Heart Shift and Motherhood

As I sit down to write this, it is incredible for me to reflect and realize that it has been only two years since what was probably the lowest point in my life. It is only two years since I was a broken, sobbing, wretched, wasted mess on my bedroom floor, curled up and crying in the darkness of approximately 2:00AM. My 6-month-old baby boy was crying again in the middle of the night and I didn’t know what to do. My older son was two at the time and brought home a new virus every week from daycare to transmit to his baby brother by way of his very adorable but highly infectious hugs and kisses. My first son didn’t get his first stuffy nose until he was well older than six months. In contrast, by six months old, my younger son had had enough fevers for me to know his Tylenol dose off by heart and I could draw it up in the dark. He’d already had one visit to the emergency room with wheezing and needed puffers on a regular basis to help him breathe without effort; and when he saw me coming at him with the saline spray and the nasal aspirator to suck the snot out of his nose, he actually smiled because he anticipated some relief! It was nothing serious or life threatening, and as a former pediatric emergency room nurse, I know how blessed I am to say that. He was a healthy, normal baby boy, who just happened to live with an older normal healthy toddler boy who went to daycare and spent all day long sharing toys and swapping spit with a bunch of other normal healthy kids. It was just germs, but it was killing me.

The recurrent sicknesses and stuffy noses meant that my baby son couldn’t breathe well, and if he couldn’t breathe well then he couldn’t feed well, and if he couldn’t feed well then he couldn’t sleep well. And therein lies the crux of the matter. My baby wasn’t sleeping, and this simple fact was completely taking me out. Not only was it physically debilitating, but it was single handedly eroding any self confidence I had as a mother, and that drained any emotional or mental reserves or capacity I had left to cope with my baby crying yet again in the middle of that fateful night.

You see, it wasn’t supposed to be like this… I had a plan. I’m a planner. I read the parenting books. My husband even read the parenting books. And we even put what they said into practice! We had a sleep-training program. And a routine. And we stuck to it. We vowed to stick to the plan, because it had all already worked once before with our older son… It worked like a charm! We put him to bed, he cried for a bit, he fell asleep, and Voila! After a couple of weeks, he slept through the night. So, I was supposed to be good at this. I’d done it before. I was supposed to be a good mom. I was strong. I could do this. I’d done it before. I had a plan…

You can make many plans, but the Lord’s purpose will prevail. Proverbs 19:21 NLT