Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected

I've posted here before about a blog I follow, called Enjoying the Small Things. The author, Kelle Hampton, just released a book called Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected, about the first year of her baby's life, a baby that was born with un-diagnosed Down Syndrome.

It is beautiful, well-written and stirring. In fact, I have been moved to tears several times. And I'm talking tears. For the past two days that I've been reading it, I have struggled to figure out why the book is touching me so much. Yes, hearing other people's pain is hard and I can be a sympathy crier, but it seems more than that. She has a section in which she talks about reading on the Internet late one night and coming across a You Tube video of a girl with Down Syndrome singing and in the comments, people are making fun of her. Oh, man, that sent me to the Kleenex box in a hurry. Or the story of her husband searching in the garage, tears in his eyes, looking for a heater for their baby's first bath. Grief strikes everyone differently.

I don't really have an answer, and as most of you know, I wouldn't  consider myself a very sensitive person, so my own response to this has startled me. But I think it's that motherhood is changing me. I am softer now, my heart more like butter. When sad or hard things happen to babies, it's almost more than I can bear.

Don't even get me started on my baby. When even the tiniest thing happens to Ruthie, I almost go to pieces. She'll scratch herself and I get so sad. One day, I let my mind wander too far into the future and I imagined her at school, sitting alone at lunch. Geeze, I almost had to get in the shower to calm down. I used to feel silly for having this sort of response, knowing I was over-reacting. But when I read these words in Kelle's book today, it made total sense:

"It is a rite of passage not just for special needs, but for motherhood - to worry, to cry, to go to the awful place of 'what would I do IF?' We ache when they ache, and we writhe with distress at the thought that they will, at some point in life, be hurt. And they will. Our children will hurt, many times along our journey, and there's nothing we can do about it but love them and hold them and whisper in their ears, 'Oh, baby, Mama's here.'"

I was reading the book last night while Ian was doing the dishes and he could tell I was getting worked up, crying and sniffling. He asked me if I was alright and I started a conversation about what we do if it were us. It's funny, because saying it out loud almost makes it feel like it's going to happen (which I know is ridiculous - God is in control and has good things, whatever that looks like, ordained for our family). But as I was talking with Ian on the couch, I wondered how we would handle it if our next baby was born with Down Syndrome. It's not that uncommon and the more children we have, the older I'll be and the more likely it will become. I said something to him last night about how perfect and amazing the 14 babies in my family are and how statistically, it's likely something would happen and since we're one of the last families having babies, it will probably be us. Again, ridiculous. Why do we think things like that?

But the truth is, even if something unexpected were to happen to us, we would be okay. Ian and I both said that last night - we would be okay.

A family at our church recently had a baby that was born stillborn, with no signs the days before that anything was amiss (if one of my pregnant friends is reading this, I am so sorry, because I remember very well how every little thing would freak me out). I was talking with Sarah about it, both remarking about how tragic it is and how hard it must be for the parents and how we could never carry on if that happened to us. But you know what? People do carry on. God brings healing and time and friends and family make you whole again. Scarred, but whole again. It's hard to imagine, but I've seen it in people who have dealt with severe grief. You do get better, you are able to feel happy again, not everything makes you sad.

Anyway, I don't even know where I'm going with this post, but I do know that when Ruthie wakes up from her nap, I am going to hug her, smell her sweet skin and kiss her all over her face. What a gift, that girl. Thank you, Lord!