Dandelion Dreams

As a young girl I had many dandelion dreams. I wish to be a famous Broadway star. I wish to be an Olympic gymnast. I wish to be a mom. With every hopeful breath those dreams scattered in the wind. It wasn’t long before reality overtook fantasy—Broadway and Olympic fame fell to the wayside. But the dream of motherhood, that seed planted itself firmly in my heart.

To be honest, I didn’t just have a dream, I had a plan. I was going to have four children before I was 30 years old. In my mind, I was going to be a young mom with two girls and two boys. Everyone would be perfectly healthy and all of them would be born naturally—no pain meds for this chiropractor’s daughter with child-bearing hips. It was a Norman Rockwell perfect plan.

My dreams started shifting when I married at 25. Do the math—four children by 30 was no longer on the table. Adjustments and concessions were made. I was pregnant, the first time, at age 28. The joy only lasted six weeks, just long enough for me to tell all the people in my life—then, the baby was lost. Naïve excitement was replaced with cynical heartache. What happened to being built for childbirth?

“God needed your baby in Heaven,” I was told through tears by nice church ladies. “Thank you, that’s comforting,” I lied. In my mind, I screamed, “I didn’t think God needed anything!” Grief has a silent language in the soul.

Three months later, I was pregnant again. Turns out, getting pregnant was easy, but staying pregnant was difficult. Wiser and terrified, my husband and I didn’t tell anyone. Six weeks later, I was visited by the ghost of things past when the tell-tale signs of pregnancy loss came back to haunt me.

Miraculously, I remained pregnant. After 10 weeks of tumultuous bedrest, during which I bled enough to believe I had lost the baby multiple times, I was able to return to “normal” pregnancy life and work. The plan was back in motion, but I was carrying an unrelenting fear throughout every day. This was not going according to my plans at all, and I was entirely helpless to change any of it. Are you allowed to be disappointed in the face of a miracle? I decided the answer was “no,” and I stuffed all the negative down under a façade of happy maternity.

My dreams shattered when I was 29 weeks pregnant.

It was an exciting leap day, February 29th. We were scheduled for a routine follow-up ultrasound and hoped to learn the sex of our baby. My husband and I were bursting with expectation when we met for the appointment.

“Are you ready to find out if we are having Chloe or Ian?” Shawn asked as he approached with the video camera.

“I can’t wait! Save the filming for later, let’s get in there.” Secretly, I was worried. The advice nurse had not returned my call. I had been exhausted for two weeks. I was swollen up like Violet, the blueberry girl in Willy Wonka; I noticed the concerned looks on women’s faces at church. I knew something wasn’t right.

Heartache, disappointment and loss don’t express the full extent of the despair when the doctor said, “Your blood pressure is too high. I’m sending you straight to the hospital. You will probably have this baby in the next 24 hours.”

Words like toxemia, stroke, preeclampsia, and kidney failure swirled in my ears. Somewhere along the way, they told me I was having a girl, but that detail lost its significance amid the chaos. All I could hear was the ticking of the clock and the rush of fear rising in my soul.

“I’m not due for 11 more weeks! I don’t want her to have a leap day birthday!” I turned to my husband and saw the fear on his face, “I’ll call your boss,” was all he could say.

It felt as if the world was spinning out of control while my fear turned to anger. “You haven’t put the baby furniture together yet! We aren’t ready.”

It was not supposed to be this way. Heartache settled in as the dandelion dreams all seemed to be blowing away.

Once we were at the hospital, friends gathered, prayers were said, questions were asked. No one could tell me if my precious baby girl would live. There was concern I would not live. This was definitely not the plan.

It was explained to me that my daughter had Intra-Uterine Growth Restriction. Her limbs and trunk growth had stopped to preserve her organs. First her legs, then her arms, then her trunk. The many doctors managing my care, believed her skull had not stopped growing, in order to preserve her brain, but she had to be born now. The precision of the knitting-together process is truly amazing, when it isn’t happening inside of you.

“Is she deformed?” I asked the nurse in the middle of the night. “You are my patient; we’ll see what happens with the baby,” she said. “Will she live?” I whispered. “Shh, try and get some rest.”

Tears, disappointment and fear were my companions that long night. Shattered dreams can cut a soul deeper than words can express.

Less than 36 hours after we arrived for that exciting doctor’s appointment, I was being prepped for an emergency C-section. Minutes before it was to begin, with more wires than I ever imagined hooked up to my body, I asked for a moment alone. There in the stillness I yelled at God: “This is the most unnatural thing I ever imagined! Where are you? What are you doing? Don’t you see us?”

The language of lament brought my soul right into the presence of God. In those brief moments, a peace came over me that can only be called supernatural. It was as if He wrapped his arms around me and let me know that He was there. In the middle of my lament, I was reminded of what I truly believe:

God is the giver of life and ordains the number of days everyone lives.

Whatever was happening in my body, He was in control of it, not me.

God knows the desires of my heart and loves me deeply.

While the surgery preparation continued, all my plans and dreams fell away as I surrendered to the One who was working something greater than I had ever imagined. My focus shifted from all the things that were different than I had dreamed, and I was able to see the incredible provision and protection of God in the timing of that leap day doctor’s appointment.

On March 1, the tiniest little girl I have ever seen was pulled from my body. Chloe was a very fragile 1 lb. 12 oz. micro-preemie and she was perfect! She certainly wasn’t the chubby baby I had imagined birthing; she looked more like a plucked chicken than the Gerber Baby. But, when I reached out to touch her tiny hand, she grabbed my finger and my disappointment faded into amazement and joy.

Despite the many medical adventures we’ve endured, I wouldn’t trade my daughter or her miraculous birth story for the boring natural birth I planned.

Dandelion dreams are truly a thing of childhood. I don’t know anyone who got what they wished for in those seeds on the wind. Loss, disappointment, heartache, peace and joy are the unplanned ingredients of life—not dreams. When we surrender to what is, instead of demanding what we want, we can savor the elements of the story we are given to live and trust the One who writes each scene.