Milestones

Party time at our house! Morgan turned 4. We had a fun family celebration, followed by a "Pinkalicious" friend party. She asked for a princess cake, so I had my first foray into the Barbie-doll-cake-in-a-bowl tradition and experienced varying degrees of success. The party was received enthusiastically. When I went shopping for all the pink accoutrements, it looked like a Pepto bottle exploded on the checkout counter. I made pink tutus for all the girls; we decorated pink wands and ate pink cupcakes; the girls got their fingernails painted - pink, of course; we had a pink Jello jiggler race and made pink bead necklaces. Good times all around. I felt like it was a hit when one of the girls told her mom, "This was the best day of my whole life!"

I achieved a goal of mine recently. It only took four years. I finished writing the story of Morgan's first month of life. It really shouldn't have taken so long, but I started and stopped many times. It was a hard story for me to visit. I wanted to record it all, but the memories were emotionally intense. Much of the experience has become a blur, and I hope I captured the most important details. In particular, it was a spiritually defining time, and those are the things I feel are the most important to remember.

I won't recap the whole story here. Many of the details are too personal and near to my heart. [Not only that, but I filled about 10 pages. Nobody wants to read all that.] But for anyone who doesn't know the basic story, Morgan was born with a malrotation of her small intestines. She was admitted to the hospital at 10 days old, spent a week with doctors trying to fix her in all the wrong ways, then had surgery at 17 days old which put her on the road to healing and health. So many worse things could have happened, and I count my blessings that the end result was positive.

Four years later, I still look at Morgan’s scar almost every day. It doesn’t look so big and ugly now. A little part of me hurts when I see it. But mostly my heart soars. I like to kiss the three little white scars from the picc line on her arm. They’ll always be there, especially noticeable in the summer when she gets a tan. They remind me of the life I could have lost. But she is here. And she has already become more than I could have imagined. She is strong, determined, creative, expressive, affectionate, opinionated. When I would sit in the pumping station at the hospital, the nurses suggested I visualize my baby and think of something relaxing. I would try to picture Morgan as a toddler. I would imagine holding her hand and walking with her. It was hard to envision that future, especially when we didn’t know what was wrong. But now when I hold her hand and kiss those little scars, my heart is full of love and hope and gratitude. Morgan knows her scars mean the doctors fixed her. Someday I’ll tell her the whole story. My hope for her as she grows is that when she sees her scars, she won’t see flaws. I hope she’ll see them and know she got to live. That she was an answer to prayers and faith. That she was, and becomes more so every day, a beautiful gift.