The Hardest Part of the Journey…

So this is a Blog I have been meaning to write for a long time. It will probably be the hardest blog I have every written and the longest with a little random rambling. This will be the first time I have said this out loud in front of people other than my Cleft Community and finally after two years I can talk about it with anyone. I have my box of tissues, you better grab yours.

So I always get questions from other moms about… how did you feel when you found out? What happened the next few weeks? How did you feel leading up to delivery? I think these are all important questions and the hardest part of the Journey personally. I think you are overcome with emotions, on top of being pregnant and hormonal and you just don't know how to sort through them. Or if what your feeling is normal, horrible, or just plain crazy. So I am going to talk about how I felt leading up to Adley getting here after finding out she was going to have a cleft.

So in the weeks leading up to finding out about Adleys Cleft. Life was good, I was having a baby girl, and she would wear huge bows, I would dress her up, and buy her lots of shoes, she was going to be "Perfect"! I was headed to the doctor for an ultrasound…

So the doctor is there with the wand on my baby bump messing with her trying to get her hands out of her mouth, and she looked and looked and never once did the words that were fixing to come out of her mouth cross my mind. NEVER in a million years did I think I was going to hear something like this, I mean honestly no one does unless you have already been there before. She pulls the wand off for a minute and tells me "Brittany I am 90% sure your baby is going to have a cleft lip." She kept telling me "it will be ok, and we needed to go double check with a Maternal Fetal Medicine Doctor". I really don't think those words registered in my head for at least 2 min and then I just cried, and cried, and cried until I could hold it together long enough to walk out of the office then I got in the car and cried some more. And the 40 min car ride home was some more crying. . The girls in the office hugged me, my grandmother hugged me, she held my hand when I called my husband, he told me it was going to be ok, even when he got home and hugged me NOTHING and I mean NOTHING at all could make it better. I cried 5-10 times a day for the next 6 days. My heart was broken in to a million little pieces. Shattered like glass on the floor. I wasn't going to have that "Perfect" baby that I thought I was going to have a week ago. For 6 days it was the most earth shattering, heartbreaking thought that went through my head every min of each day.

And then, I picked myself up and said "Suck it up buttercup"! You need to get prepared, and which we did, researched Cleft Teams, seen the Maternal Fetal, etc!

BUT, that doesn't mean the heartbreak stopped there. I would still secretly cry, I would cry on my husbands shoulder late at night, I would wake up crying. It is the hardest thing knowing that your child is going to struggle, knowing that life in the womb is perfect now but when they get here they could struggle to feed for weeks or months until surgery. That your child will face the most difficult challenges of being bullied in school later in life, being made fun of, being left out, etc. Knowing that your child will hurt or have their feelings hurt at one point is heart wrenching.

Then, comes all the other emotions. I will write all the questions I secretly asked myself in the weeks leading up to her delivery. I didn't share these questions with others because I thought I was crazy and a horrible person to ask myself any of these in the first place.

Will I love her face? Will I think she is beautiful? Will I be scared when I see her? What will my family say? Will others just say she is beautiful to make me feel better? Will others stare at her? Will I be comfortable with sharing her pictures? Will I hide her face? How will I tell others that we know she is going to be born with a cleft? Do I take newborn pictures? Do I keep these pictures locked away? Why my baby? What did I do to deserve this? What did she do to deserve this?

YEP, thats right everything a mother should never think, I thought out of pure fear! I beat myself up over and over for thinking these things. When I was home alone I would sit in her room and hold her stuff and just cry because I thought what a horrible person I am for asking myself these questions, for even thinking these thoughts in my head. HOW COULD HER MOTHER THINK THESE??? Well I am here to say it happened because I was scared to death, no matter how prepared I was, no matter the amount of support I had. No matter how much research I had done. I was SCARED and it is completely normal to have crazy irrational thoughts when you are in a situation like this. I no longer beat myself up over it. I understand it was my brain dealing with the situation if you will say.

 When my water broke and I was going to the hospital I could feel my heart beating I was more scared about meeting her than I was labor and delivery….

AND THEN….

Adley made her grand entrance into this world, they laid her on my chest and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. She stole my heart, and my fear. There was nothing that little girl couldn't do. She crushed that feeling a being scared into millions of little pieces. I didn't care what others thought about her and I wanted to shout from the roof top and give away pictures to everyone I seen of my little girl! That right, My PERFECT little girl, that would play dress up, wear huge bows, have lots of shoes! All of those she has done! The moment I held her she stole my world, and all those questions from before didn't matter. She was PERFECT. 



Note: I quote "Perfect" in here a lot because its something that has a new definition to me. Its so hard for me to deal with choosey parents, parents who just aren't satisfied until they have that girl, or boy. Parents who are upset when they find out its the opposite sex of what they want. Parents who don't understand that gender, or anything else they want "selfishly" is NOT the definition of perfect. God gives you the perfect child, or children for you. Do not question it or try and change it because you will one day see his reasoning. It may not be what you thought it was going to be, but he taught me a big lesson with Adley. I have made relationships with other moms, surgeons, doctors, that I would have never made if I didn't have Adley. I would not chose to change one thing about her, she is the perfect child, and the perfect child for us.