Wednesday, April 09, 2008

My Most Serious Health Concern, Part 6

When I started this story, I had NO idea it would take so long!
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When Jake & I started our relationship I warned him that it was unlikely I’d be able to have children. I’d dealt with it to a certain extent- still angry, but it seemed like something unlikely to change. We decided that after 2 or 4 years we’d try for a baby and then probably adopt. My Jake is an absolutely beautiful man- I think he was more interested in just having me, and he really GETS this: that when you love & marry someone, you love & marry their issues and health problems. He gets this way better than me...

Two years into our marriage I started feeling lousy- foods I loved tasted WRONG, and I was throwing up every morning. Really and truly I couldn’t imagine that I was pregnant. Finally, Jake & I bought a pregnancy test and were both rather shocked. I was pregnant! Me, the one who could not get pregnant, was pregnant.

I had already found a great OB in Seattle ‘cuz of my endo. So he guided us through the next few months. I had a rough pregnancy, was put on bed rest for about two months and finally gave birth to a purple 7 lb. baby girl, our beautiful and crazy Deborah. Honestly, it is not over-exaggerating to say I almost died during this time- I went into toxemia during the last two months of pregnancy and didn’t come out after Deborah was born. It took about 6 months for my blood pressure to come back down... My blood pressure was so high that I was seeing dark spots and actually had three numbers for a while- not just 190 over 90 - I had 190 over 90 over 87... This is BAD. I ended up back in the hospital, and then back in the hospital again...

Major decisions had to be made quickly, ‘cuz some kind of weird miscommunication happened with the school I taught at- they thought I’d decided not to come back and I thought they were holding my job. No job for me meant Jake had to get a better paying position and we ended up deciding to come up to live with my parents in Alaska while Jake went to college. He LOVED it and did fantastically well until I got pregnant again.

I was really sick again, although not on bed rest and the Abigail was born right as he started his fifth semester. Now the crazy thing about baby Abigail was that she seemed to need NO sleep at all. She’d catch these teeny 2 hour naps and be raring to go... Jake ended up dropping out of school and working for our church largely based on sheer lack of sleep and the craziness of our schedule.

It honestly wasn’t until Abigail was a year old and Deborah was 2 years old that I realized the gift God had given me. Don’t get me wrong. I recognized how beautiful my girls were and the miracle of their life. But somehow it wasn’t until they were old enough for me to get some sleep that I realized how angry and bitter I had been with God over the loss of my dream children.

It took 3 years of their being alive for me to come to grips with how this bitterness had affected my outlook on life. I had still taken pleasure in life. I had still worked for God and DELIGHTED in that work. I still had loved my husband, teaching and ministry, but this bitterness had weighed on me. It affected my trust in God, and my belief in His goodness.

What an amazing relief it was to finally ask Him for forgiveness and understand that He was in control- that He still makes miracles- that I should have trusted Him to know what was best- even if that meant adopting.

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