“So many of us are kept from eventual consecration because we mistakenly think that, somehow, by letting our will be swallowed up in the will of God, we lose our individuality. What we are really worried about, of course, is not giving up self, but selfish things—like our roles, our time, our preeminence, and our possessions. No wonder we are instructed by the Savior to lose ourselves. He is only asking us to lose the old self in order to find the new self. It is not a question of one’s losing identity but of finding his true identity! Ironically, so many people already lose themselves anyway in their consuming hobbies and preoccupations but with far, far lesser things.”
-Neal A. Maxwell
My story is not unique. It has been relived countless times by women in a hundred different faiths. We live in a world where conceptions of success are largely prescribed for us. We’re taught from the day that we’re born to be smart, athletic, artistic, beautiful and wealthy. While an argument could certainly be made that each of these desirable attributes is necessary for raising children, on a prestige scale, motherhood falls somewhere beneath data entry.
It means that most of us go into it with a sense of pride. We know that the world is wrong to look down on women who choose to be mothers. We know that we are, not only following the Lord, but also engaging in the job that requires more intelligence and skill than any other.
I once listened to a radio program where the host was interviewing a woman who claimed that those women who went to college, and then elected to stay at home wit their children, were a drain on society. She argued that since they did not directly contribute to the gross national product, that the resources of the educational system had been wasted on them. She was debating with an educated mother who pointed out that these women could go back to work after their children were old enough.
The whole debate made me angry. I respected the mother’s attempt to justify her education by arguing that she was able to return to gainful employment, but I thought that both of these women had really missed the point. Nobody addressed the fact that society has an interest in having educated people raising the children. We require that teenagers get a permit so that they can make hamburgers at McDonalds, but we don’t have an interest in having intelligent, educated people caring for children when numerous studies have proven that the care they get during those first critical years will largely determine the kind of people they end up becoming. It simply doesn’t make sense.
I am not advocating that we should require college for someone to become a mother. I am simply showing exactly where the priorities are headed in this country. It is sad that anyone could argue that people who are educated and raising children are wasting that education.
It’s completely understandable that many of us begin our careers in motherhood with a bit of a chip on our shoulders. We know how completely vital the role of a mother is. We know that we could have become big, important career women. We have no doubts about our intelligence and are choosing to become mothers as a matter of empowerment, not because we are not qualified to do anything else.
It’s a beautiful feeling, for a while. For too many of us, the lies that we have had thrown at us time and time again come to the forefront of our minds when we’re scrubbing toilets or cleaning up spills. It feels like our job is less than desirable. It feels like we’ve lost sight of the intelligent women we once were. For some of us, we are watching husbands grow and prosper in school or a career, and we feel, a little, like we’re stagnating.
My heart always knows that I am building an eternal family. My heart never forgets how vital my job is. My heart would never ask for a different life. But that doesn’t keep me from struggling from time to time. A forever family is a very long-term goal. It’s not always easy to see myself coming closer to that when everything I do one day needs to be done again the next.
But I have learned, as have so many women before me, that the way to true joy is through my family. Knowing that doesn’t always make it easier. But I truly believe that along with the physical pain and agony of sin that Christ experienced, he also knows the quiet longing and dissatisfaction that sometimes accompanies day to day life. He knows my heart and he makes me strong. It’s not that I think I necessarily deserve that, but he also knows that my amazing children need and deserve a mother who is always at her best. Together with my husband, he and I are building an eternal family. It’s a long road, but one I do not want to divert from.
Monday
Chapter One: Amy
“Sometimes you wonder why you can’t trade your parents for some better ones. No need to apologize; they sometimes wish they could trade you for someone easier to live with.”
-Boyd K. Packer
I suppose I always knew I’d have children eventually. I liked little kids. There weren’t a lot of them around my house growing up. I was 4 of 6, so I never experienced taking care of a baby brother or sister. But, we had cousins. I baby-sat and changed diapers. I talked about being a mom. I played house and named all my dolls. As a child, I did.
Things were different when I became a teenager. My mom always claimed that some horrible alien species inhabits the brains of all teenagers. She said the mischievous, invisible alien descended upon a 12-year-old brain and stayed there until it turned 18. In some cases, it stayed longer.
I disagree. I think teenagers suffer from a cousin of the middle-age crisis. Like balding forty-year-old men revert to their younger, wilder selves because of some perceived “ending of play-time,” teenagers have some psychological sense that childhood is at an end, and so revert to the behaviors we commonly associate with small children.
Those of you who are shaking your heads are surely doing so because you don’t know any teenagers who have lost their ability to use a toilet or eat solid foods. Skeptics, consider this, babies do not understand that they are not the center of the world. They demand their perceived needs the moment they become perceived and they simply do not have the mental capacity to understand that other people have needs too. They are also missing the tendency that older children have, and then loose when they become teens, to understand that parents and teachers know more then them and should be looked to for advice and help. It is also arguable that many teens completely loose their sense of fashion and taste.
I remember being at a restaurant with my young son and some friends who were not yet parents. The friend mused, “I wonder when they start not wanting to act out because they realize they look silly in front of other people.” I present that young children don’t mind acting like morons in public and neither do teenagers. But there seems to be a period between these two phases where most children have manners. This being the case, I think it is appropriate to refer to teenhood as the teen-aged crisis.
During my teen-aged crisis, I discovered the great world of being all-knowing and extremely selfish. That said, understand that I was also beyond amazing and deserved all of the airs I gave myself. I learned the taste of victory early and that may have aggravated my blooming case of teen-aged crisis.
I want to share a few of my accomplishments with you so that you can completely understand my current heart. I’m pretty sure it’s not to relive the days when my over-sized ego was being fed a healthy diet of success.
My mom worked really hard to take care of six kids in difficult circumstances. We were poor. But, I admit that I didn’t really know that as a child. Mom and Dad sacrificed to give their kids every opportunity we would have had if they had money. One of these sacrifices was when my sweet mother spent hours working as a bookkeeper for a dancing school in exchange for free lessons for my sisters and me. Her investment was well spent. My sisters now have their own dance studio where they can constantly showcase their hard-earned talent: a talent that, somehow, skipped over the middle child.
I tried hard to be a dancer. I really did. I went to class and wore the costumes. I felt pride when my grandparents lovingly encouraged me after recitals. But, alas, I wasn’t very good. I remember one time in particular when my mom came home from a discussion with the dance teacher and spent the entire afternoon trying to teach me one dance step. She told me that the teacher had promised that if I learned the step, I would be allowed to join a competitive team. The next time I went to class, I proudly displayed my new step for the teacher, who acted somewhat disinterested. Desperately, I told her my mom had said she promised me a spot on the team. She blinked and replied, “What I said was, if you can’t learn it, you shouldn’t be in dance at all.” Such was my dancing ability.
In eighth grade, though, I discovered a new talent. My brilliant history teacher staged a debate between students representing the American Colonists and the British to teach us about the Revolutionary War. I was amazing. And when the debate coach from the High School showed up to recruit new students to his program, I made sure he remembered me.
The summer before high school he gave me a scholarship to a three day debate camp. We learned several speaking events and were allowed to compete with the other students on the last day. I came home with ribbons in all three events I had competed in. None of the other students on our team had earned any. The coach gave me a ride home and asked to talk to my mom. He told her he wanted me to attend another camp, a two-week camp. He promised the debate budget would pay for it. He considered it an investment for the school.
I went to the try-out for the sophomore cheerleading team soon after. I walked into the gym, jumping with adolescent excitement. The girls clustered into groups and giggled about their dance clothes. My entire life had been leading up to that tryout. There were years worth of dance lessons to consider. I had always expected to move from there to the drill team and linger in the world of high school dancers, just like my big sister before me and my little sister after.
I stood in the gym for several moments before I grabbed my bag of dance clothes and walked down to the debate room to fill out the paper work for the next debate camp. That day changed my young life. No longer would I be a mediocre dancer. No longer would I feel the familiar pang that came with standing in the back row where your mistakes could best be hidden from the audience. I soon learned what it felt like to be really good at something, propelling me quite firmly into my own teen-aged crisis.
I won’t bore you with the details. Actually, I don’t know how many I can, in fact, remember. I won over a hundred trophies and was rewarded by several scholarship opportunities when college time came. As a high school sophomore, I pouted when I didn’t win. As a senior, I learned to take it in stride. After all, it didn’t happen very often!
I went to a fairly large high school, but was still well known. Our football team won one game during the entire three years I was there, but I debate team won state every single year. The team included homecoming queens and student body officers. We traveled the country and even had students from other schools transferring to be a part of our amazing program. And through it all, there was me. I was the only person to be on the state team every single year, each time in a different event. Over the years, I trophied in every event that went to competition. I was the president my senior year and even spoke at graduation. I was voted most likely to take over a third world country by my classmates. I was pretty high on myself. (Although, I ought to mention that the reason for all of this was my amazing coach.)
During this time, the idea of having children was very depressing to me. Motherhood was for people incapable of doing anything really important with their lives. Not that I thought it was an unimportant job, it simply occurred to me that the jobs that take the most talent are the ones that the least people do. Since becoming a mother required very little talent, creativity or intelligence, it, therefore, must be for the girls that were less impressive then me.
If you need any more evidence of my spectacular case of teen-aged crisis, I shared these thoughts with my mother. I told her I had big dreams and things I wanted to make out of my life and being a mother would prevent me from achieving those dreams. I figured my own mom would understand these feelings because she knew how absolutely exceptional I was. I was wrong.
It may have stemmed from the supreme insult of being told she had devoted her life to someone who thought she was common and untalented, or it might have been that she loved me dearly and wanted to clue me into the reality that the President of the United States wasn’t trying desperately to call our house for my opinion, but mom told me plainly that she hoped I wouldn’t give up my opportunity to be a mother. I know, now, that it was because she knew what would really make me happy, and, in answer to the prayers of all the poor parts of the world, it wasn’t conquering a third world country.
The things I learned as a mother changed who I am. I’m not sorry about that. I used to fear change, as if I was loosing something, in the process, that was unique and precious about me. Now I understand that who I was is a part of who I am, though the changes have only improved me. Growing up isn’t scary. There is no reason to fear that you’ll settle for something less than what you wanted. What really happens is that you realize how much better what you once considered to be “less” really is. I ache for my friends who hold so tightly to their youth that they never really enjoy adulthood. Youth is wonderful, but as I grew up, I learned that motherhood is much, much better. Your priorities are altered and your heart grows. You become closer to who you were truly meant to be.
-Boyd K. Packer
I suppose I always knew I’d have children eventually. I liked little kids. There weren’t a lot of them around my house growing up. I was 4 of 6, so I never experienced taking care of a baby brother or sister. But, we had cousins. I baby-sat and changed diapers. I talked about being a mom. I played house and named all my dolls. As a child, I did.
Things were different when I became a teenager. My mom always claimed that some horrible alien species inhabits the brains of all teenagers. She said the mischievous, invisible alien descended upon a 12-year-old brain and stayed there until it turned 18. In some cases, it stayed longer.
I disagree. I think teenagers suffer from a cousin of the middle-age crisis. Like balding forty-year-old men revert to their younger, wilder selves because of some perceived “ending of play-time,” teenagers have some psychological sense that childhood is at an end, and so revert to the behaviors we commonly associate with small children.
Those of you who are shaking your heads are surely doing so because you don’t know any teenagers who have lost their ability to use a toilet or eat solid foods. Skeptics, consider this, babies do not understand that they are not the center of the world. They demand their perceived needs the moment they become perceived and they simply do not have the mental capacity to understand that other people have needs too. They are also missing the tendency that older children have, and then loose when they become teens, to understand that parents and teachers know more then them and should be looked to for advice and help. It is also arguable that many teens completely loose their sense of fashion and taste.
I remember being at a restaurant with my young son and some friends who were not yet parents. The friend mused, “I wonder when they start not wanting to act out because they realize they look silly in front of other people.” I present that young children don’t mind acting like morons in public and neither do teenagers. But there seems to be a period between these two phases where most children have manners. This being the case, I think it is appropriate to refer to teenhood as the teen-aged crisis.
During my teen-aged crisis, I discovered the great world of being all-knowing and extremely selfish. That said, understand that I was also beyond amazing and deserved all of the airs I gave myself. I learned the taste of victory early and that may have aggravated my blooming case of teen-aged crisis.
I want to share a few of my accomplishments with you so that you can completely understand my current heart. I’m pretty sure it’s not to relive the days when my over-sized ego was being fed a healthy diet of success.
My mom worked really hard to take care of six kids in difficult circumstances. We were poor. But, I admit that I didn’t really know that as a child. Mom and Dad sacrificed to give their kids every opportunity we would have had if they had money. One of these sacrifices was when my sweet mother spent hours working as a bookkeeper for a dancing school in exchange for free lessons for my sisters and me. Her investment was well spent. My sisters now have their own dance studio where they can constantly showcase their hard-earned talent: a talent that, somehow, skipped over the middle child.
I tried hard to be a dancer. I really did. I went to class and wore the costumes. I felt pride when my grandparents lovingly encouraged me after recitals. But, alas, I wasn’t very good. I remember one time in particular when my mom came home from a discussion with the dance teacher and spent the entire afternoon trying to teach me one dance step. She told me that the teacher had promised that if I learned the step, I would be allowed to join a competitive team. The next time I went to class, I proudly displayed my new step for the teacher, who acted somewhat disinterested. Desperately, I told her my mom had said she promised me a spot on the team. She blinked and replied, “What I said was, if you can’t learn it, you shouldn’t be in dance at all.” Such was my dancing ability.
