Pregnant and Bedridden: Being a Human Incubator

            Thank the Lord for Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the miracle of the telephone—my connection with the outside world, to help me succeed in my human incubator role.

           

            While my husband was unraveling in front of my eyes, I did manage to glean support from phone calls bearing happy, encouraging voices. (Remember, this was WAY before laptop computers and text messaging on slick, ultra-lightweight cell phones!) Uplifting cards also arrived in the mail and were added to my growing mail stack lying beside me.

           

            Eventually, though, I even had to forgo the phone calls because simple, animated dialogue resulted in contraction episodes. Contractions that became harder to control even with the prescribed Terbutalin. My “Vitamin T” as Dr. Landry liked to call it.

           

            One friend I was able to maintain consistent contact with, though, was a Neonatal Intensive Care Nurse and Unit manager—the woman from my church who had the infant daughter I couldn’t bring myself to hold so many months before. At every stage—and every week I joyously ticked off my calendar—I called her for a detailed update on fetal development for that particular week of gestation, and about what to expect should I deliver at that particular time.

           

            She was always a great encourager, particularly when I confided to her that I really didn’t know how much longer I could lie in bed like this and that I seriously doubted my resolve and ability to keep my “promise.”

           

            “I don’t know how you’re doing it,” she’d say. “But you need to think of the baby; every day means a bigger, stronger baby, with a better chance of survival. You’ve got to hang in there. You’re doing a great job!”

           

            With words of affirmation being one of my love languages, sometimes that’s all I needed to hear from someone: “You’re doing a great job!” I’d received so few affirming words from the most important people in my life. And if there was ever a time I needed them, it was then.

           

            Always honest and impartial, she never withheld any adverse medical information about preemie infants. As much as I occasionally wanted to don a pair of rose-colored glasses, her tell-it-like-it-is, clinical approach suited me better than others compelled to be high-spirited, super-positive cheerleaders. “Everything’s going to be just fine,” they’d chirp. “It won’t be very long before you’re going to have a beautiful, healthy infant in your arms, and you will forget all about this!”

           

            How did they know everything would turn out happily-ever-after? Did they have a private line to God? Because He wasn’t giving me any super assurances all would be well. And I knew all-too-well that sometimes things just don’t turn out the way you want or expect. I had physical and psychological wounds to prove that.

           

            Happy chirping didn’t make me feel more secure, or happy. Ironically, I felt more spiritually lifted by my friend, Sandy, who years earlier was bed-ridden while carrying her daughter. She had pretty much been to hell and back in that event, and we thrived on repeatedly shared horror stories. (I know what you’re thinking, but you had to be there. And isn’t that one of the reasons people attend “group?” So they can commiserate together?)

           

            Anyway, this woman really knew deep down in her gut what I was going through. She had been there, and survived! Rather than find her stories depressing, I found solace in them; a kindred spirit who understood the fathoms of my suffering and commiserated. She didn’t try to water down the reality, or risk. She didn’t try to distract me from the suffering. Here was someone else who had taken a dangerous chance and emerged victorious. We even laughed about the embarrassing dilemmas we faced, the all-dignity-gone vulnerability we encountered on a daily basis. She understood me, and my heart. Oh, what a witness she was to me! Oh, did the Apostle Paul ever know what he was talking about when he said that we can laugh with others and cry with them; that when we have suffered, we can commiserate better with others in the midst of their afflictions.

           

            Even Dr. Landry, like an encouarging father, told me I was sacrificing a very small measure of my life; that I needed to regard myself as a human incubator.

           

            So, I continued to gather my calendar every morning, count the days, divide them into weeks, then count the remaining time, only to repeat the process again that afternoon, and the next day. That precarious moment, when I was solidly entrenched in it, certainly didn’t seem to me to be such a small interval of my life.

           

            And it caused me to repeatedly ask myself the question: What does “having faith” really mean?

           

            My friends loved me and wanted to protect me, but I reminded myself—often—that my faith and hope must remain in God’s will, and in His will alone.

