Today my heart is heavy and my mind is consumed with mothers.
I have heard of several new mother’s that are dealing with sick newborns.
Nothing prepares you for that. We as a society don’t like to think about it, talk about it, or to even try to realize that we are not all blessed with healthy babies each and every time we deliver a precious new life.
We sometimes forget that a healthy, uncomplicated delivery is a BLESSING!!! It is not the only outcome.
I heard it best put like this….
Imagine yourself preparing for a trip. Say tooooooo, France.
You study the weather, the customs, the language, and the food. You want to be able to totally enjoy your trip and to be as prepared and as equiped as you can be. You spend countless hours studying, investing your time, thoughts, and emotions into the upcoming trip. For months you prepare and finally the day is here.
You board your plane, and sit back and take a breath. Here it comes. The moment you have been waiting so long for. And then without notice and totally without explination the pilot announces that you are landing in Italy!!!
WHAT!!! You didn’t prepare for this. It isn’t what you expected. How can you handle this? It is just too hard. Too confusing and too scary!!
Now think of that mother and father. They have spent months planning, preparing for, investing in, equiping themsleves for, and loving that baby growing inside her. They envision the day they will bring baby home. How they will snuggle on the couch, lay in the bed and nurse, and watch the baby sleep in the crib they have so lovingly picked out and assembled just for baby.
Then the day comes. Labor starts and they take a deep breath and prepare to meet their long awaited blessing. Then the unthinkable happens. Instead of those first special moments of snuggle and nursing those moments are replaced with air bags, wires, monitors, and beeps. There is no quiet snuggle or first “family picture”. There is a NICU nurse and a neonatalogist saying words you can barely comprehend while your head spins. This isn’t what you prepared for. This wasn’t supposed to happen. You prepared, you ate well, you got prenatal care. Why? And the roller coaster is off. Each journey is different from this point. Some long. Some short. Some rocky. Some a slow and steady climb to health. And before you know it, you are well versed in blood gas levels, oxygen monitors, heart rates of newborns, and the daily rounding of doctors.
It isn’t right. It isn’t fun. And it isn’t what we prepare for when a new baby is due, but this is the road that some of us mother’s have been choosen to walk. I humbly ask that you pray for the mother’s that are walking this road right now. For I was one of those mothers. But I had my Heavenly Father, my church family, and my family to get me through. Many of these parents don’t have that support. They walk this road alone. And they are hurting. They are scared and they need someone to reach out to them. Would you pray for them? Consider giving to our efforts to support the Ronald McDonald Family Room (See previous post)? Whatever you are lead to do, just don’t forget to hug your healthy children. And consider them a blessing.
I recently hearde dof a few mothers walking that hard road and my heart goes out eevn though I don’t know how that feels. It makes me sooo thankful for the blessings I have had of four healthly births. I mostly find myself thinking that this birth will go swimmingly just as the others have and I sometimes even forget to pray for such a thing because I take it for granted. Thanks for the reminder that a healthy birth is a blessing and that we need to be praying for the mothers that do not have that luxury.