In eighth grade, though, I discovered a new talent. My brilliant history teacher staged a debate between students representing the American Colonists and the British to teach us about the Revolutionary War. I was amazing. And when the debate coach from the High School showed up to recruit new students to his program, I made sure he remembered me.
The summer before high school he gave me a scholarship to a three day debate camp. We learned several speaking events and were allowed to compete with the other students on the last day. I came home with ribbons in all three events I had competed in. None of the other students on our team had earned any. The coach gave me a ride home and asked to talk to my mom. He told her he wanted me to attend another camp, a two-week camp. He promised the debate budget would pay for it. He considered it an investment for the school.
I went to the try-out for the sophomore cheerleading team soon after. I walked into the gym, jumping with adolescent excitement. The girls clustered into groups and giggled about their dance clothes. My entire life had been leading up to that tryout. There were years worth of dance lessons to consider. I had always expected to move from there to the drill team and linger in the world of high school dancers, just like my big sister before me and my little sister after.
I stood in the gym for several moments before I grabbed my bag of dance clothes and walked down to the debate room to fill out the paper work for the next debate camp. That day changed my young life. No longer would I be a mediocre dancer. No longer would I feel the familiar pang that came with standing in the back row where your mistakes could best be hidden from the audience. I soon learned what it felt like to be really good at something, propelling me quite firmly into my own teen-aged crisis.
I won’t bore you with the details. Actually, I don’t know how many I can, in fact, remember. I won over a hundred trophies and was rewarded by several scholarship opportunities when college time came. As a high school sophomore, I pouted when I didn’t win. As a senior, I learned to take it in stride. After all, it didn’t happen very often!
I went to a fairly large high school, but was still well known. Our football team won one game during the entire three years I was there, but I debate team won state every single year. The team included homecoming queens and student body officers. We traveled the country and even had students from other schools transferring to be a part of our amazing program. And through it all, there was me. I was the only person to be on the state team every single year, each time in a different event. Over the years, I trophied in every event that went to competition. I was the president my senior year and even spoke at graduation. I was voted most likely to take over a third world country by my classmates. I was pretty high on myself. (Although, I ought to mention that the reason for all of this was my amazing coach.)
During this time, the idea of having children was very depressing to me. Motherhood was for people incapable of doing anything really important with their lives. Not that I thought it was an unimportant job, it simply occurred to me that the jobs that take the most talent are the ones that the least people do. Since becoming a mother required very little talent, creativity or intelligence, it, therefore, must be for the girls that were less impressive then me.
If you need any more evidence of my spectacular case of teen-aged crisis, I shared these thoughts with my mother. I told her I had big dreams and things I wanted to make out of my life and being a mother would prevent me from achieving those dreams. I figured my own mom would understand these feelings because she knew how absolutely exceptional I was. I was wrong.
It may have stemmed from the supreme insult of being told she had devoted her life to someone who thought she was common and untalented, or it might have been that she loved me dearly and wanted to clue me into the reality that the President of the United States wasn’t trying desperately to call our house for my opinion, but mom told me plainly that she hoped I wouldn’t give up my opportunity to be a mother. I know, now, that it was because she knew what would really make me happy, and, in answer to the prayers of all the poor parts of the world, it wasn’t conquering a third world country.
The things I learned as a mother changed who I am. I’m not sorry about that. I used to fear change, as if I was loosing something, in the process, that was unique and precious about me. Now I understand that who I was is a part of who I am, though the changes have only improved me. Growing up isn’t scary. There is no reason to fear that you’ll settle for something less than what you wanted. What really happens is that you realize how much better what you once considered to be “less” really is. I ache for my friends who hold so tightly to their youth that they never really enjoy adulthood. Youth is wonderful, but as I grew up, I learned that motherhood is much, much better. Your priorities are altered and your heart grows. You become closer to who you were truly meant to be.
Chapter Two: Nate
“Can you conceive of eternal life without eternal love? Can either of you envision eternal happiness without the companionship of one another?”
-Gordon B. Hinckley
After graduating from high school, I went to Dixie College on a debate scholarship. Although the experiences I had there are a big part of my personal history, they aren’t a big part of my life as a mother. My family life began shortly after I graduated from Dixie, with my two year degree.
I transferred the associate’s to the University of Utah. My major was physics, with plans to go to law school once I was done. I had always been directed to the social sciences, a fault of the way public education deals with girls. But, do to the example of a friend, and some interesting classes at Dixie, I realized that there was a lot more “science” in the physical sciences. I loved them. I found physics completely enthralling.
The biggest problem was that, although I’d taken all the prerequisites, I’d never taken calculus. So, I was bound to struggle in the calculus-based physics class at the University. I took it as a co-requisite, as required by the school. I should have taken it before I entered the physics class. Of course, if I had, I would never have met Nathan.
Along with the lectures, we were required to attend a weekly co-lab. During the co-lab, we would sit at a table with three other students and work on a specific physics problem. My first week, I sat at a table alone and waited for others to join me. Before long, a skinny boy came over and invited me to join his table. I accepted, noticing two other boys watching me from the direction he indicated. After all, the lecture had about three hundred students. Of them, I would estimate there were around 25 girls. It wasn’t bad odds for me.
I met Andrew, Mike and Nate. I took an immediate interest in Mike. He was wearing a foreign language CTR ring. I had come to associate that with returned missionaries. During the course of the class, however, my interest quickly shifted to Nate. The first week’s problem wasn’t very hard, but it was still obvious by the end of class who was the smartest boy at my table.
I admit that every boy I have ever had a crush on, from elementary through college, earned the honor because of his brain rather than any of the more socially desirable traits. Athletes bored me. Student body officers irritated me. The nerds, however, always caught my attention. I remember making note of every interesting boy’s ACT score in high school. My sophomore year, I secretly adored a boy with a 33. I swore I would not settle for less. I suppose Nate must have attracted me in other areas as well, because he only got a 32.
We did the co-lab assignments over a table that had a dry-erase board as a top. When Nate ripped apart advanced calculus problems on that table as if it took no thought at all, I sighed after him the way most girls would some dork playing a guitar at a mission reunion. It was the perfect beginning.
At the end of that first lesson, Nate pointed at my text book and said he hadn’t bought his yet. He offered to help me with the homework if I let him use the book. We sat out on the lawn outside the physics building and did the homework as soon as class was over. He had to rush off to work afterward.
I dated a couple of other guys during the next week, but I couldn’t help anticipating the co-lab and Nathan. And then, as if to spite me, he didn’t show up. I was forced to do the co-lab with Andrew, Mike and some other boy. This new one had the annoying habit of looking at me condescendingly every time I ventured a thought. I reasoned that Nate must have transferred out of the class. I was more than a little disappointed. But, schedules did have the habit of changing during the first week of a semester. I put him out of my mind.
I was delighted when he was there early the next week. He sat at our table and the original group was back together again. Months later, when I told him how disappointed I was that he hadn’t come the second week, he told me he had been there. He said, “I came in late and your table was already full. After class, I wondered if you wanted help with your homework, but when I looked for you, you were surrounded by other guys. So, I left.” That’s not the way I remember it, but his version makes me smile.
Despite his purported interest in me, I had to ask him out on our first date. After several homework sessions, I asked if he would let me take him to dinner to thank him. Once a geek, always a geek.
We dated from when we met in September, until Christmas. It was about that time when Nathan started talking about getting married. I told him, firmly, that I was going on a mission before I got married to anyone. I generously offered to let him wait for me. He became increasingly sulky. I took the spring semester off so I could work more and earn money for my mission. I would turn 21 in June.
Somewhere around March, Nate asked me to fast with him about whether or not we should get married. I agreed. It was a Sunday and I didn’t tell anyone about what I was doing. I felt like it was between Nate and me. I had been meeting with my bishop once a month to discuss my missionary preparation. I wasn’t due to meet him for another two weeks. Against all odds, the bishop found me in the church hallways and asked me to meet him in his office after church.
I walked into the office and was met with a huge smile. The bishop waited for me to have a seat before asking, “How are the mission plans coming?”
It hit me so hard; I couldn’t deny it (which I’m very good at doing). I told him I wasn’t going on a mission. I was getting married. He didn’t seem surprised at all. Not for the first time in my life, I realized that bishops always know.
It’s amazing to me how often I feel like I’ve received a strong revelation one day and how I become completely insecure about my decision the next. My certainty that marriage was the right choice didn’t last beyond that day. Looking back, I often wonder why I have such little faith. If Heavenly Father told me once, why should he have to keep reassuring me? I shouldn’t question the answer first received.
A friend of mine laughed at me when I told her I was engaged. She said that I had broken up with Nate once a week and she couldn’t believe I expected her to think that the engagement would last. It was largely because of that statement that it did. How dare she imply that I wasn’t serious about my engagement? Still, I remained secretly insecure through the three months it took to plan our wedding.
Two days before we were scheduled to be married, Heavenly Father blessed me, once again, with security. I was helping Nate clean out his apartment when I found his patriarchal blessing. It mentioned the girl he would marry. That passage struck me so hard because I knew, without a doubt, it was talking about me. I felt much more carefree in the next few days.
After the wedding, all my fears disappeared. When we were dating and I was volatile, Nate was sulky and insecure. When we were engaged, Nate was confident. When we were married, Nate was calm, happy and completely wonderful. Everyone says the man changes once you’re married. It turned out to be completely true in my case, but not in the way they imply. Instead of letting his true controlling, inattentive and cruel nature show once we were married, Nathan did the opposite. He was no longer being jerked around by me, and so he became less moody and more perfect. In fact, one might argue we had an absolutely ideal marriage for two years.
Since then, we, like all couples, have had our ups and downs. I have been told that the greatest joy in life is falling in love. I was told this by someone who couldn’t understand why I would want to spend forever with the same man I fell for when I was very young. My considered response is that the statement is absolutely correct. However you interpret it, the greatest joy in life is falling in love. I have had the opportunity to fall in love a hundred times. Each time has been sweeter than the last. But for me, each time has been with the same person. My remarkable husband continues to amaze me. And it feels like I fall in love all over again on a weekly basis. I continually find new things about him to adore. And those sweet and overwhelming feelings of knowing I’m in the arms on someone I’m completely addicted to return month after month with more impact.
-Gordon B. Hinckley
After graduating from high school, I went to Dixie College on a debate scholarship. Although the experiences I had there are a big part of my personal history, they aren’t a big part of my life as a mother. My family life began shortly after I graduated from Dixie, with my two year degree.
I transferred the associate’s to the University of Utah. My major was physics, with plans to go to law school once I was done. I had always been directed to the social sciences, a fault of the way public education deals with girls. But, do to the example of a friend, and some interesting classes at Dixie, I realized that there was a lot more “science” in the physical sciences. I loved them. I found physics completely enthralling.
The biggest problem was that, although I’d taken all the prerequisites, I’d never taken calculus. So, I was bound to struggle in the calculus-based physics class at the University. I took it as a co-requisite, as required by the school. I should have taken it before I entered the physics class. Of course, if I had, I would never have met Nathan.
Along with the lectures, we were required to attend a weekly co-lab. During the co-lab, we would sit at a table with three other students and work on a specific physics problem. My first week, I sat at a table alone and waited for others to join me. Before long, a skinny boy came over and invited me to join his table. I accepted, noticing two other boys watching me from the direction he indicated. After all, the lecture had about three hundred students. Of them, I would estimate there were around 25 girls. It wasn’t bad odds for me.
I met Andrew, Mike and Nate. I took an immediate interest in Mike. He was wearing a foreign language CTR ring. I had come to associate that with returned missionaries. During the course of the class, however, my interest quickly shifted to Nate. The first week’s problem wasn’t very hard, but it was still obvious by the end of class who was the smartest boy at my table.
I admit that every boy I have ever had a crush on, from elementary through college, earned the honor because of his brain rather than any of the more socially desirable traits. Athletes bored me. Student body officers irritated me. The nerds, however, always caught my attention. I remember making note of every interesting boy’s ACT score in high school. My sophomore year, I secretly adored a boy with a 33. I swore I would not settle for less. I suppose Nate must have attracted me in other areas as well, because he only got a 32.
We did the co-lab assignments over a table that had a dry-erase board as a top. When Nate ripped apart advanced calculus problems on that table as if it took no thought at all, I sighed after him the way most girls would some dork playing a guitar at a mission reunion. It was the perfect beginning.
At the end of that first lesson, Nate pointed at my text book and said he hadn’t bought his yet. He offered to help me with the homework if I let him use the book. We sat out on the lawn outside the physics building and did the homework as soon as class was over. He had to rush off to work afterward.
I dated a couple of other guys during the next week, but I couldn’t help anticipating the co-lab and Nathan. And then, as if to spite me, he didn’t show up. I was forced to do the co-lab with Andrew, Mike and some other boy. This new one had the annoying habit of looking at me condescendingly every time I ventured a thought. I reasoned that Nate must have transferred out of the class. I was more than a little disappointed. But, schedules did have the habit of changing during the first week of a semester. I put him out of my mind.
I was delighted when he was there early the next week. He sat at our table and the original group was back together again. Months later, when I told him how disappointed I was that he hadn’t come the second week, he told me he had been there. He said, “I came in late and your table was already full. After class, I wondered if you wanted help with your homework, but when I looked for you, you were surrounded by other guys. So, I left.” That’s not the way I remember it, but his version makes me smile.
