It’s been an unreal past few days. I’m a dad now. Rhys is here. Everything has slowed down to focus on the smaller, sweeter details of life.
It also seems like a good time to capture the journey we went on that led to him being here. It took about two years of trying and being pregnant, none of which could be called easy. I’ve shared bits of the story before, but never in one big sum. Buckle in, it was a long ride for us, too.
It’s worth noting is that when I say I heard something from God, I don’t say that lightly. Throughout most of my spiritual life, I refrained from using those particular words, always wanting to leave room for the possibility that I was just telling myself whatever I wanted to hear. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I became more open to the practice of contemplation and listening. Those moments of divine connection carried me through one of the most challenging and rewarding stretches of my life so far.
November 2018 was one of the hardest times in my life. It was in the middle of Fall, and Deanna had gotten sick. And not just casually sick, but a weird, fast, complicated illness that struck suddenly in a single afternoon. When she went on antibiotics, the road to recovery wasn’t exactly a clean one either. First, one med created some strange side effects. The next day, we were worried about blood clots. Those fears became a reality the day after.
This feels like a cruel joke, I prayed. We had been trying to have a kid for a year, and all we managed to get was this ridiculous illness. It felt like torture, in so many ways.
In a year, you will see how good I am, I heard in reply.
No way did I just hear that, I thought. It seems like too convenient of a reply. Too good to be true.
But it wasn’t the first time I heard something like that.
Years ago, just after we had gotten married, I listened to an episode of Radiolab that told the story of a girl who was born 23 weeks into gestation. She wasn’t supposed to survive, but the podcast followed the story of how her parents watched her round the clock, reading Harry Potter to her. Singing to her. Her two day prognosis turned into a week. Then two. Then a month. Then three. Finally, she grew and was released from the hospital. She was four years old at the end of the episode.
It remains the only podcast episode to ever move me to tears. And I couldn’t help but wonder about what it would be like when we started trying to have kids. Deanna’s medical history was complicated enough that we weren’t totally sure it would be possible. And if it were, I wondered what effects there might be on mother or child.
I felt four words whispered to me.
You will be thankful.
I was alone in the car. You will be thankful, I heard again. I kept those words in my back pocket.
We started trying to have a kid in April 2018. I had been at my job for over a year. We had been living back in San Diego for a similar amount of time. Things were alright financially. We were in a good place.
We started trying the way most couples do. Passively. But as time passed, we intensified our efforts. Paying attention to calendars, tracking fertility. But months went on.
In that span of time, we saw dozens of friends announce their pregnancies. I had four other coworkers get pregnant. Five other people in our family had kids as well. And we were happy for them. But also, each was a reminder of what we were missing. I hated the fact that we felt that way, and that kind of made things even worse.
There was one moment, late that summer, when Deanna told me that we weren’t having a baby that month, for yet another month in a row.
I was sad. I looked at her, imagined her with an occupied womb and told her that she would make for the cutest pregnant lady when it finally happened.
“If it happens,” she corrected me.
“Yeah, sure.”
I don’t easily admit defeat. And that stubbornly optimistic side of me held on to this feeling that someday it would happen. But I was deeply discouraged and another big part of me doubted it at the exact same time.
In August of that year, I took a work trip to Haiti. I would meet with some of the participants of Plant With Purpose’s program and hear their stories. I do about one or two of these trips every year, but this time around, their stories resonated with me at a deeper level.
Messoyel talked about the struggle of not being able to provide food for his kids. Gernita told me about not being able to reap what she sowed. Nael talked about making 34 cents a day after working 12 hours. Raymond told me about the time his brother was killed in a car accident and he developed a drinking problem.
All these instances were about 10 years ago. Around that time, an organization called Floresta was rebranding itself as Plant With Purpose. Earlier versions of my current colleagues were figuring out how to effectively bring agroforestry and food farm projects to their communities. The answers to their prayers were already mobilized, before anybody knew.
Things move slower in the village, and so one morning when I got up before anybody else, I decided to go for a walk in the woods. I care about them, I heard while praying. Look around you. I saw aloe plants and small pines. I care about these, too. These were plants in a remote, rural, frequently forgotten part of the country. And yet, they were of importance, and they were thriving.
I care about you too.
I came home. I was supposed to make a video of my Haitian friends’ stories, but when the footage didn’t arrive on time, I had to pen a script fast. The words flowed easily. I wrote the message I got out of my time in Haiti.
It turned into this video:
I am the reason you can keep going. The reason you will keep going.
Of course, the hardest part of my year hadn’t yet arrived.
It did two months later.
In a year, you will see how good I am, I heard in the midst of it.
Deanna’s recovery was slow and complicated, but she did get better. The year was coming to an end, and I had chalked 2018 up as a difficult year and I was eager to move on. I had no particular reason to think 2019 would be any better, but hey, we could hope.
Sort of.
That New Year’s Day, we spent the afternoon with my parents. For the first time ever, my stepdad asked if we thought about having kids. When we got home later, that set off a more emotional conversation between myself and Deanna. She had pretty much given up on the likelihood of us having kids.
I threw out the idea of IVF or other methods.
“What if this is my body’s way of letting me know that I’m not meant to be pregnant?” she asked.
Maybe.
“What if this year we start looking at adoption?”
Okay.
We’ve always wanted to adopt. We still do. But we also both wanted biological children. I still hadn’t given up in that same way, but what was I going to do? I couldn’t argue my way into conceiving a kid. I agreed, wondering if we might still do both, just in a different order than we expected.
After all, it was finally 2019 and I was ready for a new start.
Yeah right.
Two weeks later, I was in bed reading, while Deanna was out rock climbing with a friend. I got a call: “Hey, I hurt my leg and can’t drive. Can you come pick me up?”
