Inconceivable (34 page)

“Aren’t they blue? Paul and Shannon both have blue eyes. I think that means his will be blue too.”

“I wonder what shade of blue they are.”

“Haven’t we gotten a picture?”

“Not since September. I hope we’ll get a Christmas card or something.”

“Can we ask for one?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to overstep.”

One afternoon in November I was driving the kids back from school when I stopped to collect the mail from our box. Mixed in with the bills and holiday catalogs was a royal blue envelope with the Morells’ return address.

“Finally! A picture of my Little Man!”

The envelope was stiff in my hand. I ripped it open and flung the envelope to the floor of the car.

“No, it’s a card. A card with a picture?”

The front of the card featured an adorable picture of the entire Morell family. I squinted at the tiny baby curled up in the middle. I could barely see his face. The caption read:

A New Baby is the Beginning of All Things.
Wonder, Hope & A Dream of Possibilities.

“Is this a birth announcement?”

Inside the card was a picture of him captioned.

Logan Savage Morell…

9–24–09…5 lbs 3oz…18 inches…

Welcomed Home with Love

Paul, Shannon, Ellie and Megan.

I couldn’t look at it. I dropped the card to my lap and drove to our house. Drew got out of the car and grabbed his gear from the back of the van.

“Aren’t you coming, Mom?”

“I just need to read this. I’ll be right in.”

As the door to the house shut behind him, I looked down at the birth announcement.

This is good, Carolyn. They are celebrating Logan’s birth and their blessings. This is good!

Good? How was this good? This should have been our announcement. We should have been the happy family with the fruits of my labor curled up on my lap. I looked at my lap. My C-section wasn’t healed. Dr. Read’s estimate of when my milk would dry up was wrong. I was still leaking.

Get over it, Carolyn. He is not yours. This is the way it’s going to be.

I wiped my tears with my sleeve and got out of the car. Dinner had to be made, homework needed to be done, and MK needed a bath.

Onward, Carolyn. Onward.

That night in the rocking chair, when I read to Mary Kate, I asked myself where God was in this. If God was everywhere and in everything, was he in that birth announcement that had stung me so? Every day since February 16, 2009, I had muttered a futile prayer.
Please help me.
Sometimes I had begged for God’s help with my head buried in the loo with morning sickness, or at night when reflux woke me, or when Logan wouldn’t stop kicking. Other times that plea had come to me as I drove home from a prenatal appointment in anguish over our inevitable loss. When I felt no relief, when
the agony persisted, I’d asked myself:
Who am I praying to? Who am I begging? Why won’t God help me?

I know He exists. I’ve felt his powerful and unmistakable presence three times in my life. The first time was when I was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia the week Ryan was born. My cough was relentless, and when I asked the nurse for a cough drop, she suggested that I buy some Lifesavers from the vending machines. I dragged myself into the hallway and shuffled toward the vending machines dragging my IV pole. Sean had gone home for the night, so I was on my own, and the vending machines seemed like they were a very long way away. I didn’t think I had the strength to get there.

You’ll be fine.

I heard a voice and felt a firm hand on my back. I trudged steadily, that hand guiding me around the corner, into the waiting room, and to the machines. I retrieved the Lifesavers and found my way to my room, grateful that my companion was right by my side. Back in my room, I turned to thank the nurse and then realized no one was there. Had someone been with me?

You didn’t do that alone.

Eleven years later, I lay in a hospital bed twenty-four hours after the birth of Mary Kate. My red blood cell count was dangerously low, and I’d had a terrible reaction to magnesium sulfate, the only medication that was controlling my alarmingly high blood pressure. Yet I felt that there was someone holding me safely as my bed seemed to spin around the room. He rubbed my head when a fierce headache stabbed me right between my eyes. I could see Him.

I was there.

I’ve realized that during each of these experiences I was in an altered state, and I used to wonder if maybe I needed to be in that state to open my senses to His presence. Either way, now I no longer doubted that He was with me. Why I couldn’t always see God’s presence was a question I couldn’t answer. Was He trying to show
me that He is always there, always close at hand, but that He only reveals Himself when I’m at my most vulnerable?