Despite his purported interest in me, I had to ask him out on our first date. After several homework sessions, I asked if he would let me take him to dinner to thank him. Once a geek, always a geek.
We dated from when we met in September, until Christmas. It was about that time when Nathan started talking about getting married. I told him, firmly, that I was going on a mission before I got married to anyone. I generously offered to let him wait for me. He became increasingly sulky. I took the spring semester off so I could work more and earn money for my mission. I would turn 21 in June.
Somewhere around March, Nate asked me to fast with him about whether or not we should get married. I agreed. It was a Sunday and I didn’t tell anyone about what I was doing. I felt like it was between Nate and me. I had been meeting with my bishop once a month to discuss my missionary preparation. I wasn’t due to meet him for another two weeks. Against all odds, the bishop found me in the church hallways and asked me to meet him in his office after church.
I walked into the office and was met with a huge smile. The bishop waited for me to have a seat before asking, “How are the mission plans coming?”
It hit me so hard; I couldn’t deny it (which I’m very good at doing). I told him I wasn’t going on a mission. I was getting married. He didn’t seem surprised at all. Not for the first time in my life, I realized that bishops always know.
It’s amazing to me how often I feel like I’ve received a strong revelation one day and how I become completely insecure about my decision the next. My certainty that marriage was the right choice didn’t last beyond that day. Looking back, I often wonder why I have such little faith. If Heavenly Father told me once, why should he have to keep reassuring me? I shouldn’t question the answer first received.
A friend of mine laughed at me when I told her I was engaged. She said that I had broken up with Nate once a week and she couldn’t believe I expected her to think that the engagement would last. It was largely because of that statement that it did. How dare she imply that I wasn’t serious about my engagement? Still, I remained secretly insecure through the three months it took to plan our wedding.
Two days before we were scheduled to be married, Heavenly Father blessed me, once again, with security. I was helping Nate clean out his apartment when I found his patriarchal blessing. It mentioned the girl he would marry. That passage struck me so hard because I knew, without a doubt, it was talking about me. I felt much more carefree in the next few days.
After the wedding, all my fears disappeared. When we were dating and I was volatile, Nate was sulky and insecure. When we were engaged, Nate was confident. When we were married, Nate was calm, happy and completely wonderful. Everyone says the man changes once you’re married. It turned out to be completely true in my case, but not in the way they imply. Instead of letting his true controlling, inattentive and cruel nature show once we were married, Nathan did the opposite. He was no longer being jerked around by me, and so he became less moody and more perfect. In fact, one might argue we had an absolutely ideal marriage for two years.
Since then, we, like all couples, have had our ups and downs. I have been told that the greatest joy in life is falling in love. I was told this by someone who couldn’t understand why I would want to spend forever with the same man I fell for when I was very young. My considered response is that the statement is absolutely correct. However you interpret it, the greatest joy in life is falling in love. I have had the opportunity to fall in love a hundred times. Each time has been sweeter than the last. But for me, each time has been with the same person. My remarkable husband continues to amaze me. And it feels like I fall in love all over again on a weekly basis. I continually find new things about him to adore. And those sweet and overwhelming feelings of knowing I’m in the arms on someone I’m completely addicted to return month after month with more impact.
Chapter Three: Ryan and Sean
“Perhaps my greatest hope as a parent is to have such a relationship with you that when the day comes and you look down into the face of your first child, you will feel deep within you the desire to be to your child the kind of parent your dad has tried to be to you. What greater compliment could any man ask?”
-G. Spencer Monson
Getting married changed a few of my plans. I knew that there was no way I’d be able to attend law school with a husband dead set on medical school. I tried to talk him out of it, but not with a lot of vigor. I didn’t want to distract him from his goals. Medicine just seemed all wrong for my Nate. He did his undergrad in mathematics with chemistry minor, but his real passion is computers. I can’t begin to illustrate his obsession with them. I will tell you that during his summer break from medical school he downloaded a computer science course from MIT and spent the entire break watching it. He wasn’t getting any credit for this. He did it for fun.
I noticed that when I asked him about anything in medicine he seemed remarkably uninterested, but when computers came up, his eyes glowed. Which is why I made some sarcastic comment about Nate wanting to become a doctor while we were at his mother’s house, not long after we were married. I used a more disparaging voice than completely necessary and his mom picked up on it right away. She turned to me and said, “Don’t you want him to want him to become a doctor?” The statement held all the matter-of-factness of “Any woman would want her husband to be a doctor,” and all the scorn of, “You are trying to distract him from his potential.”
But the fact was that I didn’t want him to go to medical school. Not because I still harbored a hope of attending law school. I knew that was not going to happen for a long time, if at all. I simply didn’t think Nate would be happy in medicine. It was not what excited him. He would never say it, but he had been instilled with a deep sense of duty. He knew he could do absolutely anything he aspired to do, so he picked that which he felt would best support his family. It was never about what he wanted to do. It was about what he wanted to have.
Still, this dialogue was completely unspoken. He had his mind set and I was going to support him. So, we attended college together. He worked toward the prerequisites for medical school and I worked on a degree in mass communication. He was doing what he felt was practical and I was doing what I was really good at. Neither of us were working on what we honestly loved. Despite that, we were very happy.
I remember loving being around other women talking about their husbands. Oh sure, they loved them. But their descriptions only solidified my assurance that I was married to the most wonderful man alive. It’s hard to believe, but Nate never criticized me. He never lied to me. He never implied that I ought to be doing more or different things. In fact, he never once made me feel like I was anything other than the perfect woman who he adored. We continued that way from our first year together and into our second.
On and off, however, I kept thinking about our plans and wondering when and where we would ever fit in kids. Nate didn’t seem to give it a second thought. He figured we’d go to school first and then we’d have a family. But it kept weighing on my mind how much school Nate was planning. We would be close to 30 before he finished medical school. Then there was residency. From everything I’d heard, he was going to be more absent then than while he was actually in school. Surely if he thought it was inconvenient to have a child during school, he would have the same thoughts about residency. So, he wanted to wait until I was getting close to thirty-five before even attempting to have a baby? I don’t actually know what he was thinking on that topic because he always smoothly avoided the subject.
I tried to be supportive. I didn’t bring up my thoughts because I didn’t want him to have extra stress. I kept asking myself how I’d feel if, ten years in the future, he felt like his dreams had been abandoned because of me and children. But I couldn’t stop thinking that we needed to have a family and if we waited for convenience, we would wait forever.
One Saturday it all came out. Nate must have been shocked because I’d barely touched the subject before. I sat him down and said, “I think we should have a baby now and we can afford it.” He listened to my explanations. He agreed that residency would not be the ideal time to start a family. He agreed that it wasn’t a good idea to wait until we were older
.
In the end he said, in a resigned voice, “Okay, let’s do it.” I thought that meant he agreed and wanted a child. I was wrong. It just meant that he was giving in because he wanted me to be happy.
The next few months were terrible for me. For the twenty percent of you who have ever really struggled with fertility, that probably seems laughable. But I remember throwing the negative pregnancy test across the bathroom after breaking it in half, the third month. Once you decide you want a baby, nine months seems way too long, you certainly shouldn’t have to wait to conceive. On the fourth try, I finally had the good news.
This is supposed to be the most exciting time for a woman. Most that I have known like to dream about wonderful ways to share the news with their husband. I didn’t want to tell mine. He hadn’t been an active participant during the previous months. I had circled the days on our calendar during which I had calculated that I would be most fertile. Nate pretended like none of it was going on.
When I finally told him the baby was on his way, he didn’t want anyone to know. It turned into a horrible fight. I didn’t understand why we should be ashamed. We were supposed to be thrilled. When I asked him why I couldn’t shout it from the rooftops, he replied, “This is a big source of stress for me right now, okay.” It hit me like a hard slap in the face, my first from Nate. I had to go to the back yard to be alone.
Alright, most people aren’t going to understand why that simple expression was such a blow to me. Normal couples fight and it doesn’t sound like a horrible personal attack. But our relationship, up to that point, had been completely free of any expressions of discontent, at least from Nate. He had never before implied that anything about our marriage made him unhappy, angry, anxious, or stressed. He had always made it quite clear that he loved everything about me and didn’t want me to change. In one statement, that history had been destroyed. Instead of being his strength and passion, I was a source of stress. It was the reason I’d never asked for children before. It was my worst fear materializing.
Since then, time and time again, I’ve seen this side of Nate. And I know what causes it. I know exactly why it never showed up before. My sweet husband is a man of work and self-sufficiency. He believes America is the land of opportunity. He believes that anyone with a work ethic and a little integrity can accomplish anything he/she sets out to do. As a result, he often equates dependency and laziness. He believes firmly that if you cannot afford to support your own children, you should not have them. Acting otherwise shows a blatant lack of personal responsibility. That is why, after Ryan was born, Nate worked two jobs while going to school full time. He was determined to provide for his family and insure that I would not have to work. It’s no wonder he felt stressed. He knew what he was going to have to do to hold to his principles and provide for his family once he became a father.
Ryan was due at the end of March. I had examined the calendars very carefully. I took the spring semester off school, but Nate was still going. March 17-21 was the week of spring break. I told my boss that I would work through Friday the 14th. I wanted the two weeks before the due date to prepare my house. There was a lot to do.
Tuesday the 11th, a coworker called and asked if he could take my shift. Knowing how financially strapped we would soon be, I should have told him “no.” But I had a headache that day and really felt like I needed the rest. Ironically, by afternoon I was feeling great. I started working and, miraculously, got everything essential done that day.
It put me in a state of mind to worry about how our family would change and how Nate would adapt. I recognize that all women want their babies to be born before the due date. But I felt like it was an absolute necessity. I desperately wanted my baby during spring break. Nate would be very stressed the rest of the semester. Between preparing for graduation, applying to medical school, classes and work, I didn’t know if he’d even manage to pick his child out of a baby line-up. I wasn’t worried about me needing help. I was worried that my baby’s daddy would not have a chance to fall in love with his child.
I remember being very afraid that it was unrighteous, but I convinced myself that if it was, Heavenly Father would know that my heart didn’t mean it that way. I knelt down and asked for Ryan to come early. I explained everything that I was worried about and told Heavenly Father that I was sorry if it was not something I should pray for. I asked that if I needed to wait, for him to please find a way to help Nathan have time with his baby.
The rest of the week passed quickly. I went to work on Friday, for the last time. I even cried during my midnight drive home. I wasn’t sad, just uncertain of how my life would change in two more weeks. To my delight, it changed a lot quicker than that.
In answer to my prayer, I went into labor at six the next morning. Ryan was born at six Saturday night. I couldn’t believe it. I had hoped he would come the next week. Nate and Ryan would have the entire spring break, plus two weekends to fall in love.
Those first weeks went by smoothly. We both enjoyed being a family of three. But, it wasn’t long before we received a horrible bombshell. When Ryan was only a few weeks old, Nate got word that he hadn’t been accepted to medical school. He had a higher MCAT, more research, more community service, more work experience and a better GPA than the average person that was admitted, but the lottery simply didn’t call his numbers. He was devastated. This was everything he had ever wanted.
I left him alone. Nate is not the type to want to “talk about it.” I knew he was working through the first major failure of his life. In my mind, I wondered if he was questioning whether the choices he had made concerning his family had held him back. Afraid of the answer, I didn’t ask.
Later that day, I walked through the curtain that separated our bedroom from the rest of our garage apartment. Nate was lying on the bed with the baby, holding his fingers in front of Ryan’s little face. Ryan reached up and grabbed his daddy’s finger. I took a deep breath. I wanted to talk to my husband, but had no idea what to say. Was he staring down at that little face wondering if he was looking a huge mistake?
I asked, “What are you thinking?”
Nate didn’t look away from his son. He replied, “I’m thinking about him, about how much I love him.” Those words took my breath away and still bring tears to my eyes. He wasn’t wallowing in sorrow and disappointment. He realized, as I did, that no matter what we had to sacrifice, starting our family had been the right choice.
Over the next few months, I often questioned why Nate had not been selected to enter the medical school. The same answer kept returning to my mind. We were not going to have more children during medical school. Perhaps it wouldn’t be possible even during residency. That meant that Ryan would be five, maybe ten years old before he had a sibling. I felt very strongly that Nate wasn’t accepted to medical school that year because we were supposed to have another baby. It took four months before I got up the courage to tell Nate about my feelings.
This time I got pregnant the first try. When I was around ten weeks along, however, I started bleeding. As is my nature, I read everything I could find on the matter and discussed it with my doctor. There was about a fifty percent chance I would miscarry.
I was very upset when I talked to Nate about it. He simply put his arms around me and said, “Don’t worry about it. We’re supposed to have this one, remember.” I couldn’t believe I was hearing such words of comfort from the man who didn’t want kids, at least not for a long time. I relaxed immediately. Twelve months and 26 days after Ryan was born, we welcomed our second son, Sean. The next month, Nate was admitted to medical school…in Chicago.
One of the first things you learn as a parent is that things never work out the way you had planned. It doesn’t take long, however, before you learn that, despite that, they do always work out.
-G. Spencer Monson
Getting married changed a few of my plans. I knew that there was no way I’d be able to attend law school with a husband dead set on medical school. I tried to talk him out of it, but not with a lot of vigor. I didn’t want to distract him from his goals. Medicine just seemed all wrong for my Nate. He did his undergrad in mathematics with chemistry minor, but his real passion is computers. I can’t begin to illustrate his obsession with them. I will tell you that during his summer break from medical school he downloaded a computer science course from MIT and spent the entire break watching it. He wasn’t getting any credit for this. He did it for fun.
