Clara's Heart: I Feel Lucky

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I Feel Lucky

I'm feeling lucky.
I have spent countless hours frightening myself and reassuring myself and confusing myself by reading through posts on the Intermountain Healing Hearts (IHH) forum I joined for heart parents. And today I find myself feeling so grateful for the knowledge we have about what is going on with Clara. So many of these sweet moms had to find out, within a day or two of their baby being born, that they weren't heart healthy. Then the babies were life flighted to PCMC and their heart journey began with a separation.
Today I'm bragging because we have time to prepare emotionally and mentally for this. We can do all our googling now, we can research and ask questions and buy side-snap onesies beforehand.
And though I'm tired and not sleeping well quite yet, I am thankful for the time to rest up and prepare to greet our baby girl, ready to help her with whatever our next steps are.

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Clara and Family

"Welcome to Holland" by Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Sistine Chapel, Gondolas. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After several months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go.
Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland!”
“Holland?” you say. “What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for Italy. I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine, and disease. It’s just a different place.
So, you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy.
But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around. You begin to notice that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. And Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that experience will never, ever, ever, go away. The loss of that dream is a very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.