Facebook is wild with everyone's Year In Reviews. I looked at mine, and discovered it looked nothing like my year. According to facebook (and I suppose this is the nature of facebook, since we tend to post happy things and leave the less-than-happy out), my year was a breeze. I went to the beach! I had a baby! My kids are cute! We bought a house!
In reality, 2015 was a real humdinger.
Okay, that's a understatement.
2015 was the toughest yet. It hit us like a ton of bricks. I ended 2014 by passing the worst of the morning sickness, and thought "okay, the worst part is over."
HA! ha.
I've been sitting here for 5 minutes trying to figure out where to begin. I really don't know. I tried to write a song but poetry and lyrics are not my strong suits.
When I stop and think about what we've been through this year, of course my mind first goes to Joseph, our happy little guy who had such a scary start and wouldn't even be with us now if it weren't for modern medicine and a really wonderful team of cardiologists and surgeons who have made it their lives' work to save heart babies. I can't imagine my days without him. From the time we found out about his heart defect until the time we brought him home from the hospital was about five weeks. For those five weeks, I couldn't breathe. I survived on adrenaline and prayers. Some of my friends who saw me at some point during the process have asked how I kept it together. I don't have an answer, except adrenaline, and prayers.
The truth is that the times when I wasn't okay were the times when very few people saw me or even heard from me. When Ryan and I sobbed through the middle of the night, as we did for several nights after learning about the heart defect, we held onto each other. When, on the 4th of July, Joseph's oxygen saturation levels kept dropping, and dropping, I nearly collapsed - literally - onto the NICU floor, it was my sister who hugged me and walked me back to my room while Ryan sat with Joseph. When Joseph cried in the middle of the night over his breathing tube and needed an additional sedative to relax, it was his nurse who hugged my exhausted, shaking body and later told me I needed to get some sleep and she would watch over him. When I was so scared the night before his surgery that I couldn't speak, it was my dad who put his arm around me and held me until I could breathe again.
I was scared and sad. I was angry - how very unfair for such an innocent little baby to have to start life that way. When everything should have been milk and pacifiers and swaddle blankets and rocking, he got a PICC line and nitric oxide, a split sternum and a ventilator.
I stopped decorating the nursery when we found out about his heart defect. It was mostly done but needed a few finishing touches. It wasn't that I thought we wouldn't need it - I wouldn't even allow myself to fully process that thought, for fear that I may never get the courage to put one foot in front of the other after I did; it was that I couldn't go in there without breaking down, and wondering how long it would be before we were able to lay our baby in the crib. But the day the doctor came into his hospital room and talked to me about when he might go home, I went to Michael's on the way home and bought the remaining things I needed, plus a few activities for Nora to do while I was sitting on my couch, in my home and not a hospital room, feeding him.
As I processed what we were facing after Joseph's birth, I remembered a professor I had in college talking about his daughter's heart defect and surgery as a newborn. I couldn't remember exactly what it was, but I contacted him through facebook. It was, indeed, the same defect - and later, would be the same surgeon, too. He gave us his phone number and we called him the next day. I will never forget what he said to us: "You have to believe that your baby is going to be okay." From that moment, that became my job. Never - not for one moment, even in the hardest, worst moments - did I allow myself to think or even entertain the idea that I wouldn't get to bring him home. It helped, of course, that the odds for babies with this particular defect are very good and most live with no or very few restrictions after the arterial switch surgery.
But that was just five weeks of 2015, certainly the hardest five weeks of the year, of my whole life. The rest of the year, while happy, brought its own laundry list of stressful stuff: a broken furnace paired with a horrible experience with a warranty company. A string of confusing infections. A family of stupidannoyingawful squirrels that set up shop in our walls. A 3 year old terrified of sleeping in her new house and the squirrels that she thought would certainly invade her room. A dog that needed ear surgery. A repeat c-section. A fallen-through purchase agreement. Shingles blown off the roof less than a week before closing. A leaky pipe. A transition from one child to two.
I learned about marriage, parenthood, family, friendship, support, and a lot about grace and faith. I learned what it's like to be the person who is constantly in need of others' support and rarely able to offer any in return. And so I'm finishing 2015 a lot more tired and a little stronger. A little better at being thankful for what I've got and knowing that, with a little faith and a lot of grace, I can handle whatever life throws at me.
So that's my 2015 Year in Review. (Take that, facebook.)
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