When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. But something goes wrong. Your plane is shot out of the sky, you cling to life as the aircraft comes tumbling down. You cry and yell and pray to God for breath… for life…. for a heartbeat. When you land upon the rubble, you do not know where you are, you have forgotten time and space everything is foreign, hazy and frightening. You are in a war zone. Fight or flight floods your body and you try you best to make sense of what is happening. The people around tell you they do not know where you are, or how long you will be there. “You are “Here”…” they say. You are told it may take days, months or years to understand where “Here” is. Many people might try and tell you where they think “Here” is. But they do not know anymore than you do. You are told to wait. While you wait you may be faced with peril, and trials, and dangers that never crossed your mind before your plane crashed. You try your hardest to stay strong, to build a map, to navigate and fight through this new territory. “What happened?” You ask. “Where are we? I thought we were going to Italy?” you say. You loose all semblance of your past self. You do not remember life before the crash. But, you become a new self. You are strong. You embody everything you’ve heard about the human spirit, the truths you never wanted to experience first hand. Eventually you build a fortress, a safe haven. You even meet other families who’s planes came crashing down. You have family, and friends and strangers who come to fight along side you.
You grieve Italy. You are haunted by the plane crash, and the war zone, but you continue to push past your fears to find safety every single day.
In time the dust begins to settle. You leave the war zone and find a space to call home. You do everything within your power to make this home, your home. ‘Here’ does become home. You work incredibly hard to manage building a new life. You work incredibly hard to heal and to grow. The weather changes and often time you feel sun on your skin, and see birds, and butterflies, and watch life return to this land. You remind yourself, although the battles will rage on, the war is won. You gather resources and create new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
You catch your breath and you realize there can be peace in this land. You did not go to Italy. But after you’ve been Here for a while, you look around…. and you begin to notice that where you are is full of love and the things that matter most in this world. Your concerns about trivial matters have dissipated. You know what is valuable in life and you build your world around these things. But still, everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.
And for the rest of your life, you might say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
And the pain of that may never, ever, ever, ever go away…because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.
But…if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things… about Here.
“My family is my world. My 3rd and final baby experienced HIE at birth 20 months ago. Trying to navigate the first year was extremely difficult and I am still working on healing the PTSD caused by the events. I wrote this poem to help me express our experience. I chose to share it with the hope it may help other families too.”
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