I thought I would just be taking Deanna home, so I simply threw on sweats and flip flops and went over to the gym. When I got there, it turned out that Deanna had actually broken her knee, and we would be spending the night in the hospital. Before they X-Rayed her, they asked us if we were pregnant.
Our answer was no, but they still needed to test. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony to find out this way? I thought. But once again, the test showed up negative.
The broken leg meant eight weeks on crutches, during which Deanna couldn’t drive. Plant With Purpose was gracious in allowing me a little flexibility. Every morning, I would drive her 20 minutes to work, then head 40 minutes in the other direction to my office. I would reverse that route every afternoon, keeping me on the road for two hours every day.
To add to the stress, we had started looking for a house. We were confident enough in our decision to move that at the start of the year, we gave our apartment a notice that we were leaving in 60 days. End of February. Deanna’s leg slowed down our house hunt. When we got back to it, we found that everything was just a bit outside of our range.
We had to pack everything up and move out by the end of the month, and we had no place to go. We kept looking for houses and short term rentals we could use as a backup plan. Meanwhile, after work each day, I’d come home and do more packing. Taking several boxes to storage every day became part of the routine.
Things were unbelievably stressful. One day, I found a stray dog on the street. A small black lab who was really sweet. I told the shelter we’d adopt her if nobody claimed ownership. One day went by, and then another. The owner had a week to claim her. Six days went by, but on the final day, she was claimed.
Over Thai food that day, I simply had to vent to Deanna how tired and upset I was at nothing working out. No luck having kids. No luck finding a house. We couldn’t even get that dog.
She listened intently. We stared and ate basil noodles. Then she started scrolling on her phone.
“There’s an open house right now in City Heights,” she said. “And this is way cheaper than the other places we’ve looked at.”
We met our realtor there in an hour. And we liked it.
Later that week, we made an offer that was almost immediately accepted.
On the last day of February, my mom came over to help clean the house. I took the day off work so I could keep taking large boxes over to storage. We were closing on the house, which we’d move into in April, but we found a sweet spot to temporarily stay in for the next month. Something about that day felt right.
The sun was out. Things felt lighter. I suppose it’s worth noting that this was the same day the Phillies signed Bryce Harper.
We moved out, and I was so glad to put that month behind us.
A week later, we were in La Mesa, in our temporary living room. I was reading on the couch before work. Deanna hobbled over to me on crutches. “I have something to show you.”
She pulled out a pregnancy test strip showing two pink lines.
My smile was sincere but guarded. I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I wanted to hear from a credentialed doctor that all this was for real.
Conveniently, her broken leg called for lab work to be done that night. We checked the results and saw that HCG levels were indeed up.
That Thursday, we scheduled a visit with the gynecologist. She performed an ultrasound. And we saw him.
Our baby was the size of a rice grain. And he had a heartbeat. “That’s very good,” our doctor told us. “Most of the time you can find a heartbeat at this stage, you’ll carry to term.”
It would still be a high risk pregnancy, we were told. We’d need to see this doctor every other week. Deanna’s diabetes would be a tricky thing. We were warned that she would lose her sensitivity to her blood sugar levels. We were also given a list of all the things that could go wrong. A possible loss of lung function. A slight risk of death.
“I just have to say that stuff,” our doctor told us. “But I’m an optimist, and I think we’ll do this. You have to be an optimist about this.”
The next day, I took Beignet for a long walk. This is it, I heard. I want you to be parents.
We told our parents, but other than that, we kept this sweet news to ourselves. My cautious self wanted to wait until halfway through before we really started telling people.
We took an early Babymoon to Charleston. It was also partly a birthday gift to me, a trip to the High Water Music Festival. We had a great time, and we saw a lot of other pregnant women there as well.
The last day of the trip, however, would be the scariest day of our pregnancy.
Many diabetics can feel their blood sugar levels fluctuate and can adjust their food or insulin intake accordingly. When you get pregnant, however, your sensitivity gets thrown off and the amount of insulin you need gets thrown off. While I was driving from Charleston to Charlotte so we could fly back home, this caught us way off guard.
Deanna napped in the passenger seat, and when she woke up, she checked her blood sugar. The monitor said something I had never seen before. Sugar Dangerously Low. What? This thing measures as low as 30-- how low is she? 20? She should be in a diabetic coma right now if that were the case.
But oddly, she felt nothing. We waited as she drank juice and ate cereal bars to try and bring it back up. “This is very, very bad,” she told me. “If this baby is still okay, it would be a miracle.”
The next four days would be another painstaking wait until we could see our doctor.
I spent a lot of time on online forums trying to see if anyone had experienced a hypoglycemic shock while pregnant. The biggest source of comfort, oddly, were posts on a British website from diabetic mums in 2011. I had to do some conversion of units to see how low they dropped.
When we made it to the doctor after a long week, we watched the ultrasound screen. We found the heartbeat, and as far as anyone could see, baby was doing well.
I want you to be parents, I remembered hearing. And this baby- a boy, we’d soon learn- wanted to be alive. He found his way into our lives when they were the most chaotic- a broken leg, a housing crisis, and a ton of stress. He fought through blood sugar swings and chronic illness management and a challenging pregnancy. It looks as though he’s picked up his mom’s fighter spirit and resilience. It’s hard to overstate how happy that makes me.
And now, he’s here.
His arrival took me back to where this journey all began. Where, after a podcast episode, I heard the phrase you will be thankful. And it takes me to this time last year. A year from now, you will see how good I am. It takes me to Haiti. I am the reason you can keep going. You will keep going. It takes me to Charleston. I want you to be parents.
And you know what? A year after the hardest time in my life, I see how good God is.
I am thankful.