Six years ago today my baby girl would have fit neatly into the palms of my hands with room to spare, if only I had been able to touch her.
I birthed her into the world drenched in a fear that soaked straight through a heavy cotton hospital gown. She entered this life through the good work of surgeons skilled with scapulas and the prayers of people all around the globe rising high towards heaven.
C. S. Lewis once wrote an entire book to define the weight of glory, but I saw it spelled out plainly as they laid her bare on a scale and the numbers lit up neon. One pound, eight point six ounces. My daughter was born and she weighed less than six sticks of butter. excerpted from Anchored: Finding Hope in the Unexpected
Time became both fluid and finite. 25 weeks was all the time spent in my womb before she was delivered into an incubator. After that minutes felt like hours and life became measured in heartbeats instead of the secondhand ticking around the face of the clock.
It was all fleeting.
It was all fragile.
I was sure that every moment with her would be my last.
And here we are six years later.
Our days are filled with kindergarten homework and piano lessons and occupational therapy and impromptu stuffed animal tea parties.
I could not see it then, back when everything was all charts and rounds and words like “critical condition.” I couldn’t see any sort of future outside of those cement sided hospital walls and now my every single day looks just exactly like joy, a fountain flowing deep and wide.
We don’t ever leave a public outing without someone stopping us to say that she made their day. She exudes the most cheerful spirit and it is captivating, the way her charm radiates from her into the hearts of strangers.
Everything about our experience – her traumatic early birth, the subsequent 156 day NICU stay, all of the times we almost lost her – it changed my life.
But so did every moment after, the ones in which I am privileged to dwell in the delight that comes from being her mother.
It was the living text of Isaiah 61:3 with my every breath; beauty for ashes and joy for morning and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.
She is six years old today and our story just keeps getting better.
Not a single day has passed in six entire years that I have not felt honored to steward it.
Earlier this week a woman reached out to me on instagram because she had just had her baby at 24 weeks and someone had given her a copy of my book. I wrote Anchored for anyone who needed an infusion of hope and humor but I have a tender spot for the NICU moms who read it and write me afterwards, their babies names all listed down the side of my journal.
November is when Scarlette’s birthday falls and it also happens to be National Prematurity Awareness Month.
To celebrate and honor both, I’d love to send a few of you a kindle copy of Anchored: Finding Hope in the Unexpected. It’s just 99¢ right now so that’s right in my budget 😉 Just leave your name and email in the comments below and I’ll send it to the first five commenters!
And I would especially love if you would celebrate with us by passing on the message of Anchored, either by sharing this post with a friend, sending a 99¢ copy of Anchored as a gift to a loved one (just click “give as a gift” on Amazon), or donating a copy to your local NICU.
Thank you, for the gift of community you have so graciously bestowed upon me over the years. I am so grateful.
And now I’m off to take cupcakes to a room full of kindergartners, in a moment I never saw coming six years ago, this hope that has changed to glad fruition.
