Three Years Ago Today.....

One of Liv and Cody's favorite bedtime stories is the "when we were born" story.  I tell an edited version that cuts from their delivery to being home with the two of them.  They don't know that there are two months that have vanished from my account.

Hardly anyone knows what happened during those vanished months.  S., my sister and mother, my mothers-in-law, and a handful of nurses.   I sealed myself away from everyone else.

During those two months I was, for the first time in my life, helpless.

I was also the clearest I have ever been, as if, like Paul, I'd had the scales drop from my eyes.  That Liv survive  -- that bundled nub, swathed in tubes and smelling like scotch tape and frightened cat -- was all that mattered.  Propped against the Plexiglass coffin of her isolette in hour after hour of snotty, whispered supplication, Cody curled peacefully at my in his SnugRide, I was graced with the knowledge that nothing I had ever done or would do counted next to this.  I imagine all mothers feel like this with their babies.  Or maybe it's just the ones who fear terribly for their children.

It wasn't the first time I'd needed God.  It was just the first time I knew that I did.