Page Three
The first three years.
The saying goes, time flies. Time is consistent and steady, it is the moments that are fleeting and sometimes agonizing. We often do not realize that when we experience something traumatic, life altering or simply challenging it doesn’t just go away once the situation is over.
We were discharged from the hospital and on the road to home. Home wasn’t what it once was and home didn’t have a constant monitoring system of breathing, heart rate, and the plethora of people with the experience and know how. 90% of parenting is learning but how do you learn through the haze of worry, healing and fear. My body was trying to recover from an emergency c-section and post partum. My mind was trying to process everything that had transpired. Half of my heart was outside of my body but placed in my arms. The first three years was when I learned what survival mode was.
Fast forward to writing this today, I found myself hesitating and pushing it away. It has been 15 days since the first time I opened this page to write and came up blank.
The saying goes, everything gets better with time. When placing memories into words, it is like experiencing it all over again and feeling those moments no matter how fleeting they were.
The difference from then and now is the ability to recognize that sometimes we have to sit with the suck. What I went through and what I was experiencing was hard and not normal, but it was my normal. It was how I survived.
Synopsis of the first three years.
-Colic and Chronic infections
-Countless hospitalizations for pneumonia
-Doctors appointments turned Diagnostics clinics
-False latent tuberculosis diagnosis, treated on 9 months of unnecessary medicine
-A week stay in isolation at St Louis Children’s
-A scope of the lungs to find the bacteria from birth had regrown
-Multiple sleep studies and diagnosed Apnea
-Antibiotics and steroids on repeat
-Tonsils and adenoids removed, adenoids grew back
and the list goes on.
All of this led me to my knees and that is where I was shown how to live.
I lived with my parents for the first 9 months of my daughters life. When I went to move out I found my Grandmother Lydia’s bible in the top of my closet. It led me through the doors of a church I visited in highschool with my best friend. There I sat alone every Sunday morning and listened. God never promises it’ll be easy, he promises he will be with you through it. Let this be a reminder for you that what we carry with us doesn’t just go away. Through time, healing and faith we learn to carry it differently and realize we were never meant to carry it alone.
The saying goes, the third time is the charm. The third time wasn’t the charm, it was the most challenging.