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OUR UNEXPECTED JOURNEY TO BABY GOMEZ
I grew up thinking that whenever that time came to have a baby, it would just happen. In fact, it was almost drilled into our heads from a young age that 5 minutes of pleasure would lead to a lifetime responsibility. Well, that’s not how it happened for us. The journey to our baby was nothing like I expected.
I’ll start off by saying that I know everyone’s story is different, and God’s timing has a way of throwing us off course, especially if you’re a planner like me. David and I have planned almost every detail of our lives since we met: when we would get married, when we’d pay off our small debts, when we’d have a certain number in our savings account, when we’d buy a house, and of course, when we’d want to start a family. If you know us at all, that should have come to no surprise. But what was surprising was the waiting. It took us nearly 2 years to reach this goal…
I know that there are many women out there who have waited even longer, and some who are still waiting, and I think about them often. My heart aches because the pain and sadness I felt every single month when that stick would only show one pink line stayed with me for weeks at a time. It’s probably one of the worst feelings I think I’ve ever felt. Hearing family ask us when we were going to start having kids already, asking why we weren’t pregnant yet, and all the in-betweens. "Don't think about it so much", "Don't stress it!". But how could I not? If you're reading this and you're someone who is trying to start a family too, then you understand that when you want something so badly, it will always be at the top of your mind, all of the time. It was hard, to say the least. My life was consumed by ovulation strips, pregnancy tests, prenatals, blog posts, and reddit forums. While we waited, I tried filling this void with surrounding my free-time with other things, like growing plants, spoiling the dog, and volunteering at church with babies. There were some nights that a plant would die and I’d take it way too personally. Times when no matter what I did, the dog got an ear infection and somehow I felt defeated. Times where I’d be holding someone else’s baby in our church’s daycare room and feeling it suddenly hit me that I still didn’t have my own. Those tears would always come suddenly and were always difficult to hold back. I can distinctly remember one Sunday afternoon, sitting through a service at our church with my husband, and seeing a little girl looking around the room. She made eye contact with David, and waved. I saw him get distracted with her, and wave back, making silly faces to make her laugh. Watching him do that broke my heart. The fear I felt of the possibility of never giving him that gift of being a dad and making silly faces at his own child, it would break me beyond belief. We went to doctors, specialists, submitted bloodwork, changed our diets, and prayed and prayed. And yet, it still felt like an eternity, and it always felt out of our hands.
One Mother’s Day in 2019, we sat in a restaurant (seems crazy after 2020, right?) and the waiter handed every mother at the table a rose. One of our family members handed her rose to me and said “because one day soon, you’ll be a mom”. I was so excited, and full of so much hope at that time, thinking ‘wow, this may be my last Mother’s Day as a Not-a-Mom…’.
So when Mothers day of 2020 hit, and that line still didn’t turn pink, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It had been quite some time, and nothing was happening. Days feel like months when you’re waiting for a baby. Nothing was blooming. Nothing was growing.
I started writing to get my emotions out. I wrote several letters, all of them addressed to our future baby. I started off by talking about the world, telling our future babe all the changes that have been happening, basically a diary entry addressed to them. And it helped. I wrote how we were praying for them every night, I would tell them about the random shenanigans that David and I would get into on the weekends, and details on the pandemic. I wrote 5 letters in 2020.
The last letter I ever wrote was a bit different. I addressed this one directly to Olivia. And in it, I explained why:
My grandma Yoli used to always tell me that talking to her plants made them grow. Her entire back patio is filled with green, from orchids to pothos, succulents to tricolor stromanthes. For as long as I could remember, she has always had a green thumb. Even in her old age, when I know she is weaker and unable to go outside and water them all like she used to do, they are still beautiful and green and thriving. Whenever I’m out on the patio with her and I watch her water her plants, she talks to them. Not in a crazy way, but they all have names. Some are named after her sons, some of them have silly names. But she greets them, and tells them she’s feeding them today, she talks about the weather with them. And they grow.
So, I addressed the letter to Olivia, giving this baby I was writing to a name of her own, because I knew and trusted that one day, she would grow too.
I share this with you as a testimony to faith. A few years before we made the decision to start trying to grow our family, I was skyping with my friend and asking her “how could women actively choose to put their bodies through labor, like, by choice? It seems so terrifying. I want a family one day but I can’t imagine ever being mentally ready for child birth”. A few nights later, I had a dream. I won’t go into the details of it, but I knew it was a message specifically for me. Yes, things will be uncomfortable, and painful, and it will hurt. But the joy at the end is far greater than anything in the world. And at the end of the dream, before I woke up, I heard “congratulations, it’s a girl”. I can't explain to you why this dream was different, but somehow I knew that one day, I would have a baby girl. And that’s why I addressed that letter to Olivia. Because despite the waiting, despite the sadness and the loss of hope sometimes, I trusted that one day, it would be her reading those letters I wrote.
If you’re struggling through this stage, I just want to tell you that I’m here for you. I understand you because I am you. I know what that unspeakable sadness is, feeling like you have to keep it to yourself, keep it on the inside. It’s scary, not knowing what plans the future has for us. As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been choking back tears just remembering what a hard time that was for us. Writing letters really helped me get through it. And even if your journey is different, and even if the person you want to one day read them never does, they are a beautiful testament to your dreams and they should be documented. Theres something freeing about writing things down, even if you are the only one who reads them... just as I was the only person in the world who had ever read mine before I finally shared them with David the day we found out we were pregnant.
I will always be grateful that God chose His timing over mine. Because of the waiting, I secured a new job that has allowed me to stay remote full-time (during and even after a pandemic), our income has drastically changed, our savings has increased, I’m more mentally prepared for the changes to come, and we have found our dream location on 2 acres where we will be building our custom-built home this year. Because 2020 is past us now, David is able to come into our ultrasound appointments and see our baby, which was not the case in 2020. If things would have happened on my timing...I can’t even tell you what a mess that would have been. The world would have been upside down, in the middle of a pandemic, on an election year, and with the constant anxiety of 'what if we catch covid, what will happen to the baby'? Thankfully for me, David and I both caught covid at the beginning of December, and finally tested negative less than one month before we found out we were pregnant. Talk about God's timing.
I’m so thankful for a God who loves me and has a plan for me. His timing over ours. Always, always remember that.
I’ll be praying for you ❤️