I think what I stressed to them the most (and then to the rest of the family as I told them by turns) in those moments is that I was not making a rash decision to get married to Moses just because we were pregnant, but that when we did get married it would be a well thought out and prayed over occurrence. I'm not sure they were completely convinced.
I made the difficult decision to not stay in Kansas, but to move to Missouri with my older brother's family. We will both be forever grateful for the love and generosity they showed to me and the baby in those next few months.
Whether from pregnancy hormones or from exhaustion or just from the stress of the whole situation, I found myself crying to sleep at least once a week from the time I came back to the US. We tried to talk to each other as much as possible, to hide from the other one how bad things were, and to keep one another encouraged. It worked sometimes, and sometimes the entire conversation would just disintegrate into "I miss you"s back and forth.
It was a long 7 months carrying that little guy alone on this side of the ocean while his dad struggled to make ends meet in Uganda. I found a job, but could only work a few days a week or I would lose my health insurance that I needed to be able to deliver the baby. Carefully I rationed out what I would need to purchase for the baby. A lot of things were purchased second-hand, hand-me-downs that were generously shared, and loving friends and family showered us with gifts for Baby D (as he was affectionately called).
Moses and I had settled on a name, and then a middle name for D, but we kept it a secret until after he was delivered.
After a good after dinner walk one night in early May I went to get up from sitting and felt a pop and then liquid streaming down my legs. Little man was getting ready to make his arrival!
Moses and his mom went to the church and prayed all night for us as my labor wore on. My sister-in-law sent him constant updates on how things were going... but the long and short of it is that they weren't... going... anywhere. Water broke at 8pm; Mom, sister in law, and I went to bed around 930-10 thinking we'll have to go in sometime later. Around 1 am my mom came out and found me sitting on the couch timing contractions. They were about 3min apart at that point and she was like, "Oh my! Let's get you to the hospital!" I calmly walked upstairs and woke up my sister-in-law to go with us. But by the time we got to the hospital they slowed down to 4-5min apart and I wasn't dilated hardly at all. By 6pm the next night I still was not dilated, and starting to run a fever from exhaustion, so they opted for a C-section thinking it might be infection related. When they tried to give me pit it spiked late decels in D's heart rate as well, which I could very easily read on their in room monitor. (never underestimate a nurse to keep nursing, even on herself, even when slightly loopy on a epidural) They turned the monitor so that I "couldn't see it" but I already was asking for different intervention and told them to stop the pitocin. So off to surgery we went.
That was incredibly hard... not having Moses there with me for that. I've never had surgery before or since and it was scary, though I tried very hard not to show it since my Mom was in the OR with me. My sister-in-law was given the job of accompanying Baby D wherever he went. And I wanted no discussion on that topic. I knew they weren't going to come and ask my permission to start anything on him since I'd be coming out of surgery and Moses not being there with him, I put my sister-in-law's Mama Bear skills to work making sure my little one was gonna be safe and cared for.
The post-surgery nurse had compassion on me and took me down to the NICU to visit D before going to my floor (even though she really wasn't supposed to). The torturous amount of time that it took for them to accept my leaving the floor to go and see him was just that... torturous. They hooked up a live facetime feed for me for a little while, but then the battery died on the ipad. And I was done anyway. I wanted D to know that his Mama, the only person he really knew in the world, had not abandoned him to a unit of alarms and strange lights, lack of body warmth, missing my heartbeat, hungry, and confused by this whole big world that he had suddenly been yanked into. Hang sleep and recovery from major surgery, there was an infant that needed me!
Holding and cradling him to my chest was the absolute best feeling I have ever felt in the whole wide world.
It still is, to this day. Though he has grown a lot and Moses does come in a pretty close second on the cuddling front. ;)
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