12 Tears, part 3

The birth of a child is an emotionally overwhelming experience. After nine months of “expecting,” emotions turn to a mixture of excitement and dread as the delivery date draws nigh. The actual birth experience itself? Well, it’s hard to imagine human drama at a higher crescendo. And then there is the joy and anxiety of the fragile and tenuous first days of life. A few tears were shed on our part during the birth of our first daughter, Claire Grace last week. I counted twelve, which I’ll spread out over the next few days.

9. Breaking the news of Claire’s illness to family members over the phone—after breaking the good news of her birth to them just hours earlier—wasn’t easy. There was a degree of “holding it together” in front of the nurses and doctor and Heather, but when I heard the voices of family, all of the exhaustion and fear and emotion overwhelmed me.

10. Staring at a baby in an incubator gives one a guilty feeling of boredom. One wants to do something…but there is nothing to do—but pray. We stayed with Claire about three hours that night, heads bopping from her chest to the O2/breathing rate monitor, back and forth. We finally decided on attempting to sleep back in Heather’s hospital room. After a quick snack (the most food I had eaten all day amidst all the activity), we almost turned off the lights when we got one last call from the doctor. He said that he breathing had stabilized enough that she wouldn’t need to be on constant oxygen and that he was so pleased with her hydration that he didn’t feel that liquids through the IV were needed either. She still was to be kept for the night in NICU, but the update left us both teary-eyed and peaceful enough to sleep.

11. I’ll skip through most of Tuesday’s events, saying only that the doctors gave her a glowing report in the morning, Claire was back in our room by lunchtime, and the rest of our hospital stay amounted to primarily favorable O2 readings and test results. Tuesday brought us word of hundreds and hundreds of people praying from California to Pennsylvania to Africa to wherever-else-Facebook-and-email-goes. It was a day of great relief. Then on Wednesday, our friends Mike and Kim brought their kids and our two boys to the hospital to visit. We had vivid memories of Micah holding his baby brother for the first time, and now both boys would sit on the same chair and hold little Claire. The sight of all three of our miracles on one bench was beautiful beyond description. Wet eyes snapped away behind the camera.

12. Although we originally hoped to leave on Wednesday, the worries of Monday night and Tuesday morning kept us waiting for results into Thursday. I returned from Kijabe after spending the night with our two boys and relieving our babysitter of her duties, and after a few hours of waiting for all of the different departments to clear Heather and Claire, we were released! We snapped her into her car seat, just a little dollop of sweetness in the vast expanses of that seat. I turned the key and looked in my rearview mirror. Heather. Baby. Clean bills of health. A week of emotional heights and depths. Headed to our blustery home on the hillside as a family of five. It was a beautiful thing, and I couldn’t help shed one last tear of joy and gratitude.