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Worth It: Our Journey to the Finish Line

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Worth It: Our Journey to the Finish Line For months leading up to Everly's birth I frequently experienced this sensation like I was standing in the middle of some train tracks, watching in slow motion as a train came racing toward Matt and I.  We were stuck and we knew we were stuck, so instead of struggling to find a way out, we just braced ourselves for the impact, not knowing how powerful it would be, how much it would hurt or what condition it would leave us in.   In the weeks just before my induction date, I started to go back and forth in how I felt about the timing of things.  On the one hand, the Polyhydramnios was making me so unbelievably uncomfortable  that I wanted the delivery to just come.  But on the other hand, I knew that once the delivery came, that meant Everly was gone and I felt this sort of preemptive guilt for not appreciating her enough while she was inside of me.  I began to drive myself crazy, bouncing between these feelings.   And then
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The Good Old Days

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It's been a while since I last posted and truthfully it's because I just haven't felt like it.  I've either been feeling too much or too little to want to write about any of it.  But here I am in my third trimester with an induction date scheduled and I'm realizing Everly's birth and death are near approaching.  Admittedly, in the beginning I did a lot of pretending it wasn't happening.  There was some #livingforEverly but there was also quite a bit of #livingforme which sometimes meant pushing thoughts of Everly aside.  In our first meeting with our therapist I remember telling her I knew suppressing my feelings was a bad way to cope because at some point all those feelings were going to come spilling out of me like some kind of emotional avalanche.  Surprisingly though, she assured me otherwise.  She said I didn't need to force myself to feel, because when I needed to feel, life would force me to feel.  She said there would be natural occurrences as
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Good Vibes Only [Mostly]

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These past few weeks, there has been a flood of good vibes.  It's made it nearly impossible to have a bad day.  Like I feel good.  Legitimate, not faking a smile, good.  And I know I probably won't always feel this way, the hard days are bound to hit eventually, but that's all the more reason I need to enjoy these times when I am feeling good.  Right now I am genuinely in a good place and I think there are a few big reasons why. I think I can safely attribute 99% of these "good vibes" to blessings from heaven.  I know this sounds super cliche, so let me try and give you something a bit more tangible.  When I say that I am blessed with strength or peace or hope, I mean this very literally.  This isn't a fluffy, "I don't know, I just feel better" kind of thing.  As I mentioned in my first post, when I was still in the position of deciding whether to keep Everly, I was in a dark place.  I truly felt physically incapable of even imagining a scenar
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Lessons I'm Learning

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I keep referencing the "lessons I'm learning", so I figured it was time I share a few.  As a disclaimer, I feel like I should already have known 90% of this stuff, so set your expectations low and don't expect anything especially groundbreaking.  And truthfully, I don't think I'm necessarily even learning these things for the first time.  I think in life we learn a lot of lessons over and over again and each time they mean something a little different and each time they sink a little deeper.  In this case, they've sunk a lot deeper.  So maybe a more appropriate title might have been, "Lessons I'm Relearning."  1) Everyone has bad things happen to them. I know guys...big "duh" here.  I told you this wasn't groundbreaking.  When this really hit home for me though, was when I started having dozens of people reaching out, referring me to someone they knew who had lost their infant child.  I started to think, what is up with this
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Tuesday

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This week I learned that my unborn baby had a fatal birth defect, one that meant I may never meet her alive and if I do, I will likely have anywhere from minutes to hours to spend with her.  The diagnosis is Anencephaly and it's a neural defect that causes the skull and brain to never fully form.  I received this news at my doctors office, after what I thought was a routine ultrasound, while wrestling my tired, crying 1 year old.  I didn't cry, I just stared.  Stared until I was eventually escorted out of the Doctor's office.  I made it to the car and called Matt at work before bursting into inconsolable tears.   It has been six days since that diagnosis and I have already learned so much about myself, my family, my faith and my priorities.  I wanted to put this experience into words and put it somewhere where others could read it, in hopes that maybe they could take comfort or courage or strength from seeing another work through the extreme difficulties in their life. 
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