“At my first ultrasound, there was no little blinking heartbeat, no wiggling. I was told, ‘If you hadn’t taken the test so early, you wouldn’t have known.’ Like my baby wasn’t real. Sobbing, I told God I was done. My marriage was struggling. Then I heard the words, ‘Try again, and she will be perfect.'”
“He told me, ‘I started seeing the counselor when dad was being really mean to me about football.’ The more time Ethan spent with his father, the more my role became to be there to pick up the pieces. He confessed, ‘I thought about killing myself.’”
“He would stay awake all day long and barely sleep at night. ‘You’re so annoying, I wish I never had you!’ When I realized what I’d just said to my sweet baby, I knew something was really wrong. I wasn’t myself.”
“My beautiful mother put down that handwritten letter, and picked up determination. She did what a mother does; she loved me every moment of every day. I will never fully know the sacrifices she made for me.”
“I was single, had no mom to help me, and was staying with complete strangers. We had 6 kids between us at the house, one husband, and a baby at the NICU. I needed a PLAN.”
“‘Something is wrong with my heart.’ I lost consciousness. My husband started yelling in my face to get me to wake up and then he ran into the hallway shouting for a doctor. My nurse hit the code blue alarm. ‘It’s not OK, Kayleigh and the baby, we don’t know.’”
“Substance abuse isn’t just a celebrity problem.”
“’He’s white,’ she said. ‘Do you guys think this will work?’ We didn’t care about race. Everyone involved saw what was happening, but no one said a word.”
“Cate does not walk, talk, or do anything on her own without assistance, but she is my biggest inspiration.”
“In the hours after my son’s death, my breasts began to ache. Elias was gone, but my body didn’t know any different. I thought of all the bottles of milk I had stored in the freezer.”
