Nine years ago today it was Thanksgiving.
I wasn’t home cooking or eating. Or celebrating with family.
I was in the hospital, a twenty-two year old mother having just delivered her third daughter.
Laying in that hospital bed, reeling from Cassidy’s diagnosis, I struggled to find a single thing to be thankful for.
Over the course of the following seven days all of that would change. Only I didn’t know it then.
All I knew then was that my baby was damaged. I knew not how to care for her. How to love her the way she needed to be loved. How to go on.
I imagined the life we would lead. It looked not even remotely similar to the one I’d been dreaming of.
But even in that place of despair, even in a grief so thick it swallowed me whole, even then, God prevailed.
It took every ounce of strength in my body to trudge from the bed to the connecting bathroom. I heaved myself over the edge of the tub and begged and pleaded for God to give me whatever it was I needed to carry on.
Later that night, or possibly the next one, it’s hard to say now, I watched a Dateline special on TV from that same hospital bed.
I watched as a couple talked about the fatal disease their child had. I watched as they pulled him down the street in a wagon because he couldn’t walk on his own. I watched and listened as, in the voice over, they sent out a message that I truly believe was meant just for me. They said that when they go to the grocery store there is a young man with Down syndrome who bags their groceries. They said that they would give anything in the world if their own son had Down syndrome instead of the disease that would, sooner than later, claim his life. They said that parents of children with Down syndrome had no idea how blessed they truly were.
There were other incidents, similar to that one, in the months leading up to and immediately following Cassidy’s birth. Times when God whispered to me, not-so-subtly helping me along.
I felt His hands physically lift me up as I cried tears down the drain of that bathtub. I heard His voice in the thickly-accented words of a dark African nurse as she prayed with me at my hospital bedside. I saw His promise in the eyes of my newborn baby girl. A promise that assured me she’d be just fine. We’d all be fine.
Nine years later I think back on those days as both the best and worst of my life. Worst because I was desperate, broken. Best because I came through it with a faith I’d not known before.
And that baby girl?
She’s made strides, let there be no doubt.
There was no way of predicting, back then, how far she’d go. It was on a wing and a prayer that we set out on this journey, hoping for the best, refusing to consider the worst.
Every single day has brought it’s own challenges. But with the challenges come triumphs, with the struggles, reward.
This time every year I am reminded of Thanksgiving, 1999. How I scoffed at the irony of Cassidy’s arrival on that day.
Now, of course, I know better. It wasn’t ironic. It was a whisper. And today? Today, I’m thankful for having heard.
