“While I was asleep, he took my phone and began browsing through my messages. I awoke to his voice. ‘Who is this guy you’ve been texting?’ He looked angry. ‘That’s just my friend,’ I explained. ‘Well, don’t text back. You’re flirting with him by texting back.’ I tried once more to defend myself, but ended up pinned down for hours while I sobbed and begged for him to let me go.”
“A handsome former-classmate wrote me on Facebook: ‘I had a dream about you.’ I was thirty four weeks pregnant when my water spontaneously broke and suddenly the pain and trauma resurfaced. Were my babies okay?”
“I saw myself laying in the grass listening to my sister screaming my name looking for me. ‘Marcela! Marcela! I remember her screaming, ‘I’m here but I cannot move!’”
“I spent years praying for a baby and now my only child was being diagnosed with a life-threatening condition. You can only imagine the feelings I had. Like most people who have questions, I took to Google.”
“It took nearly 2 days before a helicopter arrived. 2 days of freaking out in subzero temperatures. I spent the entire time in a room where various people would pop their head in to make sure I was still alive.”
“At worst he’ll never be able to feed himself and at best he’ll mop the floors of a fast-food restaurant one day,’ he said with a wave of his hand, dismissing any room for hope. Option 1 is you terminate the pregnancy. We don’t do that here, but we have a clinic we can send you to.”
“But instead I got ‘you should feel so lucky! You are blessed.’ Imagine telling yourself you’re so worthless, you’re not deserving, that you literally mess everything you touch and feeling guilty for all of that, like a tumble dryer in your head, swirling around and then someone says, ‘be grateful’”
“We called dispatch and AAA and an Alabama State Trooper showed up to help. I thought he was just going to divert traffic away from our lane, but he did so much more than that!”
“I was covered in puke, knees scraped from the driveway. For 45 minutes I walked around holding my 3-month-old to my chest, just praying for a miracle. ‘We did everything we could, but it just wasn’t enough.’ I was living in my worst nightmare. ‘Can God give my Daddy back?’ Telling my son was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”
“The day finally arrived. The doctor opened the door, popped his head in and said, ‘How about Monday?’ I glanced over to see her expression. ‘Sounds good!’ On the inside I was doing a full-blown happy dance. My thoughts were screaming, ‘That’s MY birthday!!! His birthday is going to be MY birthday!’”