I noticed that when I asked him about anything in medicine he seemed remarkably uninterested, but when computers came up, his eyes glowed. Which is why I made some sarcastic comment about Nate wanting to become a doctor while we were at his mother’s house, not long after we were married. I used a more disparaging voice than completely necessary and his mom picked up on it right away. She turned to me and said, “Don’t you want him to want him to become a doctor?” The statement held all the matter-of-factness of “Any woman would want her husband to be a doctor,” and all the scorn of, “You are trying to distract him from his potential.”
But the fact was that I didn’t want him to go to medical school. Not because I still harbored a hope of attending law school. I knew that was not going to happen for a long time, if at all. I simply didn’t think Nate would be happy in medicine. It was not what excited him. He would never say it, but he had been instilled with a deep sense of duty. He knew he could do absolutely anything he aspired to do, so he picked that which he felt would best support his family. It was never about what he wanted to do. It was about what he wanted to have.
Still, this dialogue was completely unspoken. He had his mind set and I was going to support him. So, we attended college together. He worked toward the prerequisites for medical school and I worked on a degree in mass communication. He was doing what he felt was practical and I was doing what I was really good at. Neither of us were working on what we honestly loved. Despite that, we were very happy.
I remember loving being around other women talking about their husbands. Oh sure, they loved them. But their descriptions only solidified my assurance that I was married to the most wonderful man alive. It’s hard to believe, but Nate never criticized me. He never lied to me. He never implied that I ought to be doing more or different things. In fact, he never once made me feel like I was anything other than the perfect woman who he adored. We continued that way from our first year together and into our second.
On and off, however, I kept thinking about our plans and wondering when and where we would ever fit in kids. Nate didn’t seem to give it a second thought. He figured we’d go to school first and then we’d have a family. But it kept weighing on my mind how much school Nate was planning. We would be close to 30 before he finished medical school. Then there was residency. From everything I’d heard, he was going to be more absent then than while he was actually in school. Surely if he thought it was inconvenient to have a child during school, he would have the same thoughts about residency. So, he wanted to wait until I was getting close to thirty-five before even attempting to have a baby? I don’t actually know what he was thinking on that topic because he always smoothly avoided the subject.
I tried to be supportive. I didn’t bring up my thoughts because I didn’t want him to have extra stress. I kept asking myself how I’d feel if, ten years in the future, he felt like his dreams had been abandoned because of me and children. But I couldn’t stop thinking that we needed to have a family and if we waited for convenience, we would wait forever.
One Saturday it all came out. Nate must have been shocked because I’d barely touched the subject before. I sat him down and said, “I think we should have a baby now and we can afford it.” He listened to my explanations. He agreed that residency would not be the ideal time to start a family. He agreed that it wasn’t a good idea to wait until we were older
.
In the end he said, in a resigned voice, “Okay, let’s do it.” I thought that meant he agreed and wanted a child. I was wrong. It just meant that he was giving in because he wanted me to be happy.
The next few months were terrible for me. For the twenty percent of you who have ever really struggled with fertility, that probably seems laughable. But I remember throwing the negative pregnancy test across the bathroom after breaking it in half, the third month. Once you decide you want a baby, nine months seems way too long, you certainly shouldn’t have to wait to conceive. On the fourth try, I finally had the good news.
This is supposed to be the most exciting time for a woman. Most that I have known like to dream about wonderful ways to share the news with their husband. I didn’t want to tell mine. He hadn’t been an active participant during the previous months. I had circled the days on our calendar during which I had calculated that I would be most fertile. Nate pretended like none of it was going on.
When I finally told him the baby was on his way, he didn’t want anyone to know. It turned into a horrible fight. I didn’t understand why we should be ashamed. We were supposed to be thrilled. When I asked him why I couldn’t shout it from the rooftops, he replied, “This is a big source of stress for me right now, okay.” It hit me like a hard slap in the face, my first from Nate. I had to go to the back yard to be alone.
Alright, most people aren’t going to understand why that simple expression was such a blow to me. Normal couples fight and it doesn’t sound like a horrible personal attack. But our relationship, up to that point, had been completely free of any expressions of discontent, at least from Nate. He had never before implied that anything about our marriage made him unhappy, angry, anxious, or stressed. He had always made it quite clear that he loved everything about me and didn’t want me to change. In one statement, that history had been destroyed. Instead of being his strength and passion, I was a source of stress. It was the reason I’d never asked for children before. It was my worst fear materializing.
Since then, time and time again, I’ve seen this side of Nate. And I know what causes it. I know exactly why it never showed up before. My sweet husband is a man of work and self-sufficiency. He believes America is the land of opportunity. He believes that anyone with a work ethic and a little integrity can accomplish anything he/she sets out to do. As a result, he often equates dependency and laziness. He believes firmly that if you cannot afford to support your own children, you should not have them. Acting otherwise shows a blatant lack of personal responsibility. That is why, after Ryan was born, Nate worked two jobs while going to school full time. He was determined to provide for his family and insure that I would not have to work. It’s no wonder he felt stressed. He knew what he was going to have to do to hold to his principles and provide for his family once he became a father.
Ryan was due at the end of March. I had examined the calendars very carefully. I took the spring semester off school, but Nate was still going. March 17-21 was the week of spring break. I told my boss that I would work through Friday the 14th. I wanted the two weeks before the due date to prepare my house. There was a lot to do.
Tuesday the 11th, a coworker called and asked if he could take my shift. Knowing how financially strapped we would soon be, I should have told him “no.” But I had a headache that day and really felt like I needed the rest. Ironically, by afternoon I was feeling great. I started working and, miraculously, got everything essential done that day.
It put me in a state of mind to worry about how our family would change and how Nate would adapt. I recognize that all women want their babies to be born before the due date. But I felt like it was an absolute necessity. I desperately wanted my baby during spring break. Nate would be very stressed the rest of the semester. Between preparing for graduation, applying to medical school, classes and work, I didn’t know if he’d even manage to pick his child out of a baby line-up. I wasn’t worried about me needing help. I was worried that my baby’s daddy would not have a chance to fall in love with his child.
I remember being very afraid that it was unrighteous, but I convinced myself that if it was, Heavenly Father would know that my heart didn’t mean it that way. I knelt down and asked for Ryan to come early. I explained everything that I was worried about and told Heavenly Father that I was sorry if it was not something I should pray for. I asked that if I needed to wait, for him to please find a way to help Nathan have time with his baby.
The rest of the week passed quickly. I went to work on Friday, for the last time. I even cried during my midnight drive home. I wasn’t sad, just uncertain of how my life would change in two more weeks. To my delight, it changed a lot quicker than that.
In answer to my prayer, I went into labor at six the next morning. Ryan was born at six Saturday night. I couldn’t believe it. I had hoped he would come the next week. Nate and Ryan would have the entire spring break, plus two weekends to fall in love.
Those first weeks went by smoothly. We both enjoyed being a family of three. But, it wasn’t long before we received a horrible bombshell. When Ryan was only a few weeks old, Nate got word that he hadn’t been accepted to medical school. He had a higher MCAT, more research, more community service, more work experience and a better GPA than the average person that was admitted, but the lottery simply didn’t call his numbers. He was devastated. This was everything he had ever wanted.
I left him alone. Nate is not the type to want to “talk about it.” I knew he was working through the first major failure of his life. In my mind, I wondered if he was questioning whether the choices he had made concerning his family had held him back. Afraid of the answer, I didn’t ask.
Later that day, I walked through the curtain that separated our bedroom from the rest of our garage apartment. Nate was lying on the bed with the baby, holding his fingers in front of Ryan’s little face. Ryan reached up and grabbed his daddy’s finger. I took a deep breath. I wanted to talk to my husband, but had no idea what to say. Was he staring down at that little face wondering if he was looking a huge mistake?
I asked, “What are you thinking?”
Nate didn’t look away from his son. He replied, “I’m thinking about him, about how much I love him.” Those words took my breath away and still bring tears to my eyes. He wasn’t wallowing in sorrow and disappointment. He realized, as I did, that no matter what we had to sacrifice, starting our family had been the right choice.
Over the next few months, I often questioned why Nate had not been selected to enter the medical school. The same answer kept returning to my mind. We were not going to have more children during medical school. Perhaps it wouldn’t be possible even during residency. That meant that Ryan would be five, maybe ten years old before he had a sibling. I felt very strongly that Nate wasn’t accepted to medical school that year because we were supposed to have another baby. It took four months before I got up the courage to tell Nate about my feelings.
This time I got pregnant the first try. When I was around ten weeks along, however, I started bleeding. As is my nature, I read everything I could find on the matter and discussed it with my doctor. There was about a fifty percent chance I would miscarry.
I was very upset when I talked to Nate about it. He simply put his arms around me and said, “Don’t worry about it. We’re supposed to have this one, remember.” I couldn’t believe I was hearing such words of comfort from the man who didn’t want kids, at least not for a long time. I relaxed immediately. Twelve months and 26 days after Ryan was born, we welcomed our second son, Sean. The next month, Nate was admitted to medical school…in Chicago.
One of the first things you learn as a parent is that things never work out the way you had planned. It doesn’t take long, however, before you learn that, despite that, they do always work out.
Chapter Four: The Emergency Room
“Our own intellectual shortfalls and perplexities do not alter the fact of God’s astonishing foreknowledge, which takes into account our choices for which we are responsible. Amid the mortal and fragmentary communiques and the breaking news of the day concerning various human conflicts, God lives in an eternal now where the past, present, and future are constantly before Him”
-Neal A. Maxwell
Before we were married I promised Nate that I would go with him to medical school, anywhere he got in, as long as he promised to bring me home after he finished his education. I didn’t think I’d end up moving my two small boys to a northern suburb of Chicago. I always figured the school would be in the West, so did Nate. It turns out that there aren’t many private medical colleges in the West. And, we learned during the first year of applying, that state sponsored colleges were pretty much inaccessible to anyone not from that state. So, when Nate didn’t get into the University of Utah, we knew we were headed East.
We found a duplex in a town called Waukegan. We had three bedrooms, a backyard and a basement with a washer and dryer. Nate quit his jobs, dropped out of mathematics graduate school, which he had been doing since he had finished undergrad the year before, and prepared for a blind move. I tried to contact people from the church in our new area that could give us advice, but had little luck. We truly had no idea what we were headed into.
We knew that the school sold health insurance, which was required for students. We figured out a budget so that I could stay home with my two boys. The financial aid people at the school had sent Nate letters telling him that in addition to the fifty thousand, or so, he would need for tuition and supplies, he could borrow $1600 a month for living on. Our apartment cost $850, so we would have to make the rest of the bills fit into the remainder.
Needless to say, we were a bit discouraged when, during the first week of school, he received paperwork showing that insurance for our family would be over $800 a month. The numbers simply didn’t add up. I talked to some of the other medical students at church and discovered that everyone was on Medicaid. I was in a predicament. I could have applied for a job, but it was extremely unlikely that my bachelor’s degree, with no experience, would earn us enough money to pay for day care, let alone insurance. And I didn’t even want to try. I had two babies who needed a mother.
So all of Nate’s well-founded principles were about to collapse. He believed it was a man’s absolute obligation to provide for his family. But, he had been accepted into medical school and would not be able to have a job. The support we were allowed to borrow was simply not enough. The only thing he could do was lament the bad decisions that had put him in this situation and apply for Medicaid. Of course, the whole thing made him ornery. But Nate wasn’t stupid enough to tell me he wished we hadn’t had our children. He just moped and avoided the subject of healthcare. That made it my responsibility.
I did almost everything myself. I went to the meetings and did the paperwork. Luckily, the wife of a second-year med student offered to watch Ryan, so I could meet with the social worker. I called the referral line and asked about doctors that would accept the insurance. When I was told there weren’t any, I took the boys to the state health clinic for their immunizations. The whole thing was humiliating, but I would do what it took to make sure my children didn’t suffer for my decisions.
By the time January rolled around, we were getting settled into our new home. When Nate had been accepted to medical school, we realized that we would have to sale our nicer car in order to pay off what we owed on both of them. Since our sad little budget didn’t include money for a car payment, I was left at home alone most of the time. As a result, I didn’t know the area very well at all.
All of this presented a problem the middle of our first January in Chicago. Ryan was suffering from croup. It was an illness we’d battled before with our sweet little boy. He would get that horrible barking cough and cold symptoms. As new parents, a year before, we had rushed him to the pediatrician. He had told us it was completely viral and, besides a few simple home remedies that have been around since medieval times, there was little we could do except wait for it to pass.
Alone in my new home, I waited. It got a little worse each night and a little better during the day. I knew it was just a viral respiratory infection, but it sure seemed to be taking a long time for my little boy, just months shy of two years old, to fight it off. One night, I sat in a chair holding Ryan, waiting for his dad to come home from school. My energetic toddler lay there, struggling to breath. I knew he needed a doctor, but I didn’t have a car.
By the time Nate came home, all of the clinics were closed except for the after-hours acute care center and the emergency room. I certainly didn’t even entertain the idea of taking him to the ER for something as silly as croup. So, I looked up the address of the acute care center and loaded Ryan in the car, leaving Nate with Sean. The clinic was in a part of town that I’d been to before. I felt semi-confident that I could find it.
