I filled Alder’s nursery with plants. I need to see life and growth in that room while he is away; it’s so stagnant without him. My world is stagnant without him. It doesn’t seem fair, really, that once again I’ve had my boy taken from me; my children are growing and time is passing and the world keeps spinning, but my heart is standing still. People are getting married and having babies and going on holiday. I am in hospital, waiting for my baby’s lungs to mend. Waiting for his opiate addiction to wane.
So much waiting. I had been lulled into a false sense of normalcy. From the appearance of things, Alder was healthy and strong, beautiful and alert and chatty and happy. But always we return to what’s under the surface of things: he still has weak lungs. He was still born too soon. It still feels like my fault. What could I have done differently? How could I have prevented my body from displacing my darling? How could I have sheltered him from this sickness? How could I have grown him bigger, faster, stronger?
Logically, I know there is nothing I could have done. The reality of my own powerlessness has never been so clear, but when I lay the blame on my own shoulders it makes me feel a little more in control. If I could have done things differently than I can do things differently going forward and therefore prevent any of this from happening again. But really, I know better. I can’t protect my son any more than I can protect myself. My life is not my own, either.
I have found comfort there, but also a bitterness that threatens to consume. This life—the one I’m living on this very day, the one that includes every moment of agony from the past year, the one that includes separation from my children—this has been chosen for me. I can no more change my present circumstances than I can manipulate my future ones. God is sovereign, but I am struggling to reconcile that knowledge with the pain of these months that we have suffered. This is the question, isn’t it, that humanity cries: If you are good and powerful and you love us, then why have you chosen this?
I remember well that day back in November, when I cried out in agony over another “lost day” in the nicu; another day where my baby should have been home in my arms but wasn’t; another day when I could do nothing to fix my living hell. I decided on that day I must choose: either God doesn’t exist, He doesn’t care, or He does. And if He does, than everything I’ve experienced must somehow be worked for His highest and my best. But after months of trauma, exhaustion, dashed hopes and unanswerable questions, I couldn’t choose. “I don’t have the strength to choose,” I cried. “If you want me, you’re going to have to choose me.” For months, all I could pray were those words. “If you want me, choose me.”
I haven’t had any grand visions or heard voices from heaven in response. But there has been an image and a story that have echoed with me since Alder was too tiny and sick for me to hold. They feel significant in a way I can’t quite explain, but I’ll do my best. In those nicu days, I would just sit next to his bed, hold his hand and sing. There was no more I could do, no other way to display the deep, passionate and fierce love I had for my fragile infant. One day, it was as if I could see myself from above, sitting there with him, and I could see the tenderness and the intensity of my love for him. A mother hovering over her son. That’s when it really struck me, how completely ludicrous it was to have such infinite love for a child who could give or guarantee nothing more than the promise of painful days to come. Yet I could no more logic the love out of me than I could physically separate my heart from my chest. He could do nothing to earn my love, nor nothing to lose it. He is mine. I love him.
I recently heard a story about a couple who adopted a child born at 24 weeks just days after his birth. I cried when I heard that. I am this road because I have to, but to willingly enter this suffering path is unfathomable. I can’t begin to conceive of that kind of love.
And yet, I can. These are simply variations on the theme that I’ve read and heard from my childhood. Now I’ve seen them and walked them, too: I am that adopted micro preemie, shriveled and gasping and struggling. I have nothing to offer, but I am entirely, fiercely and unabashedly loved. He chose me. And when He looks at me, He doesn’t see a baby on the brink, but a beautiful bride.
Because He loved us.
Because, as my husband once preached, “Immensity cloistered” and became flesh and dwelt among us. Because God sent His beloved son as a helpless babe. I have not been chosen by a God who is a stranger to suffering, but by the Creator who knows the pain of watching His Son as a 24 weeker, by the “man of sorrows acquainted with grief,” by the Christ who cried on the cross, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”
I am chosen by Christ, who chose to suffer for the love of us.
I cannot make heads or tails out of what I’m going through these days, but I can cling to that truth, even if it’s just by my eyelashes.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessings in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.” Ephesians 1:3-6