           

            No matter what the outcome would be.

            Even if I failed to be a good human incubator.

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NEXT WEEK: Being pregnant and bedridden and dealing with the physical pain of a growing, developing baby…

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Until next week,

Thanks for joining me!

Blessings,

Andrea

(If you are currently pregnant and bedridden and have no one to talk to, please feel free to email me, to unload, to wail, to talk via cyberspace! I would be happy to laugh and cry with you, and throw in the encouragement you need from someone who has walked your path! My email is: andreaarthurowan@gmail.com

High-Risk Pregnancy: When Stress Threatens the Marriage, and the Pregnancy’s Outcome

            Another day of living bedridden in a high-risk pregnant passed, and I checked it off my little hand-made, bedside calendar. Then I'd count the days I survived and the days I still had to go. 

            It was my own personal ritual.

           

            Day after day, I leaned into the Lord through prayer to gain strength.

           

            Yet, even with the strength I garnered from prayer, there remained plenty of weak moments when I felt like waving the white flag of surrender and giving up. Then my inward-seeking self would roar back. “None of this is worth it!” I’d confirm vehemently to the silent room and emotionless ceiling. “After all, I have a life to lead. My husband and son rely on me, and I’m not very reliable lying in bed. Who’s looking after my family and household?”

           

            And what if, after all of this sacrifice, we still lost the battle? That ugly possibility always hovered around the perimeter of my conscience as I forced myself to view the situation realistically.

           

            One afternoon, though, in the depths of doubt, a “voice” spoke to me in such clarity from my heart that my conscience snapped to attention: Fight for me, Mom, the “voice” entreated. Fight for me!

           

            How could I not? It was all I needed to “hear” to buttress my resolve to go on. What I was doing was right and necessary, even if it were physically painful. The fight would endure until a succinct end signaled victory or defeat. And I would go down swinging.

           

            But as my resolve strengthened, Chris’s withered away. At twenty-eight weeks, he slumped into the rocking chair in my bedroom after a rough workday and caustically announced, “I don’t know how much more I can take. I’ve experienced just about enough! I’m tired, sick and frustrated. The demands from everyone are unrealistic, and I have realized my limit!” His voice was sharp, accusatory, dripping with disgust and anger.

           

            Then he launched a final blow. “If it all ended today, I would be happy. I could live with myself for the rest of my life and not feel the least bit of remorse.”

           

            I was crushed into silence. What had happened to the man who so lovingly washed my hair once a week and tenderly helped me change my clothes when they wouldn’t last another day? I desperately needed his encouragement; I needed him to continue to be selfless with his love and support. He was doing everything humanly possible to take care of my physical needs, but his emotional conviction waned dangerously. It actually seemed to have packed its bags and vacated. I thought—hoped—it was a single night of him unloading his frustrations. But it wasn’t. With increasing frequency and intensity, he complained vehemently about the demands everyone was placing on him—from work, to Parker, to me. It threatened to become a nightly ritual, and instead of happily awaiting his return home, I started dreading his appearance every afternoon. 

           

            What did he expect me to do? How did he expect me to provide him with any emotional support? I knew and appreciated how hard he was working, but there was absolutely nothing I could do to lighten his increasing load, much of which was brought on by his own design since he also continued his relentless pursuit of self-employment while working full time.

           

            Yet guilt racked me. The gravity of my situation had become a frightening, monolithic burden—to me and everyone else. Keeping me focused on my goal continually strained my tolerance boundaries and sanity. My heart ached for him and his burden, but I was incapable of shouldering his afflictions, too. He needed to find someone else he could unload on.

           

            I started resenting his daily castigations against his company, his “situation,” and the demands of both. It was difficult for me to not regard his attitude as selfish and coarse. He needed someone else upon whom he could pour his fears, doubt and anger. He needed someone else to strip away the hard, emotionally protective veneer he’d constructed around his heart and mind. Without me, he no longer wished to attend church regularly, so support wasn’t coming from that arena. And the men he knew didn’t call to ask how he was doing.