It may have been my imagination, but Ryan’s breathing seemed to become more labored every time I turned a corner. I drove to the shopping center where I expected to find the acute care center. It was along a very busy stretch of rode, with a huge mall on one side and smaller strip malls along the other. I wasn’t sure which side of the rode it was on or how far into a shopping center it might be, so I squinted into a half-dozen dark roads. I pulled into some of them, but I couldn’t find what I sought.
It was in the parking lot of a car dealership that I finally lost it. Ryan was wheezing and whimpering. I had no idea what to do. While making our budget, we had decided a cell phone was completely out of the question. I said a prayer and then picked a direction at random. Miraculously, I turned into the parking lot of the acute care center. It was tucked behind another building in the mall parking lot; go figure.
Ryan was weak and a little limp when I pulled him out of his car seat. He had to suck hard to get any air into his lungs. But we had made it. There were doctors just a few feet away. I tried to compose myself, but my hands were still shaking a little as I carried my little boy into the clinic.
I stopped dead a moment after I had entered. Right over the reception desk, they had a huge sign posted. It said, “We do not accept any form of public aid.” I didn’t really know what that meant. I realize that sounds stupid, but I wasn’t real familiar with the terminology of welfare. I knew there were a hundred different programs. I wasn’t sure if one of the programs covered public aid and kid-care was something else. Well, the ideas flashed through my head. I was pretty sure what it meant.
I took a step up to the receptionist and tried to talk quietly. I said, “You don’t accept Medicaid?” She shook her head. I choked. I am not the type to ask for help. I like to figure stuff out on my own. But I was at my wit’s end. Ryan seemed to be getting worse moment by moment. I asked, “Where can I go?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “I guess there’s always the emergency room.” I stepped in closer, after glancing around at the other people in the waiting room. They were all watching me curiously, a few with pitying looks. I desperately wanted to turn and run out.
I whispered, trying not to make eye contact with this woman, “Where’s that?”
Again I was met with a look of distain. She said, curtly, “Down Grand,” and looked to her computer to tell me she was done with the conversation. As I turned to go, another of the reception workers stepped over and started to whisper directions to me. I nodded but didn’t speak. I repeated the directions in my head and tried not to let the tears burning my eyes fall. I had no idea where any of the roads she mentioned were.
I remember hurrying out to my car and strapping my sick little boy into his car seat. I don’t remember many details of what happened after that. But I know I was being watched over through my minor crisis. I know that because I drove strait to the hospital. More than a year later, when I became pregnant with Chloe, I saw an obstetrician whose office was at that hospital, some ten miles away from the acute care center. I was never able to drive to those prenatal appointments without wondering how in the world I found that hospital in the dark when I had never been in that city before.
The triage nurse watched me walk into the waiting room. I don’t know how I looked, but Ryan must have concerned her. When I was signing in she turned to another nurse and said, “This baby is going to need a cool mist right now.” There was no nerve racking wait. They took Ryan right back, x-rayed his chest, and gave him steroids.
We sat in the tiny ER room for hours waiting for the x-ray results. When they came back, the doctor said his airway was constricted and he would need to be admitted for a couple of days. It made for a great adventure with Nate taking over with Ryan before school so I could run home and shower. Ward members came to give Ryan a blessing and even fed Nate and Sean while I stayed at the hospital with my boy.
In the middle of the second day, I got pretty hungry, but didn’t want to leave Ryan. I decided he could walk down to the cafeteria with me. As soon as I had him out of his room, though, alarms started ringing, the doors to the unit automatically closed and three nurses ran over ready to tackle me. It turns out Ryan wasn’t allowed to leave the floor. Oh well. I wasn’t hungry enough to leave my poor little boy in the bed surrounded by prison bars all by himself.
The good that came out of my whole experience was a business card from the ER doctor. It turned out that she had a friend who was family practice and would accept Medicaid. I was thrilled at the prospect of never having to go to that horrible state health clinic again. Of course, I would learn a year later, that hope was too good to be true. I didn’t complain. Beggars can’t be choosers.
-Neal A. Maxwell
Before we were married I promised Nate that I would go with him to medical school, anywhere he got in, as long as he promised to bring me home after he finished his education. I didn’t think I’d end up moving my two small boys to a northern suburb of Chicago. I always figured the school would be in the West, so did Nate. It turns out that there aren’t many private medical colleges in the West. And, we learned during the first year of applying, that state sponsored colleges were pretty much inaccessible to anyone not from that state. So, when Nate didn’t get into the University of Utah, we knew we were headed East.
We found a duplex in a town called Waukegan. We had three bedrooms, a backyard and a basement with a washer and dryer. Nate quit his jobs, dropped out of mathematics graduate school, which he had been doing since he had finished undergrad the year before, and prepared for a blind move. I tried to contact people from the church in our new area that could give us advice, but had little luck. We truly had no idea what we were headed into.
We knew that the school sold health insurance, which was required for students. We figured out a budget so that I could stay home with my two boys. The financial aid people at the school had sent Nate letters telling him that in addition to the fifty thousand, or so, he would need for tuition and supplies, he could borrow $1600 a month for living on. Our apartment cost $850, so we would have to make the rest of the bills fit into the remainder.
Needless to say, we were a bit discouraged when, during the first week of school, he received paperwork showing that insurance for our family would be over $800 a month. The numbers simply didn’t add up. I talked to some of the other medical students at church and discovered that everyone was on Medicaid. I was in a predicament. I could have applied for a job, but it was extremely unlikely that my bachelor’s degree, with no experience, would earn us enough money to pay for day care, let alone insurance. And I didn’t even want to try. I had two babies who needed a mother.
So all of Nate’s well-founded principles were about to collapse. He believed it was a man’s absolute obligation to provide for his family. But, he had been accepted into medical school and would not be able to have a job. The support we were allowed to borrow was simply not enough. The only thing he could do was lament the bad decisions that had put him in this situation and apply for Medicaid. Of course, the whole thing made him ornery. But Nate wasn’t stupid enough to tell me he wished we hadn’t had our children. He just moped and avoided the subject of healthcare. That made it my responsibility.
I did almost everything myself. I went to the meetings and did the paperwork. Luckily, the wife of a second-year med student offered to watch Ryan, so I could meet with the social worker. I called the referral line and asked about doctors that would accept the insurance. When I was told there weren’t any, I took the boys to the state health clinic for their immunizations. The whole thing was humiliating, but I would do what it took to make sure my children didn’t suffer for my decisions.
By the time January rolled around, we were getting settled into our new home. When Nate had been accepted to medical school, we realized that we would have to sale our nicer car in order to pay off what we owed on both of them. Since our sad little budget didn’t include money for a car payment, I was left at home alone most of the time. As a result, I didn’t know the area very well at all.
All of this presented a problem the middle of our first January in Chicago. Ryan was suffering from croup. It was an illness we’d battled before with our sweet little boy. He would get that horrible barking cough and cold symptoms. As new parents, a year before, we had rushed him to the pediatrician. He had told us it was completely viral and, besides a few simple home remedies that have been around since medieval times, there was little we could do except wait for it to pass.
Alone in my new home, I waited. It got a little worse each night and a little better during the day. I knew it was just a viral respiratory infection, but it sure seemed to be taking a long time for my little boy, just months shy of two years old, to fight it off. One night, I sat in a chair holding Ryan, waiting for his dad to come home from school. My energetic toddler lay there, struggling to breath. I knew he needed a doctor, but I didn’t have a car.
By the time Nate came home, all of the clinics were closed except for the after-hours acute care center and the emergency room. I certainly didn’t even entertain the idea of taking him to the ER for something as silly as croup. So, I looked up the address of the acute care center and loaded Ryan in the car, leaving Nate with Sean. The clinic was in a part of town that I’d been to before. I felt semi-confident that I could find it.
It may have been my imagination, but Ryan’s breathing seemed to become more labored every time I turned a corner. I drove to the shopping center where I expected to find the acute care center. It was along a very busy stretch of rode, with a huge mall on one side and smaller strip malls along the other. I wasn’t sure which side of the rode it was on or how far into a shopping center it might be, so I squinted into a half-dozen dark roads. I pulled into some of them, but I couldn’t find what I sought.
It was in the parking lot of a car dealership that I finally lost it. Ryan was wheezing and whimpering. I had no idea what to do. While making our budget, we had decided a cell phone was completely out of the question. I said a prayer and then picked a direction at random. Miraculously, I turned into the parking lot of the acute care center. It was tucked behind another building in the mall parking lot; go figure.
Ryan was weak and a little limp when I pulled him out of his car seat. He had to suck hard to get any air into his lungs. But we had made it. There were doctors just a few feet away. I tried to compose myself, but my hands were still shaking a little as I carried my little boy into the clinic.
I stopped dead a moment after I had entered. Right over the reception desk, they had a huge sign posted. It said, “We do not accept any form of public aid.” I didn’t really know what that meant. I realize that sounds stupid, but I wasn’t real familiar with the terminology of welfare. I knew there were a hundred different programs. I wasn’t sure if one of the programs covered public aid and kid-care was something else. Well, the ideas flashed through my head. I was pretty sure what it meant.
I took a step up to the receptionist and tried to talk quietly. I said, “You don’t accept Medicaid?” She shook her head. I choked. I am not the type to ask for help. I like to figure stuff out on my own. But I was at my wit’s end. Ryan seemed to be getting worse moment by moment. I asked, “Where can I go?”
She looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “I guess there’s always the emergency room.” I stepped in closer, after glancing around at the other people in the waiting room. They were all watching me curiously, a few with pitying looks. I desperately wanted to turn and run out.
I whispered, trying not to make eye contact with this woman, “Where’s that?”
Again I was met with a look of distain. She said, curtly, “Down Grand,” and looked to her computer to tell me she was done with the conversation. As I turned to go, another of the reception workers stepped over and started to whisper directions to me. I nodded but didn’t speak. I repeated the directions in my head and tried not to let the tears burning my eyes fall. I had no idea where any of the roads she mentioned were.
I remember hurrying out to my car and strapping my sick little boy into his car seat. I don’t remember many details of what happened after that. But I know I was being watched over through my minor crisis. I know that because I drove strait to the hospital. More than a year later, when I became pregnant with Chloe, I saw an obstetrician whose office was at that hospital, some ten miles away from the acute care center. I was never able to drive to those prenatal appointments without wondering how in the world I found that hospital in the dark when I had never been in that city before.
The triage nurse watched me walk into the waiting room. I don’t know how I looked, but Ryan must have concerned her. When I was signing in she turned to another nurse and said, “This baby is going to need a cool mist right now.” There was no nerve racking wait. They took Ryan right back, x-rayed his chest, and gave him steroids.
We sat in the tiny ER room for hours waiting for the x-ray results. When they came back, the doctor said his airway was constricted and he would need to be admitted for a couple of days. It made for a great adventure with Nate taking over with Ryan before school so I could run home and shower. Ward members came to give Ryan a blessing and even fed Nate and Sean while I stayed at the hospital with my boy.
In the middle of the second day, I got pretty hungry, but didn’t want to leave Ryan. I decided he could walk down to the cafeteria with me. As soon as I had him out of his room, though, alarms started ringing, the doors to the unit automatically closed and three nurses ran over ready to tackle me. It turns out Ryan wasn’t allowed to leave the floor. Oh well. I wasn’t hungry enough to leave my poor little boy in the bed surrounded by prison bars all by himself.
The good that came out of my whole experience was a business card from the ER doctor. It turned out that she had a friend who was family practice and would accept Medicaid. I was thrilled at the prospect of never having to go to that horrible state health clinic again. Of course, I would learn a year later, that hope was too good to be true. I didn’t complain. Beggars can’t be choosers.
Chapter Five: Cora Anne
“The Lord takes many away, even in infancy, that they may escape the envy of man, and the sorrows and evils of this present world; they were too pure, too lovely, to live on earth.”
-Joseph Smith Jr.
When Nate and I were first married, we lived in a converted garage that my Grandpa had built when his oldest daughter came home after moving out. Nate didn’t consider this to be a violation of his principles of self-reliance because my grandparents were old and he could help them around the yard and house. My grandpa, on the other hand, had let his newly married grandkids live there if, and only if, both of them were in school. It worked out well for us.
Because it was an older area with a lot of cheap apartments, the church we attended was considered what those of us who frequent the sin of levity call a newly wed/nearly dead ward. Everyone was either talking about their grandkids, having babies, or on fertility. This is where we met Justin and Stephanie.
They were a young couple set on a specific career path. Stephanie was working on a degree in psychology and Justin was taking classes to become an airplane mechanic. They had discussed and set out on a family plan. They knew when they would each graduate and exactly when they would try for a baby.
There are two conversations with Stephanie that stand out in my mind from that period. We had been friends for some time before I became pregnant with my first baby. But, for some reason, I remember best a time when I as pregnant. Nate had found a kitten in grandpa’s yard. Knowing that I liked cats, he opened a can of tuna and enticed it into our little house. When I came home, I found him and my sister playing with the kitten. He picked it up and handed it to me. He said, “I found this in the back yard and thought, ‘Oh look, a kitty for Amy.’” It was one of the most genuine, sweet things my husband has ever done for me. Perhaps someday, he’ll be able to afford to buy me an expensive gift. If that day ever comes, it won’t mean more than that kitten.
Stephanie also wanted a cat, and her husband wanted to give her one. But they lived in an apartment where pets weren’t allowed. For some reason, despite all the conversations the four of us had, the one that stands out was the one we had when she found out about our kitten. She shot her husband a furtive look and said, “Oh sure, Amy gets a kitty and a baby.” She followed it up with a nervous laugh and blew the whole thing off, but I caught her meaning. She wasn’t having any easier of a time with the concept of “establishing a career before having a family” than I was. She was just less vocal about it.
