Little Wonder

I know my topics bounce around a lot. I get a lot of ideas in my head throughout the day about what I want to write about, and the one that yells the loudest is the one that wins when I sit down here at my keyboard. Tonight, I want to take a few minutes to write about my littlest girl, Camryn.

I’m going to be really honest here (as if I am ever anything else) and tell you that, when I found out I was pregnant, I was not exactly thrilled. A year, almost to the day, prior to my last pregnancy, I had sat in the same bathroom, peed on the same (type of ) stick, and seen the same results. I was numb. I was definitely having the baby, but I wasn’t okay with it at all. It was a major blow, a big mistake, just not good. So when I went to the doctor due to some minor spotting just a few weeks in, and he told me that this baby inside me had no heartbeat, I was not at all prepared for the total, horrible grief that took a hold of me. I was devastated.

Fast forward a year. I wish I could put into words that odd, detached, yet somehow terrified feeling I got looking down at that little, all powerful, EPT. That’s “early pregnancy test” in case you somehow did not know that. The worst part was, it had looked like it was going to be negative. (I know, I know, they tell you to wait a certain amount of minutes before trying to read it. Show me ONE woman who does this.) It had done all the stuff it seemed like it was going to do, then slowly, sloooowly, that second line appeared.

I was scared. I was OLD. I mean, I know 35 is not really old, but in terms of having another baby, it kind of is. I had actually sort of convinced myself that I had “old eggs” and was in no danger of getting pregnant. I highly discourage this as a method of birth control. It has a few glitches. Anyway, so there it was.

Now I’m going to share with you something that will probably make you think I am totally nuts- if you don’t already. At no time during my entire pregnancy did I believe anything other than that this was the same baby. What I mean is, that baby that I had miscarried had come back, a year later, when it was a better, more feasible time for it to be born. I don’t know that I have ever shared that with anyone other than Devon, who is the other co-creator of this child. I really believed that, and I still do. I got a do-over. It was the right time.

I had a lot of the normal worries of pregnancy- will my baby be healthy, is everything alright in there, etc. I had some of the added worries of a later-in-life pregnancy- will my baby have Down’s Syndrome? Will my body be able to do this? And then I had some worries about things that women who have other children undoubtedly have- will my daughter (who was already 12 at the time) be okay with all of this? And the biggest question of all- How will I ever be able to love another kid the way I love this one?

The answer arrived in the form of Camryn Faith, on November 16th, 2010. It was a scary delivery. She had some problems with her umbilical cord, and every time I had a contraction, it became compressed, cutting off her oxygen. I listened as her heartbeat disappeared. So did the whole room full of doctors and nurses. I don’t know that I have ever felt so helpless before in my life. Finally, they wheeled me off to surgery (my very first one, ever) and not ten minutes later, I heard my little girls first cry in the world.

I’m pretty sure I had postpartum, this time around. Everything was harder for me than it had been the first time- of course, the first time, I had been 22, clueless, and the baby had come out via the normal and standard orifice rather than through a man-made one in my abdomen. It was hard. I think it was a good two weeks before I really started bonding with this perfect little girl. But once it started, look out.

I have had her for a while now, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep her. Sure, she likes her dad a little more than she likes me, but whatever. If I was a baby, I probably would, too. He’s more on her level (BURN! Ha!), not that I’m jealous or anything. I am such a better parent this time around than I was the first time. I have so much more sense, and so much more understanding of what it really means to be a mother. I am forming a human being here, that will someday go out into the world and be a grown up woman. I want to do this right.

Camryn is a blessing. Not just to us, here in this house, but to the people she meets. She is one of those happy, smiling, laughing kids that cheer people up. There are rarely times when she is fussy or unhappy- she wakes up with a smile on her face and goes to sleep the same way. She is above average smart, and I’m not just saying this because I am her mom- her doctor has verified this for me time and time again. She’s a toddler and she has an amazing sense of humor!

But Camryn is a blessing for even more important reasons than just being a ray of sunshine in a sometimes rotten world. She did something to my heart. I don’t know how to describe it other than this- because of her, my heart burst wide open, allowing me to love in a whole different way. Maybe I was just too young with Aisley, too selfish, still, but now I am so aware of how precious children really are. And every single one of us was a child at one time. See the implications, here? Every face on the planet is a face that has been loved by a mother, a father….every one of us have had a moment we don’t recall, where someone has watched us as we slept and loved us until their heart ached. Camryn has softened every hard part of me, and opened my eyes. She is my little wonder.