Surprise!
🤩
‘My husband would say odd things like, ‘My chest hurts. I feel like I’m having a heart attack.’ I would find him sitting down in the shower. I started getting angry. He was not demanding answers.’
“My doctor’s face turned white. My stomach was in my throat and I wanted to scream. A second doctor entered and said, ‘It’s okay. They all look great!’ She showed me the monitor. Not 1, not 2 but 3 babies!”
‘In the coldest bedside manner, he said, ‘It is extremely rare and there is no cure. IF she lives, she will stop mentally developing at 2 months old.’ I just stared at him, my body slowly over heating.’
“I could feel the nausea setting in. I could feel the walls closing in on me. I could feel Bobby fuming. I told him get me out of there. I was BORN to be her mom. She is here to prove everyone wrong.”
‘We called it ‘Naughty November.’ We were on a roll for the first 3 days. And then I got my period and lost my mojo. I didn’t want my husband to touch me.’
“I hate to admit it, but having sex feels like a chore. I can’t be the only one? I felt like I failed. I would rather just sleep and be alone.”
‘I spent hours searching, which told me my daughter had autism and was mentally impaired. I cried and cried for weeks, absolutely devastated my child was ‘not like the rest.’
“I started to notice she wasn’t ‘just like her sister’ around 9 months old. She still didn’t have her first teeth, and was barely babbling any words, let alone noises.”
‘I heard rumbling uncharacteristic of the bathroom. Shouting ensued. I burst in to discover my son had hurled a suitcase into the shower at his sister.’
“I heard a frantic screaming from upstairs. My daughter had gone into the bathroom to use the toilet. This provoked the unbridled anger of her brother. Infuriated, he stood and peed on her in retribution.”
‘How could this be happening again? My body did not want to let go of my baby, and neither did I. Nothing prepares you for delivering your dead child.’
“The very cord that was meant to sustain her ended her life so abruptly.”
‘Hey, Grace. A baby girl was abandoned at the hospital. She doesn’t even have a name. Can you come pick her up in an hour?’
“I open the fridge, over and over, to prove to children there is always food. I attend IEP meetings and I advocate for kids. But you know what else I do?”
‘Despite having 5 beautiful children, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that our family was not complete. I looked around and thought, ‘Surely we have room for one more, right?’
“At only 17 years old, while still a senior in high school, I vividly remember the intense fear I felt when I looked at that pregnancy test. What would become of me? I had always been the good girl – the one that got good grades and followed the rules.”
‘I was pushed around, thrown into chairs by a group of older kids. I was kicked with such force I actually passed out.’
“I fell to the floor and cried like I have never cried in my life and talked about driving off a bridge. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my mum to see her 6 foot, 8 inch, 18 stone son breaking down in front of her.”
‘Strong people do foster care. Bible thumpers do foster care. Not us. People like us do not do foster care.’
“We tried for five long years to have children of our own. Five years is sixty months. That’s six hundred ovulation tests and one hundred and twenty pregnancy tests. Always negative.”
