You can plan for almost any scenario in your life. Your wedding, your funeral, your graduation, your birthday party. You can plan those things that are the most important to you, and you can watch them fall apart or come together beautifully. You can watch the story of your life unfold in perfect harmony or you can see it fall apart in a mosaic of broken dreams and deep heartache.You can plan for every deviation from the path and you still won't be right. You can hope and pray and fight and struggle and give-up, but still, life goes on. With or without you, your life plugs on day by day by grueling day. Life fights to go on whether you are on board or not. Whether you give the thumbs up or get dragged along kicking and screaming. Life continues. The very heartbeat of who we are continues to pump the thick liquid of life through our every vessel. Even when we want to give in, the very essence of who we are pulses on.I know I was designed to be a mother. From the time I can remember I have been preparing my heart for what it will be like to hold my baby in my arms and call him my own. I have wondered from my earliest childhood what it will be like to feed and clothe and clean up after my very own child. I have often tried and failed to imagine what my child will look like. What they will act like and smell like. My life has been a preparation for the joys and pains of motherhood.
I remember my preschool career day. Kids lined up dressed as doctors and teachers. Costumes representing firemen, policemen and nurses duplicated themselves throughout the rows of chubby cheeked 4-year-olds. I remember getting ready for school that day and knowing exactly what I wanted to be. "Mommy," I proclaimed without reservation, "I want to be you." And I was. With a handkerchief in my hair, an apron strung across my torso and a duster in my fragile right hand, I confidently trotted into school ready for my place in this world. My place as a mommy. This was it. I was declaring myself to the world. "Get ready everyone. I'm going to be the best mommy you've ever seen."
While I probably wasn't the only tiny tot seeking to replecate her mother's chosen profession of "domestic manager", I may be the only one who carried that image of myself through elementary school (taking care of my little sister like my own baby), highschool (looking out for the younger students), and even college (choosing a major, Family Services, because it best suited starting a family. Even my professional life has been in preparation for mothering. From taking care of at-risk preschoolers to calming down histerical teenagers, I feel like my whole exsistence has hinged on the hope that one day I will indeed be called Mom.
Not that long ago Tony and I were struggling with jobs and where to live and what to do with our lives when I said to him, "I just want my real life to start." I felt like we were on hold somewhere between child and dead and we were not making the right steps forward for that all important life giving leap called parenthood. I wanted so badly to get on with life. I wasn't living the life I had been given in the present. I'd like to say that ended for me. That at some point in the wonderings and pity and self-doubt I found that true life is etched into the details of everyday exsistence. But I didn't. I felt my callling so strongly within myself I couldn't help but feeling that to be whole I needed to be pregnant.
Well, it happened. One February day I took a test and there it was, or maybe there it was. That all consuming plus sign, maybe. I took two more tests just to be sure and called my doctor. We went through our whole appointment with her until I finally had to stop her and say, "We ARE pregnant right?" It was true. A positive was a positive was a positive and I had the three tests to prove it. Finally, my time had come. Our life could start and we could finally be the family I have always imagined.
The first 10 weeks went by in a flurry, another doctor's visit bolstered my hopes and we started thinking of names and how to paint the nursery and what kind of things we were going to do for this child. We prayed and hoped and giggled and celebrated. And then the trouble came. I didn't feel quite right and the signs were pointing in a direction I didn't want to go. I called my doctor and was told to wait, so we waited and waited until we couldn't wait any more. The nurse told us to come in for an ultrasound at 11 weeks and we knew it wasn't going to be good.
I'll never forget laying in that exam room waiting for the ultrasound to click on and then it clicking on and knowing I was not seeing what I should be seeing. It's a weird feeling, seeing your baby for the first time and knowing it's going to be the last as well. It's a horrible feeling hearing the words "I'm sorry" come out of your ultrasound technitians mouth. You don't need to hear anymore. You know. And somewhere deep inside of you, you've knon for a while.
I can't begin to describe the next 4 months of our life together. You can't bring someone into your deepest sorrow and force them to understand it. You can't make someone feel your grief as much as you can't make them fall in love. It is inexplicable the pain that you feel and if you've ever known the grip of loss you know how lonely it can be. The waiting was unbearable and the unkown was even more so. Our plans for our life had been completely derailed. Thrown off track and buried in the mud. No one plans for a miscarriage and even less are ready for it when it comes.