           

            The situation ballooned out of control, so he took what seems to be the familiar male approach: he lashed out against it, or tried to reduce it to a state of insignificance. Chris was a man in limbo who wore his negative emotions on his sleeve, on his face, and in his cornflower blue eyes. There were times when I even dreaded turning my head to look into those more frequently flashing, angry eyes. Eyes that had formerly been so expressively tender and loving. At the worst times, those precious eyes, and the man I love so deeply, seemed to find everything about me—and the situation I had put the whole family in—irritating and disgusting.

           

            By the thirtieth week, I was terrified of my husband.

           

            If this was the enemy’s way of trying to undermine our union, erode our foundation and assure my failure, it was working. The chunks were rapidly falling from the edifice.

           

            As the loneliness deepened and separation from the outside world threatened to drive me insane, sorrow now penetrated my soul. I felt acutely alone, even when my family was in the house—especially when my visibly miserable, overburdened husband was present. Yet, it all made me even more determined not to disintegrate emotionally or physically, or to walk out of that room defeated. I would not be forever cursed with what ifs overtaking my conscience like a slow-growing parasitic fungus, every waking moment for the rest of my life. Not after all of the love, suffering and perseverance already accomplished.

           

            How could I throw God’s mercy and grace in His face and tell Him that He could have it back, that I was finished with it? How could I tell Him He was expecting too much from me—from all of us—and that I had changed my mind; that I no longer desired to sustain the precious life I was carrying? The life He had given me?

           

            Alone, yet not alone.

           

            If I thought I’d hit the end before that point, I was dead wrong. I needed to crawl under the shadow of the cleft and hide.

           

            At least there I knew I’d be sustained.

           

            And protected.

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NEXT WEEK: Little sparks of encouragement…

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Until next week,

Thanks for joining me!

Blessings,

Andrea

           

           

            

            

Pregnant and Bedridden: Sacrificial Love

           

            Getting me successfully through my pregnancy was, as Lee, one of my readers, so aptly put it when describing his mother’s high-risk pregnancy journey, a family affair.

           

            I couldn’t shake the feeling that my husband and son were also held hostage; all of us in some kind of bondage. Two years of bondage. I started having the guilties about what all of this stress was doing to each one of us individually, and to our family as a whole. I could never ask them to endure it again, should our hopes and efforts end in failure. This would be our final attempt to enlarge our family.

           

            While lying in bed one day, thinking about the possible future—should we fall short of our “goal”—a song from the famous play A Chorus Line flashed through my mind: “What I Did for Love.” Although I knew some of the words to the song, I’ve never seen the play or movie, and I thought it just a little strange that that particular song niggled my conscience.

           

            But it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t just doing this to “win.” I was doing something for love. Everything I did, every move I made—or didn’t make—was motivated by unconditional love! I and my comfort and pleasure no longer mattered. What mattered was devotion and sacrifice for this unborn child developing within me. This child conceived in love. This child unseen but already intensely loved.

           

            Love. What a powerful, motivating force.

           

            Then my typically myopic mind sharpened into clarity as my thoughts motored from what I was doing for love to what God does for love. Most specifically what He already did for love. What He did for the world—for me—when He sent His precious, perfect Son to a hostile environment and a torturous death on a cross for the world’s—my—underserved salvation. All because of His unfathomable love for us. For me!

           

            What mature Christians already understood was a new revelation for me—a Christian mired perennially in un-discipled infancy. Oh, I had intellectually processed the physical suffering on the cross part and comprehended and believed wholeheartedly in Christ as the Son of God and in the resurrection, but now I more fully reflected on the inconceivable depths of Jesus’ emotional and spiritual pain, experienced even before He was actually nailed to that cross. My comprehension of Christ, and all that He was and did, was at first painful and then thrilling as the Holy Spirit revealed all that Christ could become to me personally. Head knowledge of His emotional suffering abruptly turned into deep heart and soul knowledge.

