“‘Well,’ she paused. ‘Five days is a long time. If it were me, I’d want to know.’ I could not get her words out of my head. I purchased the finest pregnancy tests 8 quarters could buy.”
‘Mommy! I’m going to ask Santa for a baby in your belly!’ Doing all I could to keep it together, I replied, ‘That may be a hard promise for him to keep.’
‘The baby suddenly gagged and then violently vomited what seemed to be a weeks’ worth of breast milk. I held her up and she was lifeless. She was unresponsive.’
“I immediately told my oldest to dial 9-1-1. She was trembling. I was trying to figure out if the baby was breathing. I realized my oldest was unable to call; she dialed 1-9-9 in utter fear.”
‘I was fat shamed by a complete stranger on a plane.’
“As I looked back to confirm he moved, 4 rows back, I overheard him tell his new neighbor in row 15, ‘That girl up there is so huge, I…’”
‘A well-dressed man approached me. He offered to take me to eat. I got in his car and he drove me to a wooded area. He raped me all night. This is how I lost my virginity.’
“I was sent to live with my mother’s parents. My grandmother was a functional alcoholic. My grandfather was a child molester. This marks the beginning of my running away from home.”
‘What do you do with all the ‘stuff?’ It’s gut-wrenching for parents who lost a child. The dreams of a baby in the nursery are no longer viable, and now you are left with ‘stuff.’
“Our nursery sat untouched. I couldn’t open the door. There was no need for 3 burping pillows. But, there was one box that sat in our basement for nearly 2 years. I held my breath as I opened that final storage box.”
‘We took the kids Trick-Or-Treating and had fun being together. Little did we know, we would take our last family photo that day.’
“Avery seemed to be coming down with something. All he wanted to do was snuggle and nap. He had a low grade fever but nothing alarming so we put him to bed like we always did.”
‘This led us to a dark, silent hospital room on Halloween. We were supposed to be prepping a nursery and picking out names.’
“Instead, we hastened to name an already much-loved child that was not ours to keep. Every alarm bell in my body went off.”
‘Nobody thought I had a problem, I was just the life of the party. I was reaching out for help, but doctors didn’t believe me. I was even suicidal on my wedding day.’
“I knew something was terribly wrong. I was in law school about to collapse on the floor of my dorm room when I realized my life would never be the same again. It was like an all-night-long strobe light party in my brain.”
‘Doctors said my surgery would be smooth, and all would go well. To my surprise, I woke up in the ICU with tubes coming out of me, double vision, and not able to walk.’
“In an instant, my whole world came crashing down. I knew I needed to call my mom. I had no idea how to break the news to her though. That’s a parent’s worst nightmare.”
‘My partner of 4 years left with no explanation. I was blindsided with an earth-shattering, life-changing conversation.’
“He came into the bedroom to wake me up, just as he had done every day of our relationship. Only today was different. My entire life had been flipped upside down in an instant, and no matter how hard I tried to get it back, it was gone.”
