“I had done everything right. The last 4 years were wiped away without reason. My mind kept replaying every situation over and over again. Not only was I going to school, working, and dealing with my parents’ divorce, but I was now about to be a single mom. I prayed for a sign I’d be okay.”
‘There I was, crying over my newborn daughter, looking at my husband’s arm around another woman. I begged him to talk to me in person. He never called, never texted. My world flipped.’
‘Don’t worry, when he’s here you can wrap him in a blanket and nobody will ever know he’s different.’ That’s all it took for the tears to start. This was all too much.’
“‘The only thing I worry about is his size,’ I said, smiling. I was terrified of having to push out anything bigger than 8 pounds. How ironic now, come to think of it. They asked me what I already knew about his condition. Nothing, I realized I knew absolutely nothing.”
‘As I looked in the mirror, I immediately started critiquing myself. Then I heard my daughter tell my husband, ‘She really IS Wonder Woman.’ My heart just stopped.’
“I go to bed and beat myself up for all the things I didn’t do perfectly that day. They go to bed with smiles, and I fall asleep with a panic attack. I see scars everywhere from the life I’ve survived.”
‘The wildest part is the hallucinations. She thinks her reflection is another person, whom she has named ‘Sharon.’ She has always been ditzy and silly, so it was harder to catch the changes happening as time went on.’
“Usually ‘Sharon’ is a good friend, but sometimes she gets messy, so I have to take the bathroom mirror down. She will have bursts of anger, and has tried to run away. We had to get an alarm for her bedroom.”
‘I could not mentally prepare for what I was going to witness. He had been hospitalized due to Shaken Baby Syndrome. My heart immediately sank.’
“I asked if this was the same child I had seen in on the news, and she confirmed it. I knew in that moment I had to put my whole heart in it for this family.”