The other conversation happened after all of us had moved out of the ward. We kept in touch and occasionally got together for dinner. I don’t remember whether Sean was born by this time or if I was just expecting him. But I remember being greeted by a beaming Stephanie, who laid out the details of their five-year plan. The exciting part was that it would only be a little over a year before they could start trying for a baby. She was much more excited about that than about graduating with her degree, or her husband getting his.
Skip ahead to the summer following Nate’s first year of medical school. He had a couple of months off, so we flew to Salt Lake where he got a temp job at a medical waste incinerator. I began suspecting that I might actually be pregnant again. I tried to put the thought out of my head since I had promised Nate that the reason we had Sean was so we could wait until he was through with school for more. Besides, what was a few missed pills? I missed pills all the time during the two years before Ryan, and I never got pregnant. I had come to the conclusion that those pill packs worked pretty effectively, even when you weren’t exactly diligent in taking them at the same hour each day.
When the signs became too much to ignore, I went to my sister. It’s horrible, but if I was pregnant I wanted someone to be happy for me and my husband was incapable of that. He didn’t want a child when we could support ourselves because he anticipated that someday we might not be able to. Imagine how he would feel about having one when we couldn’t even afford medical insurance. Amber looked at the pregnancy test before I did. She gasped. I knew why immediately. It was so dark. I was having another baby. How would I ever tell Nate?
A couple days later, I broke down and told him. He just said, “Ya, I figured.” We didn’t talk about it again. But he pouted for a couple weeks. I’m sure most women fantasize about their husband’s winning a Nobel Prize, or something equally grand. I just want him to smile, just once, when he finds out he’s having a child. I suppose that’s about as likely as the Nobel Prize. *sigh*
I didn’t get any prenatal care until I was 18 weeks along because I couldn’t find anyone willing to accept Medicaid. The doctors my friends had used told me they weren’t doing that anymore. But other than that, the pregnancy progressed normally and soon became just another part of life.
I was thrilled when I got the e-mail from Stephanie saying that they were expecting a baby the beginning of January. Her due date was a month before mine. We had been less than diligent in keeping touch since I had moved away, but our communication was resurrected when we discovered the experience we were sharing.
Right around twenty weeks, Stephanie found out she was expecting a little girl. She and Justin decided to name their daughter Cora Anne, a name they had pulled out of their genealogy. I didn’t find out until I was nearly seven months, but I happily reported that I was also having a girl. We would name her Chloe Joy, after my mom and Nate’s.
I was due February second. Both Ryan and Sean were born during the thirty-seventh week, but I really wanted to go home for Christmas, so we planned a trip. Stephanie was excited and immediately asked us to plan a time to see them during our trip. I told them we’d come over to their house, if we had to. I was hoping to see them and their daughter in the hospital, though. She would be thirty-nine weeks before we left.
We met at their apartment the week between Christmas and New Years. They were planning to move to Florida for work a few months after the baby was born, so many of their baby things were packed into boxes. It was good they were going to move. They were living in a basement and it was very small. The baby things stacked up against all the walls. They showed us where they had a pack and play set up for Cora to sleep in until they moved and could put up the crib.
It was a wonderful dinner. We joked about how long it had taken for them to finally have a baby. Justin is a huge sports fan and he proudly showed us tiny little outfits with the Miami Dolphin’s logo on them. He told us how he would watch the football games with his daughter on his knee.
As we were leaving, I turned to thank Stephanie and she pressed her huge belly against mine. She said, “Who had thought we’d be pregnant together?” We hugged and I asked her to have the baby in the next few days because we would be leaving right after the New Year. She promised to try.
A few days later, Nate and I pulled into the driveway of my parent’s house after saying a final goodbye to his family. My sister, Amber, met me in the driveway. She said, “Amy, Stephanie called.” My first thought was that we wouldn’t have time to see them again and I regretted having to call and tell her so. But Amber continued, “She called from the hospital.” My worry turned into excitement. We would certainly find the time to visit her and her baby in the hospital.
I started to exclaim, “Oh, she had the baby…”
Amber cut me off, “They lost her.” I will never forget the way those words hit me. There was no instant sadness or anger or anything you would expect. I felt disbelief. It just didn’t seem possible. She was within a week of her due date! I had seen her only days before, glowing with the thrill of becoming a mother.
Amber gave me the phone number Stephanie had left. I stared at it for a while, not sure I knew how to be a good friend right then. I told Amber I didn’t think I should call. Wouldn’t I be the last one she wanted to talk to? Still, she had called me. Amber was certain she wanted me to call. She told me of the short conversation she had with my friend. “She said she was sure you would want to come see her.”
I called and spoke with the nurse. But it was after hours, so all I could do was leave a message. I was astonished when my friend called me back a few minutes later. The day before, she had started to feel nervous when she realized it had been several hours since she had felt her daughter move. They called their doctor and then went into the hospital as a precaution. The nurse couldn’t get a heartbeat. They did a rudimentary ultrasound and were pretty sure the baby had died. But, they did another, more high tech one, to be sure. After that, they gave her a vaginal insert to soften her cervix.
She stayed in the hospital over night and they induced her the next morning. She endured a long, torturous labor without the baby actively moving to help things along. And then, she and her husband had to call family and friends. Instead of announcing their new baby’s eye color and temperament, they were talking about plans for a funeral.
Cora Anne was perfect. The umbilical cord was not wrapped around her neck. She didn’t have any deformities or obvious signs of trauma. Justin and Stephanie would never know why their baby daughter had died days before her due date.
I didn’t know what to say. I am certain whatever I did say was the wrong thing. We had one more day before we flew home and I promised her we come to the hospital. She wanted to rest; we said goodbye.
I went down to the room my husband and I were staying in. I curled up into as much of a ball as I could, considering I was huge. I sobbed for hours. Poor Nathan came down to bed and tried to console me. He even promised that I could have a fetal heartbeat monitor if I was so worried. He would put it on the credit card and we could worry about how to pay for it later. What he didn’t understand is that I wasn’t worried about my baby. I was a little anxious, but mostly sure that I would be holding a happy, healthy baby girl in a month. I was sobbing because Stephanie wouldn’t.
All of our family members had already returned to work. That meant that there was no one to watch our little boys while we went to the hospital the next morning. Nate was convinced we shouldn’t go. He reasoned that there really wasn’t any worse way to help them heal than to throw two rambunctious kids and a very pregnant woman into their small hospital room. I told him what Stephanie had said, “They will want to come see me.”
I do not have the writing ability (perhaps language doesn’t have the words) to describe that visit. Stephanie was lying in the bed with her husband by her side. She looked exhausted. They told us the details of their experience in dry voices. Stephanie said she was “All cried out.” They told the story as if they had told it before. I just listened.
In truth, I wanted to offer words of comfort. I really wished I had the ability to say the right thing. But, I was forced to admit to myself that there was no right thing. So, I listened. During the conversation, my kids started getting a little stir crazy. Justin calmed them down by offering them cookies and cheetoes. At times, Stephanie chided him for giving the treats without expecting the boys to earn them by behaving. It was odd hearing them discuss parenting philosophy. They were prepared in every way for the child they had lost. Justin said that it helped them to see our kids. I didn’t know whether I could believe that.
Remembering something a friend had told me about a couple who had lost a baby to SIDS, I asked to see pictures of Cora Anne. Stephanie smiled apologetically as Justin handed me their digital camera. She said, “She’s a little blue.” I didn’t know how to respond to that.
The first pictures on the camera were of a pregnant, smiling Stephanie holding up a piece of paper that said how many weeks along she was. It broke my heart. How she would have cherished showing those pictures to her grown daughter while she awaited the birth of a grandchild. I didn’t have any pictures of myself while I was pregnant. Suddenly, I regretted that. After the one that said “39 weeks,” there were pictures from the hospital. They took pictures of each of them holding their daughter.
People like to say at funerals that the deceased looks like they are peacefully sleeping. She didn’t look like that at all. Stephanie declared that she had her mother’s nose and her father’s lips. My heart ached as I thought about how we had hastily made such decisions about both of my boys, only to have them change a hundred times as they grew.
There was much more to this visit than an explanation of what had happened. Somewhere in between the sorrowful stories both parents managed to say the words that I should have been saying to them. They bore certain testimony that they would see their daughter again. They spoke of telling their future children that they had an angel watching over them. And they even talked about how this experience would strengthen their faith and dedication because now they had to be righteous. They would be better people so that they would deserve to be reunited with their perfect Cora Anne.
I often wondered, before this time, why we were friends with Justin and Steph. Of course we liked them, but we had absolutely nothing in common. As I said, Justin was a big sports guy. Nate never watches sports. Stephanie and I were complaining about homework one day and she said it bothers her because she’d rather be cleaning her house. I would much rather be doing homework than cleaning. Still, they were great friends and we always managed to keep in touch. Suddenly, I was profoundly grateful to have known them.
We flew home the next day and didn’t get to attend the funeral. I kept in touch with our friends through e-mail. I wanted them to know what their strength had meant to me. I sent Stephanie an e-mail that included this passage: “I was talking to another friend of mine about you and I told her about the beautiful testimony you bore and how absolutely amazing you were. I also said that it really made me happy because when I heard about your baby I worried that it might shake your testimony like it would for so many others. My friend said, ‘I would be worried about that too. I don't know Stephanie, but just hearing her story has shaken my testimony.’ I have thought about that a lot. I want you to know that it was just the opposite for me. Our Heavenly Father has promised that we'll never have to endure a trial we can't handle. I think if our situations were reversed, I might be certain he had broken that promise. I can't even imagine what you must feel. But so many people talk about the blessings of an eternal family without really understanding what it actually means. I have felt the spirit testify that families are forever, but I think you know the truth of that principle better then I can imagine. Just listening to you and seeing your strength has strengthened me. I will always be grateful for the day we met you in the foyer of the Miller Ward. I think I better understand Heavenly Father's plan because of the two of you. Naturally, that can't make this any easier on you. But I thought you should know anyway.”
She wrote back, in part, “I will say that even though my breasts are constantly leaking, my pelvis hurts and I have to wear these ‘sexy’ panties for a while longer, it is not in vain. I know that my little girl is worth everything I am going through now and I will get to see her soon. This life is so short and she will be with me soon enough. I am so thankful for the opportunity the Lord has given me to carry such a perfect little angel and to have her apart of our family. I can't wait to share her beautiful pictures and memory book with our future children. The only troubling thing is that even if we can get pregnant in May/June/July this year, I still won't have a little one of my own to hold a year from now. However, when the Lord does bless us with another special child it will be the right time.”
It took a little time before she decided it was okay to show me the side of her that was in real pain. In another letter, she wrote, “I just want to hold a little one of my own so badly. In the book that I am reading, ‘Running with Angels,’ she talks about how her arms ache to hold the two little ones that she lost. I feel that so often and wish that I could have those moments of a little one screaming. I know you get tired of all the screaming, crying and fussiness that your little boys bring, but I would give anything to be in that position. So for my sake, please enjoy those precious moments you have with your little ones.”
Less than three weeks after the death of Cora Anne, I was blessed with my perfect little Chloe. She was born during my thirty-seventh week, just like both of my boys. To me, it was another small miracle.
-Joseph Smith Jr.
When Nate and I were first married, we lived in a converted garage that my Grandpa had built when his oldest daughter came home after moving out. Nate didn’t consider this to be a violation of his principles of self-reliance because my grandparents were old and he could help them around the yard and house. My grandpa, on the other hand, had let his newly married grandkids live there if, and only if, both of them were in school. It worked out well for us.
Because it was an older area with a lot of cheap apartments, the church we attended was considered what those of us who frequent the sin of levity call a newly wed/nearly dead ward. Everyone was either talking about their grandkids, having babies, or on fertility. This is where we met Justin and Stephanie.
They were a young couple set on a specific career path. Stephanie was working on a degree in psychology and Justin was taking classes to become an airplane mechanic. They had discussed and set out on a family plan. They knew when they would each graduate and exactly when they would try for a baby.
There are two conversations with Stephanie that stand out in my mind from that period. We had been friends for some time before I became pregnant with my first baby. But, for some reason, I remember best a time when I as pregnant. Nate had found a kitten in grandpa’s yard. Knowing that I liked cats, he opened a can of tuna and enticed it into our little house. When I came home, I found him and my sister playing with the kitten. He picked it up and handed it to me. He said, “I found this in the back yard and thought, ‘Oh look, a kitty for Amy.’” It was one of the most genuine, sweet things my husband has ever done for me. Perhaps someday, he’ll be able to afford to buy me an expensive gift. If that day ever comes, it won’t mean more than that kitten.
Stephanie also wanted a cat, and her husband wanted to give her one. But they lived in an apartment where pets weren’t allowed. For some reason, despite all the conversations the four of us had, the one that stands out was the one we had when she found out about our kitten. She shot her husband a furtive look and said, “Oh sure, Amy gets a kitty and a baby.” She followed it up with a nervous laugh and blew the whole thing off, but I caught her meaning. She wasn’t having any easier of a time with the concept of “establishing a career before having a family” than I was. She was just less vocal about it.
The other conversation happened after all of us had moved out of the ward. We kept in touch and occasionally got together for dinner. I don’t remember whether Sean was born by this time or if I was just expecting him. But I remember being greeted by a beaming Stephanie, who laid out the details of their five-year plan. The exciting part was that it would only be a little over a year before they could start trying for a baby. She was much more excited about that than about graduating with her degree, or her husband getting his.
