweet girl.’”
“She continued to scan my belly and remained rather quiet. I had no idea what to expect during an ultrasound but I thought that was kind of odd. Jokingly I asked, ‘There isn’t twins in there, right?’ She looked over at me and smiled. My heart dropped and I sat up quickly.”
“Christmas, when I was 5-years-old. I remember in the back stood a box approximately 3-foot-tall with MY name on it. Of course, my brother couldn’t help but tease me there is only a small gift inside, and the big box was just a trick. But I knew.”
“A miracle came just days before he passed away. At just 20 months old, our son had only verbalized one word. Dog. Yet, he responded to my wife and I as we laid over his crib, tears falling from our cheeks, expressing our love for him. With absolute perfect clarity, our little boy looked up at us. I held him for the last time. I crave his smile. I miss seeing his eyes light up.”
“I needed to go in for surgery. This terrified me. I thought I could handle the pain – I was wrong. I was in the bathtub. Tears flood my eyes. My daughter sat next to the tub, sharing blue raspberry Jell-O. ‘Do you need to take a bath? I can eat Jell-O with you.’ She is the most caring, sweet, and loving 3-year-old. Finally, it was announced we had a girl, her cord was cut, and she was laid on my chest. I was still sure something bad was going to happen.”
