A Meaningful Conversation

I feel like it’s not often that I have a meaningful conversation during the typical day. Last Thursday though, when Nick came home, I announced to him that I’d had not one meaningful conversations that day but 3! When I was finished telling him about conversation #3 he said “actually, you had 4 meaningful conversations because part of what you just said was a separate conversation with the boys that was very meaningful.” He was right! Here’s what happened…

My phone rang that afternoon and when I answered I was glad to hear it was one of my triplet mom friends. We were chatting and she asked if I remember that she’d told me the week before that one of our friends (who was expecting triplets) we on hospitalized bed rest. I said that I remembered and then my friend didn’t say anything. I finally said “did she lose them?”

What ensued was a conversation about how while she hadn’t lost all three babies, she had indeed lost one and her pregnancy was still in a very precarious place. She was only 25 weeks at the time and the doctors were just hoping to keep those babies inside as long as possible. Each day is iffy. I told my friend we’d start making calls to figure out ways to support this mom and that I would continue to pray for her and her babies.

As I hung up the phone Tyler said “what did she lose, Mommy?”

Ugh.

I looked at my three smiling boys and said “Well, one of mommy’s friends is pregnant with triplets. That’s three babies just like you guys. Sometimes having so many babies at once makes the mommy sick or the babies sick.”

At this point I started crying, as I was totally overwhelmed with the situation. I was never “sick” and my babies were never “sick”. Instead I had an easy pregnancy (all things considered) and my babies had an easy NICU stay.

Now my boys weren’t smiling and Chase asked why I was crying.

I said, “it’s ok. I’m crying because I’m happy that I was never sick when I was pregnant with you and you boys were never sick when inside my belly.” I was so grateful that I had 3 healthy boys to even ask me this question.

Then I said, “Do you remember the March for Babies we do every year?” Nods all around… “Well that’s why we do it. To raise money for mommys and babies who are sick. That’s pretty important huh?” More nods all around.

I still had tears streaming down my face and then the boys started making fun of me for crying. End of serious conversation.

A couple of days later I was blog surfing and came across one where the parents had just given birth to their very early triplets and none of the babies survived more than a few hours. Heart breaking!

I feel like a lot of people (me included sometimes) look at my boys and forget how precarious my pregnancy was. Things easily could have gone the other way. Easily. For every terrible story there are hundreds of good ones. That’s how it should be and really there should be fewer terrible stories. That’s why I walk.

Donate here. We’re currently at $360 and my goal is $1,000. The walk is less than 2 weeks away. Can we get to at least $500 by the end of today?