In all things.....

My baby girl turns 6 tomorrow......tonight, I held her a little tighter because she's a little girl whose story could have turned out so differently...


Our daughter was almost delivered at 29 weeks....


At about 25 weeks, I was put on complete bed rest....the kind where the doctor doesn't even want you sitting up.  Basically, there was nothing between her and the outside world...for some reason, my body just doesn't keep babies in.


Have you ever had times in your life where God just seems so far away and the pain that you are facing makes you feel like He's not even there? With my daughter's pregnancy, that's exactly where I was.....a very dark and lonely place.....a place where I just couldn't understand why God had put me there.


The day that I went into labor with her was one in a series of disasters. We were moving back to the East Coast and my husband had to leave 2 weeks early to start his job.  I was left to pack the house...on bedrest.....with 2 small children....yes, completely insane!


Even more insane.....as he was flying home for our house closing and move, our moving company pulled up.....and pulled away......without any boxes!  Yes, they didn't like how we had packed the boxes.....so.....they left.


I remember standing in my driveway....my husband in the air......the moving company gone....completely and utterly alone.....(and yes, I should NOT have been standing!)


I went into panic mode.....and members from our church arrived within 20 minutes to start repacking our house....I remember being in complete shock and kept repeating through tears....how does a moving company pull away??  Who will take all of our stuff??


My husband walked in the door about 2 hours later and within 10 minutes, I was in full-blown labor......at 29 weeks....with only 3 days left of health insurance.


I remember our frantic drive to the hospital.....to this day, I still don't know who took care of our other children or where they even spent the night.....how people found them clothes to wear in the chaos of our house....who tucked them in.....but I am so grateful for the hands that cared for them.....


After many attempts and high dosages of magnesium, they were not able to stop the labor.....the hard part about this is that when you are in preterm labor, the doctors are only focused on stopping the labor.  Pain management is relative.  So for many hours, I was laboring hard.....sick from the magnesium and scared to death.


The doctors brought in a consult visit from the NICU--the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  We were familiar with them....both of our boys were preterm and had spent time in the NICU.  But this time, the tone of our conversation was a whole lot different.  They read a litany of problems that our 29 week old daughter potentially could have.....


They told us about 6 pm that evening that they only had one option left.....a drug that was rarely used, but had been known in the past to stop labor.  This drug was their last possibility of stopping labor.


I remember being in a fog of confusion.....all I wanted was for the pain to end...but what if the end of my pain was the beginning of a lifetime of pain for my daughter....


Hours later, the contractions slowed and then ceased......I attribute it to the hundreds of people praying for us!  For me to be released from the hospital, I had to go 24 hours without one contraction....


I went 24 hours without contractions.....at 7am on the morning our insurance expired (due to our job and state change we had a lag between insurance coverage) we pulled away from the hospital.  I was a bit of a celebrity that morning....everyone wanted to see the "crazy lady" who was driving 16 hours east....


Amazingly, I ended up delivering our little girl at 38 weeks.....but those 9 weeks between would be some of the hardest of my entire life....


My contractions didn't end....they just paused long enough to get home to PA....I ended up contracting around the clock for the next 9 weeks.  I seriously thought that I would lose my mind.  


I have a deep empathy for people who suffer from chronic pain.....during those 9 weeks, I couldn't focus on anything except enduring the constant pain that I was in.....truly, I could not understand why God had put me in such a painful and lonely place. 


To this day, I still don't fully understand why I had to go through what I went through......my faith in God was shaken.  Alone at 3 am, awake from the pain, I would just cry out to God and ask Him..."Why me??  You could take this pain away in an instant".....but....He didn't.....instead, He was asking me to endure.


Honestly, I'm not sure how well I endured.....I was pretty mad at God for a while....at the time, I was not able to pray through or even believe the words of Romans 8:28...

 And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.

People tried to encourage me, but in the midst of my storm.....it was just too dark for me to see that...I needed other people to believe it for me...

Tonight, as I kissed the sweet head of my little girl and told her parts of "her" baby story, I realized that those months of suffering were so worth the feel of this precious little girl in my arms....healthy and alive....

Happy Birthday, precious girl.....

your Mama loves you so very much....
and your Father in Heaven loves you even more....