| In
1974, my husband and I were awaiting the birth of our first baby.
It was not an uneventful pregnancy, sad to say. Because of my
childhood-onset diabetes, I had specialists for everything. My weight
gain was minimal, even though the endocrinologist increased my insulin
dosage repeatedly. A bout of ketoacidosis hospitalized me during
Memorial Day weekend. Even so, the baby’s father and I had a lot
of hope for a living, healthy child. An early C-section delivery
was scheduled for late in July. The waking dreams that had started in April continued. Almost every morning, I dreamed the same dream. I was always the center of attention, lying on a cold metal table while a disembodied voice instructed me to “Press down, dear”. Other shadowy figures flitted to and fro. A tantalizing fragment of a vision, but since I had it so often, it perplexed me. At eight month’s gestation, after my obstetrician could neither detect motion nor find any fetal heartbeats, the surgical delivery was canceled and an induction took its place. Without my glasses, nearsighted as I am, I could not see anything or anyone clearly. Medications administered to induce labor made that problem even worse. Under the blur of powerful ceiling lamps, a stillborn boy was delivered as my doctor instructed me to push down while the anesthetist and nurses spoke in soft whispers – exactly what I had seen happening while waking weeks, even months before. Rather than mope around at home, within a few weeks I went back to work. My job at that time entailed filing pictures of newborn infants into the medical charts of the mothers. Whenever that particular chore needed to be done, I would take a handful of snapshots into the file room and try to read the chart numbers through tears. Watching parents cuddling their living bundles of joy was also painful. So what’s the point? The prescient visions did not make this loss preventable nor ease its hurt. It’s not in God’s job description to fix every hurt or to grant our every wish. But God is always with us, whether we know it or not. |
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