“He blew up the air mattress in our living room and held me while I cried. I drove myself and a teenage girl from Chicago to Ohio. I felt myself start to bleed. That 17-year-old girl was there for me when she did not have to be.”
‘Maybe you’re pregnant,’ she said. At 11:19 p.m. in a Target bathroom, I took a test. Two faint little lines. I kept the secret from my husband.’
‘Everyone poops during labor,’ she warned. It was my first time. I couldn’t stop asking questions. ‘Is it normal my water hasn’t broken yet?’ ‘Should I push? When do I push?’
“My questions didn’t stop there. ‘Is the baby okay?’ He was covered in white slime. ‘Should he be that color?’ I felt so completely unprepared. These women never looked at me and said, ‘That isn’t my job.’ That is a hero.”
‘I can’t go back there; I can’t lose my wife again,’ he told me. ‘I’m not sure I’d survive that.’ We were terrified. Terrified of who I was pregnant.’
“My doctor very clearly advised me I would need to be off my antidepressants if I wanted to get pregnant, so I came off them. The next several months were some of my darkest. My husband was taking care of a wife who, in his words, ‘had disappeared.'”
‘Her grip on the bed rails quickly moved over to him. Her nails sliced through his shirt, like butter. They were in this fight not just to win, but to grow together.’
“He never stopped watching her face. In the middle of it all, he knew where his priorities were. The scratches, the teeth marks on his shoulder, all became battle scars.”
‘I’ll forever remember that moment. The doctor told me to get my camera out and take a picture. And then everything became quiet. The world stopped, right before chaos erupted.’
“Doctors had never seen anything like it. Harper was encased in a hard, thick skin, much like armor, all over her body. It was like we were sleeping walking. We needed to do something quickly.”
‘Wait! I am 29 years old. I won’t poop my pants. That’s ridiculous.’ I didn’t want to bother my wife. I didn’t want her to panic that I was home alone. ‘I think it’s time. I think I’m in labor.’
“But let’s start at beginning. My wife and I met in high school. It wasn’t love at first sight, or even attraction at first site. In fact, I wasn’t even into women.”
‘I kept my pregnancy a secret. I knew coming home from the war would be tough, but I expected him to be a better father. He started drinking and blaming me.’
“I was working full time, coming home to a 2-year-old, while his dad played video games. My initial thought was ‘How??’ I saved the test to show their father. But that never happened. So I sent him a message. Straight to the point. ‘I’m pregnant.’ He packed all of his stuff, and was just gone.”
‘A nurse latched a painful, angry piranha to my nipples. ‘How many feeds has he had?’ She didn’t notice I had been crying. She said she’d help me. She never came back.’
“I was asked hundreds of questions. All of them, about my baby. When a baby is born, so is a mother. So, ask us too, and ask us often, ‘Is everything okay?’”
‘There is no rush. They may never get to do this again, holding their baby like this.’ As we admired him, there was a quiet heaviness. He looked different. My husband already knew.’
“Had we delivered at a hospital, he would have been taken from me immediately. My heart also aches in pain but I could not possibly foresee what was to come.”
‘I bawled to my husband, ‘I came in for kidney stones. Now I’m praying we don’t have a micro-preemie in the NICU in California when we’re moving to Colorado in 3 weeks.’
“Nurses were rushing in. My baby’s heart rate was dropping. ‘Something’ was wrong, but nobody knew what. I started preparing myself for the reality of having one child in the hospital in one state, while we all lived in another.”