Skip ahead to the summer following Nate’s first year of medical school. He had a couple of months off, so we flew to Salt Lake where he got a temp job at a medical waste incinerator. I began suspecting that I might actually be pregnant again. I tried to put the thought out of my head since I had promised Nate that the reason we had Sean was so we could wait until he was through with school for more. Besides, what was a few missed pills? I missed pills all the time during the two years before Ryan, and I never got pregnant. I had come to the conclusion that those pill packs worked pretty effectively, even when you weren’t exactly diligent in taking them at the same hour each day.
When the signs became too much to ignore, I went to my sister. It’s horrible, but if I was pregnant I wanted someone to be happy for me and my husband was incapable of that. He didn’t want a child when we could support ourselves because he anticipated that someday we might not be able to. Imagine how he would feel about having one when we couldn’t even afford medical insurance. Amber looked at the pregnancy test before I did. She gasped. I knew why immediately. It was so dark. I was having another baby. How would I ever tell Nate?
A couple days later, I broke down and told him. He just said, “Ya, I figured.” We didn’t talk about it again. But he pouted for a couple weeks. I’m sure most women fantasize about their husband’s winning a Nobel Prize, or something equally grand. I just want him to smile, just once, when he finds out he’s having a child. I suppose that’s about as likely as the Nobel Prize. *sigh*
I didn’t get any prenatal care until I was 18 weeks along because I couldn’t find anyone willing to accept Medicaid. The doctors my friends had used told me they weren’t doing that anymore. But other than that, the pregnancy progressed normally and soon became just another part of life.
I was thrilled when I got the e-mail from Stephanie saying that they were expecting a baby the beginning of January. Her due date was a month before mine. We had been less than diligent in keeping touch since I had moved away, but our communication was resurrected when we discovered the experience we were sharing.
Right around twenty weeks, Stephanie found out she was expecting a little girl. She and Justin decided to name their daughter Cora Anne, a name they had pulled out of their genealogy. I didn’t find out until I was nearly seven months, but I happily reported that I was also having a girl. We would name her Chloe Joy, after my mom and Nate’s.
I was due February second. Both Ryan and Sean were born during the thirty-seventh week, but I really wanted to go home for Christmas, so we planned a trip. Stephanie was excited and immediately asked us to plan a time to see them during our trip. I told them we’d come over to their house, if we had to. I was hoping to see them and their daughter in the hospital, though. She would be thirty-nine weeks before we left.
We met at their apartment the week between Christmas and New Years. They were planning to move to Florida for work a few months after the baby was born, so many of their baby things were packed into boxes. It was good they were going to move. They were living in a basement and it was very small. The baby things stacked up against all the walls. They showed us where they had a pack and play set up for Cora to sleep in until they moved and could put up the crib.
It was a wonderful dinner. We joked about how long it had taken for them to finally have a baby. Justin is a huge sports fan and he proudly showed us tiny little outfits with the Miami Dolphin’s logo on them. He told us how he would watch the football games with his daughter on his knee.
As we were leaving, I turned to thank Stephanie and she pressed her huge belly against mine. She said, “Who had thought we’d be pregnant together?” We hugged and I asked her to have the baby in the next few days because we would be leaving right after the New Year. She promised to try.
A few days later, Nate and I pulled into the driveway of my parent’s house after saying a final goodbye to his family. My sister, Amber, met me in the driveway. She said, “Amy, Stephanie called.” My first thought was that we wouldn’t have time to see them again and I regretted having to call and tell her so. But Amber continued, “She called from the hospital.” My worry turned into excitement. We would certainly find the time to visit her and her baby in the hospital.
I started to exclaim, “Oh, she had the baby…”
Amber cut me off, “They lost her.” I will never forget the way those words hit me. There was no instant sadness or anger or anything you would expect. I felt disbelief. It just didn’t seem possible. She was within a week of her due date! I had seen her only days before, glowing with the thrill of becoming a mother.
Amber gave me the phone number Stephanie had left. I stared at it for a while, not sure I knew how to be a good friend right then. I told Amber I didn’t think I should call. Wouldn’t I be the last one she wanted to talk to? Still, she had called me. Amber was certain she wanted me to call. She told me of the short conversation she had with my friend. “She said she was sure you would want to come see her.”
I called and spoke with the nurse. But it was after hours, so all I could do was leave a message. I was astonished when my friend called me back a few minutes later. The day before, she had started to feel nervous when she realized it had been several hours since she had felt her daughter move. They called their doctor and then went into the hospital as a precaution. The nurse couldn’t get a heartbeat. They did a rudimentary ultrasound and were pretty sure the baby had died. But, they did another, more high tech one, to be sure. After that, they gave her a vaginal insert to soften her cervix.
She stayed in the hospital over night and they induced her the next morning. She endured a long, torturous labor without the baby actively moving to help things along. And then, she and her husband had to call family and friends. Instead of announcing their new baby’s eye color and temperament, they were talking about plans for a funeral.
Cora Anne was perfect. The umbilical cord was not wrapped around her neck. She didn’t have any deformities or obvious signs of trauma. Justin and Stephanie would never know why their baby daughter had died days before her due date.
I didn’t know what to say. I am certain whatever I did say was the wrong thing. We had one more day before we flew home and I promised her we come to the hospital. She wanted to rest; we said goodbye.
I went down to the room my husband and I were staying in. I curled up into as much of a ball as I could, considering I was huge. I sobbed for hours. Poor Nathan came down to bed and tried to console me. He even promised that I could have a fetal heartbeat monitor if I was so worried. He would put it on the credit card and we could worry about how to pay for it later. What he didn’t understand is that I wasn’t worried about my baby. I was a little anxious, but mostly sure that I would be holding a happy, healthy baby girl in a month. I was sobbing because Stephanie wouldn’t.
All of our family members had already returned to work. That meant that there was no one to watch our little boys while we went to the hospital the next morning. Nate was convinced we shouldn’t go. He reasoned that there really wasn’t any worse way to help them heal than to throw two rambunctious kids and a very pregnant woman into their small hospital room. I told him what Stephanie had said, “They will want to come see me.”
I do not have the writing ability (perhaps language doesn’t have the words) to describe that visit. Stephanie was lying in the bed with her husband by her side. She looked exhausted. They told us the details of their experience in dry voices. Stephanie said she was “All cried out.” They told the story as if they had told it before. I just listened.
In truth, I wanted to offer words of comfort. I really wished I had the ability to say the right thing. But, I was forced to admit to myself that there was no right thing. So, I listened. During the conversation, my kids started getting a little stir crazy. Justin calmed them down by offering them cookies and cheetoes. At times, Stephanie chided him for giving the treats without expecting the boys to earn them by behaving. It was odd hearing them discuss parenting philosophy. They were prepared in every way for the child they had lost. Justin said that it helped them to see our kids. I didn’t know whether I could believe that.
Remembering something a friend had told me about a couple who had lost a baby to SIDS, I asked to see pictures of Cora Anne. Stephanie smiled apologetically as Justin handed me their digital camera. She said, “She’s a little blue.” I didn’t know how to respond to that.
The first pictures on the camera were of a pregnant, smiling Stephanie holding up a piece of paper that said how many weeks along she was. It broke my heart. How she would have cherished showing those pictures to her grown daughter while she awaited the birth of a grandchild. I didn’t have any pictures of myself while I was pregnant. Suddenly, I regretted that. After the one that said “39 weeks,” there were pictures from the hospital. They took pictures of each of them holding their daughter.
People like to say at funerals that the deceased looks like they are peacefully sleeping. She didn’t look like that at all. Stephanie declared that she had her mother’s nose and her father’s lips. My heart ached as I thought about how we had hastily made such decisions about both of my boys, only to have them change a hundred times as they grew.
There was much more to this visit than an explanation of what had happened. Somewhere in between the sorrowful stories both parents managed to say the words that I should have been saying to them. They bore certain testimony that they would see their daughter again. They spoke of telling their future children that they had an angel watching over them. And they even talked about how this experience would strengthen their faith and dedication because now they had to be righteous. They would be better people so that they would deserve to be reunited with their perfect Cora Anne.
I often wondered, before this time, why we were friends with Justin and Steph. Of course we liked them, but we had absolutely nothing in common. As I said, Justin was a big sports guy. Nate never watches sports. Stephanie and I were complaining about homework one day and she said it bothers her because she’d rather be cleaning her house. I would much rather be doing homework than cleaning. Still, they were great friends and we always managed to keep in touch. Suddenly, I was profoundly grateful to have known them.
We flew home the next day and didn’t get to attend the funeral. I kept in touch with our friends through e-mail. I wanted them to know what their strength had meant to me. I sent Stephanie an e-mail that included this passage: “I was talking to another friend of mine about you and I told her about the beautiful testimony you bore and how absolutely amazing you were. I also said that it really made me happy because when I heard about your baby I worried that it might shake your testimony like it would for so many others. My friend said, ‘I would be worried about that too. I don't know Stephanie, but just hearing her story has shaken my testimony.’ I have thought about that a lot. I want you to know that it was just the opposite for me. Our Heavenly Father has promised that we'll never have to endure a trial we can't handle. I think if our situations were reversed, I might be certain he had broken that promise. I can't even imagine what you must feel. But so many people talk about the blessings of an eternal family without really understanding what it actually means. I have felt the spirit testify that families are forever, but I think you know the truth of that principle better then I can imagine. Just listening to you and seeing your strength has strengthened me. I will always be grateful for the day we met you in the foyer of the Miller Ward. I think I better understand Heavenly Father's plan because of the two of you. Naturally, that can't make this any easier on you. But I thought you should know anyway.”
She wrote back, in part, “I will say that even though my breasts are constantly leaking, my pelvis hurts and I have to wear these ‘sexy’ panties for a while longer, it is not in vain. I know that my little girl is worth everything I am going through now and I will get to see her soon. This life is so short and she will be with me soon enough. I am so thankful for the opportunity the Lord has given me to carry such a perfect little angel and to have her apart of our family. I can't wait to share her beautiful pictures and memory book with our future children. The only troubling thing is that even if we can get pregnant in May/June/July this year, I still won't have a little one of my own to hold a year from now. However, when the Lord does bless us with another special child it will be the right time.”
It took a little time before she decided it was okay to show me the side of her that was in real pain. In another letter, she wrote, “I just want to hold a little one of my own so badly. In the book that I am reading, ‘Running with Angels,’ she talks about how her arms ache to hold the two little ones that she lost. I feel that so often and wish that I could have those moments of a little one screaming. I know you get tired of all the screaming, crying and fussiness that your little boys bring, but I would give anything to be in that position. So for my sake, please enjoy those precious moments you have with your little ones.”
Less than three weeks after the death of Cora Anne, I was blessed with my perfect little Chloe. She was born during my thirty-seventh week, just like both of my boys. To me, it was another small miracle.
Chapter Six: Chloe
“As a father, do I love my daughters less than I love my sons? No. If I am guilty of any imbalance, it is in favor of my girls. I have said that when a man gets old he had better have daughters about him. They are so kind and good and thoughtful. I think I can say that my sons are able and wise. My daughters are clever and kind. And “my cup runneth over” (Ps. 23:5) because of this.”
-Gordon B. Hinckley
I had not mourned for concern over my baby, but for the pain I knew Stephanie was facing. That doesn’t mean that I never gave in to panic that I might be called to face the same trial. I shared Stephanie’s story with a friend of mine in Chicago who replied, “The same thing happened to my sister.” Nathan was doing autopsies at a hospital during those last weeks while we waited for Chloe’s birth and one day I asked him what had been the cause of death in the one he had done that day. He answered, “Thirty-ninth week gestation inter-uterine fetal demise.” I had to think that through for a minute, but I got it. He should have lied. I even mentioned it to my doctor who told me she was 34 weeks pregnant her last year of residency when she had to tell a patient at thirty-nine weeks that she had lost her baby.
Needless to say, I did a lot of kick counts in those weeks. I remember telling the Lord that I knew how richly I was blessed and I had no right to ask for any more, but if I carried this baby to thirty-nine weeks, I might go crazy. Again, I was blessed with exactly what I asked for.
I often wonder why my life has been so easy and so rich. I ask myself if there is some horrible trial I will be called to face in the future. Certainly Heavenly Father has the right to expect me to be faithful through anything. I feel like I am the poster child for the unprofitable servant. It doesn’t matter how good things get, there are always more blessings and happiness just around the corner. The more I learn and grow, the more I want to start paying back my growing debt. But, inevitably, some little inconvenience comes my way and I handle it all wrong. I can never deserve what I’ve been given, but I take comfort in knowing that no one else could either. The difference is that I am probably the most blessed person in the world.
Chloe was perfect, as they all were. Nate, who had been very vocal about wanting all boys, immediately adored his beautiful little girl. Ryan and Sean set in quite comfortably to their new roles as big brothers. One day, Ry even walked over and touched her head while he said, “I have to take care of her.”
Of course, the birth of my daughter couldn’t be completely without disaster. Both the pediatrician that saw Chloe in the hospital and the obstetrician that saw me asked who would be my baby’s doctor. I told them she would be going to the same lady that saw my boys, the one who I had been told about when Ryan was in the emergency room a year before. I assumed that wouldn’t be a problem.
