Not What We Expected

I started keeping a bit of a hospital journal when I was in Royal Columbian, trying to bake Nyana just a little longer. For the most part, this journal was nothing more than depressing musings of a woman unsure of what was to happen next. One of the first entries reads:

Who’s stupid idea was this, anyways? All Don and I wanted was a little Brackett. A little doppelganger we could call our own. Nearing the end of my second trimester, I’m supposed to be sunshine and lollipops, shopping at Babies R Us by day and marvelling by night at my ever-changing body. I am not supposed to be enduring Day 8 of hell on earth… institutionalized bedrest.

So I’m over the bitterness, perhaps now that the hospitalized bedrest is over, but I’m still marvelling at how drastically different what we got is from what we were expecting. Not that I’d change what we have for anything, but I don’t think we could have landed any further from what we planned for ourselves when we decided to start a family.

It’s hard not to ask myself, “why?” It’s hard not to wonder what it is about Don and me that made the universe decide that we were going to get the preemie child. Has our life been too easy for the past ten years? Have we done something karmically wrong somewhere along the way to be punished like this? Or maybe we’ve done something karmically right, that we are blessed with an experience such as this. Who knows. All I know is that I wouldn’t change what I’ve got now for anything.

I wrote the other day about finding our new normal. Here is our new normal in pictures; two images that sum it all up pretty perfectly. The hallway I love to hate, and my place by her side.