It wasn’t so very long ago, just a little more than a year, that I got the first awful text: She’s in labor. She’s going in.
She was only 20 weeks.
And I spent that whole day praying for a woman and a man and two baby boys I already loved, because there was still hope, wasn’t there? Labor could still stop. Babies could still be saved. Miracles could still come winging in on the back of prayer and hope and faith. Nothing is impossible for you. That’s what I heard growing up, all the time, and I believed it. We just had to have faith and pray.
But this was impossible for you, because there was no miracle, and those two people I love watched their two babies slide into the world much too soon and claw for breath and then suffocate, because they had no lungs. The cruelest way to die for tiny beings. The cruelest way for parents to die in the secret places.
It all happened the same week I found out our sixth baby was growing in my womb, and guilt gripped my heart and wouldn’t let go for all those months later, all those months we asked and begged and cried and raged for their miracle and yet still rejoiced, because we had ours.
And then, finally. Finally came the day when another text pinged across the miles, and there it was: beautiful hope. A picture of a sonogram. The words rimmed by exclamation points: Coming in March 2016!!! So excited!!!
We danced and sang and cried and offered up thanks and hoped. Most of all we hoped.
Because we knew everything that could go wrong. We knew how a beginning doesn’t always assure the ending we want. We knew that sometimes the sky opens up and drops acid rain when we aren’t even looking.
But even though we could not see the end, I could not stop thinking the same thing over and over again: It’s about time. It’s about time they’re able to welcome a baby into their lives, as if they already had. It’s about time their prayers were answered, as if they already had been. It’s about time they were given the longing of their heart, as if the gift was here and sure and alive.
Every day we prayed for them, the six of my boys and Husband and me, storming your throne so that baby would be born safe and healthy and not too soon. My boys prayed it and I prayed it again: Please don’t let her be born too early. Please don’t let her be born too early. Please keep her safe and don’t let her be born too early. And every night, just before sleep, we breathed relief that the day had ended without the bad news that something had happened, that something had gone wrong, that another baby had been lost.
It was all going perfectly. Uterus health, check. Cervical health, check. Baby health, check.
Check, check, check, check, check. All the boxes were checked.
And then.
There we were, picking up my boys from a weekend at my mother’s, and I was caught in a project when she knocked on the door and startled me. I opened the door for her.
“Have you heard?” she said, and I felt your whole world crumble down. This world you made for us, this world of hope and dreams fulfilled and waiting in expectation. The next words reached me from a tunnel. “Her water broke.”
She’s only 17 weeks.
I sat there, sad, worried, but mostly angry. Mostly I felt the red-hot anger-fire climbing through the places one can’t see, down my face, past my neck, where it sat, flaming, on my heart. I felt it clench my fists and grit my teeth and shake my head against the news I could not bear to hear. Because they can’t do it again. They just can’t, God. They can’t go through another goodbye, and here it was, knocking on the door, again, in water breaking 23 weeks too early.
So many years they have waited, wishing, hoping, trying, and so many years they have held onto hope as it unraveled in their hands, and even now, with a 1 percent chance of survival, they hold on, and, God, it’s just so unfair. I am so angry. I am livid. I am on a war path, because they deserve better. They deserve a family. They deserve a baby, because they want a baby, and there are so many who get babies who don’t really want them, and why can’t they just have a baby?
WHY CAN’T THEY JUST HAVE A BABY?
My boys came piling into the car, but I could not move, could not even try for those moments of grief, because it’s just not fair, it’s just not fair, it’s just not fair. She’s had to say goodbye to two of them, and what if she has to say goodbye to this little girl? Would a mama survive? Would a daddy survive? Would their faith survive?
I just don’t know. I just don’t. We can only take so much, God.
Their hearts are bruised and crumpled from all the dried-up wishes in their chests, and they wait in expectation and fear and hope still flapping in their hearts, because hope is that thing with feathers that sings songs without words and never, ever stops. But this is a road no one ever wanted to travel, and yet they have traveled it already once before, meeting two babies before their time, and those pictures hang on a living room wall proudly, because their sons are never forgotten.
And now there is this baby.
Let them meet her. Let them know the delight and joy that she will bring, ALIVE. Let them watch your miracle keep a womb warm and full and protected so she is born ALIVE. Seal up the rupture so she stays ALIVE.
Let them hold her and listen to her breathe while she sleeps in a crib that first night home from the hospital, and let them feel the weight of her, the living weight of her, in their arms so that they will know surely and beautifully that you are God. That you hear the desperate cries of our hearts. That you give. And give. And give.
Let her be a mother. Let him be a father.
We know all things work together for the good, and we know that with God all things are possible, and we know that we only see things through a glass dimly right now. We know all the right answers, because we’ve been repeating them to ourselves all our lives, for all the years they’ve been trying, but show us. Show us you are God. Show us you can do what you say you can do. Show us that you still bring miracles in babies who live in spite of overwhelming evidence otherwise.
We need to see you. We need to see your miracles. We need to see her.
So I’m coming to you today, like I’ll come every day that baby stays put safe and sound in a mama’s warm, to shake my fist at the sky and say: JUST GIVE US A BABY.
Just give us a baby.
Just give us.
A baby.
Just.
If you’re there, just.