Life isn't a roller coaster ride or a walk in the park. It's not a series of unfortunate events or even a laid out path that we can walk without heartache and hurt. Life is like a mosaic. A mosaic of intimate moments poured out in bedrooms and car-seats. It blubbered over phone lines to complete strangers and mostly takes place on our living room couch during commercial breaks. Life is tiny shards of things you thought it would be and big broken pieces of nothing you could have ever guessed. It often seems like a tangled mess, like the books and hairpins and deodorant shoved in my bedside table drawer. It's messy and broken and a mass of moments and events that never seem to make sense. It often seems like a blind walk of a steep cliff and other times feels like lying on your back in an expansive field. Life goes on and presses on. It happens in times when you don't know it's happening and blossoms in the face of tragedy.
After months of uncontrollable crying and unrequited grief life blossomed in our bathroom. A few days before Tony's 26th birthday it was time for another pregnancy test. This one more nerve-wracking and frightening than the first. I sneaked away from the choas of football and web surfing in our living room to quietly take the test without Tony knowing.
I'm not sure that another two lines in the world can be as beautiful as the ones forming the light blue plus sign on a pregnancy test. I also know no two lines more frightening or anxiety-ridden. But there they were. 1,2 just where they should be. Standing at attention as if our babies first words to us were so precise and measured, "I'm coming!" Honestly, we were not so sure how to react. Jumping up and down seemed feeble and premature. Holding each other seemed right. In the end taking pictures and pseudo crying for a split second was the route we chose to go.
For 3 months we have been waiting. Hoping. Living on the edge of our seats waiting for this day. Yesterday. November 18, 2008. We didn't know if we could make it and the night before we laid in bed holding each other's hands and hoping, praying for the best result. A strong heartbeat.
The nurse could see the apprehension scripted all over my face and tried her best to put the both of us at ease. She knew from my chart that we were still raw from the pain of our last loss and made sure to make finding the heartbeat a quick and painless process (although it is both for almost every woman, it seemed she took special care with us). She squirted the light blue gel carefully onto the "magic" wand and began to look for the heartbeat.
For the second time in my life I held my breath waiting for any sign of life. Evidently this is not the correct thing to do when looking for the heartbeat, because I was told to relax and just breath. And then there it was. First like the wooshing of the waves on the beach and then for a few precious seconds that I wish could have lasted and lasted and lasted it was there. The steady drum beat of life. The flow of blood through the ventricles of my babies little heart. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. 160 beats per minute. Strong. Good. Life.
So it has begun again, for another. A little life pulsing inside a larger life that is pulsing inside the Largest Life. Working and striving together just to survive. Life is a mosaic. A mosaic of hairpins and dirty laundry and under-cooked chicken. But it's also a mosaic of tears and laughter and tiny heartbeats. And what seems like a mess of broken dreams and ruined plans is really a beautiful picture of the love of Christ. The problem with me is that I'm seeing it from the inside of my bedside table drawer. I see the cracker wrappers and soda stains. I see the messed up plans and the shattered dreams, but He sees something else.
In all my humaness the thing I want to do is scream at him "Show me, show me the beautiful mosaic. Show me how all the pieces fit together correctly. Show me how I will be the most amazing representation of who you are. Show me." But He doesn't. I can't understand why He doesn't. But He seems to think I don't need to know.
Maybe Jesus is just like that little kid in art class that hides his work between his elbows and screams "Don't look, I'm not done yet! You won't get it! Don't look!" Maybe. Maybe He's testing our faith or trying to get us to understand something that, right now, I'm not sure my pea-sized brain can comprehend. Maybe. Maybe He's just saying, "Trust Me."
Trust Me. How can two words be so simple, yet so difficult. Maybe the same way two blue lines can be so beautiful and frightening. Maybe the same way 160 little beats can bring such joy and comfort. Maybe.
You can plan almost anything. And you can watch those plans be fulfilled, shattered or fade away like the colors of fall. You can plan your whole life and miss out on living it. You can hold onto the plans you've made and stumble over them in search of reality. But in the end. He's going to do what He's planned. He's going to take the mess of our life and lay it out, grout it and varish it into something more beautiful than we could have ever imagined. Mostly because it was made by the same hands who made the trees and the grass. Mostly because He knows and we don't.
