Life Jackets
God Doesn’t Always Part the Sea
by Kris Ann Valdez
I crumpled onto the hospital floor outside my newborn daughter’s ICU room, heaving sobs, not caring if the doctors and nurses in the hall witnessed my defeat.
My nurse friend came and sat with me before her shift. “Will she make it?” I asked her, looking through the glass at my newborn’s body clinging to life in a tumbleweed of wires and monitors.
I’ll never forget her answer because I appreciated her honesty. “I don’t know,” she said, “but babies are resilient.”
These weeks were the stuff of parental nightmares, where the wicked what-ifs taunted and sleep exhaustion tortured.
Every day brought more bad news, hurling us further into the abyss of the nightmare: speculative diseases with painful medical treatments and dismal statistical outcomes, results from an MRI that showed stroke and brain damage, and daily fights for her glucose and ferritin levels to stabilize.
There were the first nights when my newborn child howled in pain and hunger, but almost worse were the nights she fell silent—too weak with pain and suffering to raise a cry of protest when she was poked and prodded.
I pumped her legs when they became swollen with fluid and helped untangle her legs when they got caught in the wires. I held her tiny fist when she received spinal taps, heel pricks, a feeding tube, and a PICC line. I wished by clinging to her hand that I could transfer the pain into my own. I promised her everything would be okay, even though I didn’t know.
At night, my husband and I crammed onto a small, hard, lounge-style bench. This was not the postpartum experience I imagined. My sickened stomach survived on fresh-squeezed juices and a mother’s steel adrenaline. I pumped milk for a baby too sick to drink it. I tried to assure my other child that his mom and dad would soon come home with his baby sister.
One night, while my baby’s heart rate dipped low, I saw a vision of a group of people holding hands and walking around her bassinet. Their faces shone with the hope of a song of prayer.
I saw another larger circle of people around that first circle and a circle around them, and so on, until I realized the ripple effect of people believing with us for the miracle of her life.
Even in the darkness, the lantern of community guided us through each winding, dark passage. In the midst of that dark place, somehow we experienced joy, made sweeter because of the sorrow it illuminated.
I know the biblical story of God parting the Red Sea for his people to escape their captors. But He didn’t part our seas. Instead, he threw us life jackets and told us to tread the raging waters, even as the waves threatened to swallow us. Then suddenly they calmed. None of the doctors could explain the marked improvements in our child on day eleven. She was moved out of the ICU onto a normal floor.
“I expected to meet a much sicker baby,” one of the doctors on our new floor said, puzzled.
By day thirteen, they released her from the hospital. My daughter’s doctors called her a miracle. They determined her illness was caused by bacterial sepsis, an infection from unknown bacteria, and sent us home with seizure medication and follow-up appointments.
In the early days at home, I panicked in the moments when I almost forgot a dose of her seizure meds, which needed to be administered three times daily. I kept my baby close to me, foregoing an invitation to anywhere I could not bring her. As I washed dishes or completed other mundane tasks, fear gripped my maternal mind.
I learned that waking up from a nightmare doesn’t mean it stops haunting you.
Month eleven brought steps. And month twelve brought a clean EEG report. The months that followed kept bringing signs of “normal” development.
As we celebrate our daughter’s first birthday, I mourn and rejoice in a coin toss of emotions.
I mourn for the sweet beginnings we didn’t experience as a family. I mourn for others who are praying on calloused knees and haven’t yet received their miracle. I also mourn for parents in nations where the life-saving medical care we received in the United States remains an elusive dream.
But I must rejoice, too, in the moments when our eyes connect, and my daughter and I share a smile. To every mother, those moments are precious. To me, they are a reminder of what I could have lost—these precious, fleeting moments of life.
This is motherhood: carrying our fragile hearts outside ourselves where they are bound to be scraped, bruised, and split open.
I have decided it’s okay if healing takes a year or two—or a hundred—because we heal, bit by bit, when we are gentle storytellers of our own stories.
We heal when we know we aren’t swimming the raging seas alone.
Kris Ann Valdez is a proud Arizona native, freelance writer, wife, and mother to three spunky children. @krisannvaldezwrites
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