The day I was supposed to be discharged, the nurse told me I would need to make an appointment with the doctor for Chloe’s one week check up. I had been largely alone in the hospital this time. None of my family was close enough to come and Nate had to take care of the kids and do school. The ward members helped and so did some of our friends that we had met through the school. But I was largely bored. So, I wandered into the reception area and asked if they had a listing of doctors that were part of their medical group, so I could find the phone number for the lady who had been seeing Ryan and Sean.
She wasn’t listed. So, I asked for a phone book and looked up the name of her practice. I was able to find that. I went back into my room to call. The receptionist who answered the phone at the doctor’s office told me she had changed back to her maiden name, which is why she wasn’t listed. It struck me as odd that she wouldn’t inform her patients, but I didn’t have to wonder long why she never contacted us.
When I asked about an appointment for my baby the receptionist put me on hold for quite a while before coming back and saying, curtly, “I’m afraid the doctor will not be accepting any new patients with Medicaid.”
I was confused. Was a new baby in an existing family considered a “new patient?” But the receptionist made it quite clear that I no longer had a doctor for my baby. I choked back tears and embarrassment long enough to walk back to the desk and ask, in a whisper, where I could find a doctor for Chloe. They gave me unwanted pitying looks and told me to call the referral hotline.
The operator on the hotline told me there was absolutely no one who would take Medicaid and suggested that I go to the state health clinic. I thanked her in a shaky voice, hung up the phone, pulled my knees to my chest and bawled. My precious baby was so small. I didn’t want to take her to that place. I pictured myself in the crowded waiting room, trying to coral my two boys during the three hour wait before every appointment. Like all newborns, she would need a lot of appointments. Most of the other patients would be there to treat sickness. Would I possibly be able to leave without any of my children contracting something?
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciated all of the health care we got, considering our financial circumstances. I always made an extra effort to express to the doctors, or-more often-nurse practitioners, how much it meant to us that they took the time to care for my kids. I had even written a letter to the immunization clinic a year before to say how wonderful the people there were. But Chloe was so little and fragile. She would need so many appointments. And I was in an unstable emotional state anyway.
I did the only thing that came to my mind. I called my husband. Poor, sweet Nate. He had taken a Saturday job cleaning swimming pools to try and make ends meet. He was working and a lady from the ward was watching my boys. As part of the job, he carried a cell phone at all times. When he answered the phone I was barely able to talk.
Within a few seconds, he sounded absolutely panicked. He couldn’t understand what I was saying, but he knew that I was sobbing. It was very cruel of me. He must have wondered what was wrong with our baby to have upset me so much. But I worked on sounding less pathetic and I finally was able to tell him why I was crying. He acted like, “That’s all?” I wanted support, but he was probably so relieved to find out that Chloe was okay, that not having a doctor seemed like a wonderful relief.
Right in the middle of my hysterical story, the phone dropped the call. I tried to call back, but it didn’t work. I huddled in my room, feeling very alone. Twice, hospital employees came in to bring food or check on me. I hid my face. The last thing I needed was someone reporting I had a case of post-partum depression or something like that.
It took me over an hour to calm down. I knew I had one resource left. We had a friend in the ward with two boys about the same age as mine. Her husband was a year ahead of Nate at the same medical school. She was the one who had helped me get to the appointments to get Medicaid in the first place. I doubted very much this would work out, but I decided to call to see who her doctor was. I was skeptical because that was what I had done when I first became pregnant. I called other women’s doctors and was told they were no longer accepting Medicaid.
Shanna was so sweet. She told me that she had only found her doctor because she had a baby at the hospital where I was. She warned me that the office was not wonderful. But she said that the doctor was amazing. He had once been part of a practice with several other physicians, but had to go out on his own because he refused to stop accepting Medicaid. The nurse who had given Shanna his number had said, “This guy shoulda been a priest.” It was nice to talk to Shanna because she didn’t wonder why my voice cracked. She understood what I was going through completely. When I hung up, I felt much less alone.
I took a deep breath and dialed the number for Dr. Harris. I told the receptionist that I had just had a baby and needed a doctor who would accept Medicaid. That familiar pang of humiliation hit me and I held my breath, waiting for her answer. She said, “Can you come in next Wednesday?” She didn’t tell me to try again in a couple months. She didn’t say they weren’t accepting new patients. She didn’t act condescending or pitying. I couldn’t help it. I started bawling again. The poor girl must have thought she was talking to a crazy person. But I cannot describe how it felt to know there was a doctor willing to see my baby.
I started taking all of my kids there because the atmosphere was completely different from the other doctor. I didn’t feel like my kids were being treated begrudgingly or like the doctor smiled to my face and then complained at my back. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing a more competent, kind, wonderful doctor. He will never know how much he did for my family during our years in Illinois. It’s hard being on the receiving end of charity, so much harder than being the giver.
I learned something through being on that end, though. I learned how flawed it is to think that someone who has more has it because he works harder. The difference between rich and poor often has little to do with integrity and work ethic. The difference is the grace of God. That makes the riches we’re given a stewardship from a loving father who trusts us, rather than something we’re entitled to because of our own work. You see, Heavenly Father gave us the ability to work as well.
I also learned that those who understand this principle the best never talk down to those who have less than them. I always felt like I needed to apologize for our reliance on Medicaid. I still do. I felt humiliated every time I pulled out the card. But usually on the other side of a humiliated person is a prideful person. Usually. But, never at Dr. Harris’ office. I had to learn these lessons the hard way. I pray I never forget them.
Our experiences were completely different, but I think Stephanie and I both had a few indisputable blessings come to us that month. We added daughters to our forever families and we both gained a firmer testimony of the eternal nature of the family. Stephanie learned about sacrifice and I learned about charity. I will always be grateful to my friend, her sweet daughter and a chronically underappreciated family practice doctor in Illinois for that.
-Gordon B. Hinckley
I had not mourned for concern over my baby, but for the pain I knew Stephanie was facing. That doesn’t mean that I never gave in to panic that I might be called to face the same trial. I shared Stephanie’s story with a friend of mine in Chicago who replied, “The same thing happened to my sister.” Nathan was doing autopsies at a hospital during those last weeks while we waited for Chloe’s birth and one day I asked him what had been the cause of death in the one he had done that day. He answered, “Thirty-ninth week gestation inter-uterine fetal demise.” I had to think that through for a minute, but I got it. He should have lied. I even mentioned it to my doctor who told me she was 34 weeks pregnant her last year of residency when she had to tell a patient at thirty-nine weeks that she had lost her baby.
Needless to say, I did a lot of kick counts in those weeks. I remember telling the Lord that I knew how richly I was blessed and I had no right to ask for any more, but if I carried this baby to thirty-nine weeks, I might go crazy. Again, I was blessed with exactly what I asked for.
I often wonder why my life has been so easy and so rich. I ask myself if there is some horrible trial I will be called to face in the future. Certainly Heavenly Father has the right to expect me to be faithful through anything. I feel like I am the poster child for the unprofitable servant. It doesn’t matter how good things get, there are always more blessings and happiness just around the corner. The more I learn and grow, the more I want to start paying back my growing debt. But, inevitably, some little inconvenience comes my way and I handle it all wrong. I can never deserve what I’ve been given, but I take comfort in knowing that no one else could either. The difference is that I am probably the most blessed person in the world.
Chloe was perfect, as they all were. Nate, who had been very vocal about wanting all boys, immediately adored his beautiful little girl. Ryan and Sean set in quite comfortably to their new roles as big brothers. One day, Ry even walked over and touched her head while he said, “I have to take care of her.”
Of course, the birth of my daughter couldn’t be completely without disaster. Both the pediatrician that saw Chloe in the hospital and the obstetrician that saw me asked who would be my baby’s doctor. I told them she would be going to the same lady that saw my boys, the one who I had been told about when Ryan was in the emergency room a year before. I assumed that wouldn’t be a problem.
The day I was supposed to be discharged, the nurse told me I would need to make an appointment with the doctor for Chloe’s one week check up. I had been largely alone in the hospital this time. None of my family was close enough to come and Nate had to take care of the kids and do school. The ward members helped and so did some of our friends that we had met through the school. But I was largely bored. So, I wandered into the reception area and asked if they had a listing of doctors that were part of their medical group, so I could find the phone number for the lady who had been seeing Ryan and Sean.
She wasn’t listed. So, I asked for a phone book and looked up the name of her practice. I was able to find that. I went back into my room to call. The receptionist who answered the phone at the doctor’s office told me she had changed back to her maiden name, which is why she wasn’t listed. It struck me as odd that she wouldn’t inform her patients, but I didn’t have to wonder long why she never contacted us.
When I asked about an appointment for my baby the receptionist put me on hold for quite a while before coming back and saying, curtly, “I’m afraid the doctor will not be accepting any new patients with Medicaid.”
I was confused. Was a new baby in an existing family considered a “new patient?” But the receptionist made it quite clear that I no longer had a doctor for my baby. I choked back tears and embarrassment long enough to walk back to the desk and ask, in a whisper, where I could find a doctor for Chloe. They gave me unwanted pitying looks and told me to call the referral hotline.
The operator on the hotline told me there was absolutely no one who would take Medicaid and suggested that I go to the state health clinic. I thanked her in a shaky voice, hung up the phone, pulled my knees to my chest and bawled. My precious baby was so small. I didn’t want to take her to that place. I pictured myself in the crowded waiting room, trying to coral my two boys during the three hour wait before every appointment. Like all newborns, she would need a lot of appointments. Most of the other patients would be there to treat sickness. Would I possibly be able to leave without any of my children contracting something?
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciated all of the health care we got, considering our financial circumstances. I always made an extra effort to express to the doctors, or-more often-nurse practitioners, how much it meant to us that they took the time to care for my kids. I had even written a letter to the immunization clinic a year before to say how wonderful the people there were. But Chloe was so little and fragile. She would need so many appointments. And I was in an unstable emotional state anyway.
I did the only thing that came to my mind. I called my husband. Poor, sweet Nate. He had taken a Saturday job cleaning swimming pools to try and make ends meet. He was working and a lady from the ward was watching my boys. As part of the job, he carried a cell phone at all times. When he answered the phone I was barely able to talk.
Within a few seconds, he sounded absolutely panicked. He couldn’t understand what I was saying, but he knew that I was sobbing. It was very cruel of me. He must have wondered what was wrong with our baby to have upset me so much. But I worked on sounding less pathetic and I finally was able to tell him why I was crying. He acted like, “That’s all?” I wanted support, but he was probably so relieved to find out that Chloe was okay, that not having a doctor seemed like a wonderful relief.
Right in the middle of my hysterical story, the phone dropped the call. I tried to call back, but it didn’t work. I huddled in my room, feeling very alone. Twice, hospital employees came in to bring food or check on me. I hid my face. The last thing I needed was someone reporting I had a case of post-partum depression or something like that.
It took me over an hour to calm down. I knew I had one resource left. We had a friend in the ward with two boys about the same age as mine. Her husband was a year ahead of Nate at the same medical school. She was the one who had helped me get to the appointments to get Medicaid in the first place. I doubted very much this would work out, but I decided to call to see who her doctor was. I was skeptical because that was what I had done when I first became pregnant. I called other women’s doctors and was told they were no longer accepting Medicaid.
Shanna was so sweet. She told me that she had only found her doctor because she had a baby at the hospital where I was. She warned me that the office was not wonderful. But she said that the doctor was amazing. He had once been part of a practice with several other physicians, but had to go out on his own because he refused to stop accepting Medicaid. The nurse who had given Shanna his number had said, “This guy shoulda been a priest.” It was nice to talk to Shanna because she didn’t wonder why my voice cracked. She understood what I was going through completely. When I hung up, I felt much less alone.
I took a deep breath and dialed the number for Dr. Harris. I told the receptionist that I had just had a baby and needed a doctor who would accept Medicaid. That familiar pang of humiliation hit me and I held my breath, waiting for her answer. She said, “Can you come in next Wednesday?” She didn’t tell me to try again in a couple months. She didn’t say they weren’t accepting new patients. She didn’t act condescending or pitying. I couldn’t help it. I started bawling again. The poor girl must have thought she was talking to a crazy person. But I cannot describe how it felt to know there was a doctor willing to see my baby.
I started taking all of my kids there because the atmosphere was completely different from the other doctor. I didn’t feel like my kids were being treated begrudgingly or like the doctor smiled to my face and then complained at my back. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing a more competent, kind, wonderful doctor. He will never know how much he did for my family during our years in Illinois. It’s hard being on the receiving end of charity, so much harder than being the giver.
I learned something through being on that end, though. I learned how flawed it is to think that someone who has more has it because he works harder. The difference between rich and poor often has little to do with integrity and work ethic. The difference is the grace of God. That makes the riches we’re given a stewardship from a loving father who trusts us, rather than something we’re entitled to because of our own work. You see, Heavenly Father gave us the ability to work as well.
I also learned that those who understand this principle the best never talk down to those who have less than them. I always felt like I needed to apologize for our reliance on Medicaid. I still do. I felt humiliated every time I pulled out the card. But usually on the other side of a humiliated person is a prideful person. Usually. But, never at Dr. Harris’ office. I had to learn these lessons the hard way. I pray I never forget them.
Our experiences were completely different, but I think Stephanie and I both had a few indisputable blessings come to us that month. We added daughters to our forever families and we both gained a firmer testimony of the eternal nature of the family. Stephanie learned about sacrifice and I learned about charity. I will always be grateful to my friend, her sweet daughter and a chronically underappreciated family practice doctor in Illinois for that.
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