           

            And my heart suddenly hurt. Terribly.

           

            Jesus had born the cross in love—love like no other before Him and no other since—and with the grace and dignity of the King that He was then and still is. Yet, in the height of His emotional torment, (in the garden, where the battle was actually won), He prayed for the cup to pass—the cup of bearing the full wrath and rejection of His Father for one purpose: to bear the sins of the world, all of them, since the dawn of humanity, so that that the world could be reconciled to Him in order to spend eternity with Him, together.

           

            Then on the cross, in the climax of excruciating pain and humiliation, He wondered aloud why God had forsaken Him. Not just wondered, but cried out in anguish to His Father, questioning the abandonment in His time of greatest need.

           

            Jesus, the Creator of the universe, felt deserted.

           

            Jesus, the Creator of the universe, felt alone.

           

            Scripture prophesied that God would do it, and the Messiah (Christ) would implore why; Scripture says it had to happen just that way. Jesus had always been one with the Father. “I and the Father are one,” He proclaimed. Now, for the first time in His life, (heavenly and earthly), Jesus was no longer one with the Father. He was, instead, completely separated from His Father and from His Father’s divine love. 

           He was, suddenly, as human as any human can get.

           

            I can’t imagine the torment.

           

            I could never compare my suffering with Christ’s, but His doubt, His agony, His questioning—His utter humanness—made me feel more secure about my down-in-the-depths, visceral need to holler out to God. To bare my soul and pour out my doubts and confusion. To unload my pain, my fears, my unfair lot in life. To really display anger and confusion before Him and to Him.

           

            What I was experiencing, He (Jesus) had felt.

           

            What I was thinking, He (Jesus) had already verbalized.

           

            Nothing could happen to me that He did not understand. Nothing could befall me that He couldn’t carry me through, because He had been through it all and conquered it all.

           

            As long as I kept my eyes focused squarely on Jesus—as long as I continued to open my heart to receive His comfort, grace, mercy and love—nothing could keep Him from me.

           

            I knew then that I wanted nothing to keep me from Him.

           

            Lying in bed alone, with no distractions and with my self wasted, God was personally giving me a life-changing, life-affirming, love-motivated theology lesson I’d never forget.

           

            It was more than a wakeup call.

           

            And it would be a game changer.

oOo

           

            That famous passage every little kid learns and rattles off in Sunday school—probably the first passage they memorize—suddenly took on an entirely new significance for me, especially after I learned the meanings of some of the passage’s words in the original Greek language:

           

            “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

           

            For God (supreme Divinity, THE God) so loved (from a moral or social sense) the world (you, me, everyone, everything) that He gave His only (read: one and only one) begotten (only-born) Son that whosoever (whosoever means whosoever—you, me, anyone) believes in Him (moves toward and believes and trusts in Him alone for salvation, entrusts one’s spiritual well-being to, commits), will not perish (be destroyed) but have everlasting (eternal, forever) life.

           

            Make no mistake about it, though. God saves not by love but by grace. But that grace is driven by His unconditional love. It is because of His love that He sent His Son. It is because of love that His Son made the decision to endure the sacrifice. And it is by the grace—unmerited gift—of that sacrifice that we are saved.

           

            Although God was motivated by His love for the world, it’s personal. We must each believe, individually. No one else can do it for us.

           

            So, let’s go through this again:

           

            For God so loved Andrea that He gave (her) His only begotten Son (Jesus) that if she believes (trusts) in Him (alone), she will not perish (be destroyed) but have everlasting (forever) life.

           

            And this one last time, read it aloud this way:

           

            For God so loved me that He gave me His only begotten Son that if I believe in Him, I will not perish but have everlasting life!

           

            He did this for you! If you were the only person on earth, He would have done it, and would do it again.

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NEXT WEEK: Stress overflows: Chris’s angry, heart-crushing words, and I near the breaking point…

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Thanks for joining me!

Until next week.

Blessings,

Andrea