I didn’t know the answer to that question until last February, when I saw Him the third time. That afternoon, as I lay in bed waiting for the results of my pregnancy test, God revealed Himself to me again. I was sick and weak with a fever and chills, and I’d drifted off to sleep with my phones on my pillow, waiting for the clinic to confirm that I was pregnant. As I dozed off, I felt Him near, but I was confused.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “I’m not sick like the other times.”

There was no answer.

“I don’t need you. I am okay with however this goes. Why are you here?”

Nothing but silence.

I woke knowing something wasn’t right. Then I heard Sean coming up the stairs to our bedroom, the door opened, and our journey began.

There were countless times during my pregnancy when I felt abandoned. I wanted to be sheltered and cared for. Despite my weaknesses and doubts, God was there. Now I realize that He revealed Himself to me in that moment because He knew I was headed for a potential spiritual disaster. If I didn’t maintain my faith, I would lose myself in sorrow. Even though I couldn’t always see Him or feel Him, He walked my path with me. The night we learned of the mistake, I couldn’t imagine surviving this heartbreak and coming out the other side okay. On that day, when it all began, He was reminding me not to lose faith.

He guided me to do the right thing. But now I needed God more than ever as I struggled to let Logan go.

Shannon had sent me a birth announcement for Logan at the same time and in the same way that she had announced him to her extended family and distant friends. This was what stabbed at my soul. I was now a bystander in his life.

When I got back downstairs, I looked at the picture of Logan in the birth announcement. He wore the outfit I had tucked into the treasure chest for him. His feet were perfect, and his fingers were long. He was too young to smile, but he was surrounded by the happy faces of his family. This was an announcement that my job was done. I had to let Logan go and try to find a way to feel good about that. I saw Logan in this beautiful picture. He was healthy, well cared for, and clearly adored by his parents. Who was to say I could love him any better than they did?

I had to accept the reality of this situation. This was things as they were, and I could not hope for more. Carefully I cut the picture from the birth announcement and placed it in the frame I’d bought.

God, I feel you now. I feel your eyes on me. I have done your will. Please be merciful and grant me peace.

SEAN

No strings attached. That was our approach to giving Logan to Paul and Shannon. I believe that a gift with conditions is not a gift at all. Throughout the pregnancy, we consistently communicated to Paul and Shannon that we would defer to them on deciding when we could see Logan. That just made sense to us. I couldn’t picture calling the Morells and announcing, “I will be at your home next Saturday to spend time with your son.” We waited to be invited when they felt it was right. Carolyn and I believed it was the proper approach. Paul and Shannon needed to determine what was best for their family. There was no road map for either of us, so Carolyn and I challenged ourselves to find compassion for Paul and Shannon in their struggle to find the best way to handle this moving forward.

On my first day back at work after the birth, my assistant Laura wanted to know when I thought I would see Logan again.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re happy to see him whenever they will let us. We need to leave it up to them.”

“I’m sure you’ll see him soon,” said Laura brightly.

Little did I know that many people would ask that same question.

Nearly every client I met with wanted to know, and so did everyone I bumped into at the office kitchen. Before Logan was born, people often asked if we would really want to see the baby once we had handed him over to the other family. I understood that they wanted to protect us and believed that seeing him would be a painful reminder of our loss. I think what other people really wanted to ask was, “Don’t you want to forget this ever happened?” How could we pretend this did not happen? Why would we really want to do that? A beautiful child was involved, and this had been a life-changing process.

As the days turned to weeks and then to months without seeing Logan, I often looked at the photograph of our time with him in the hospital. Carolyn had placed it in a silver frame in our living room. We are all frozen in that moment when Carolyn, myself, Drew, Ryan, and Mary Kate bonded with Logan. Relaxed, happy, and excited were the emotions running through me in that picture. The “family” picture taken during that visit will be the only one of its kind. Logan will grow and change, but our most powerful image will be the baby we held in our hands on September 25, 2009.

I envisioned ten years down the road, driving to a ball field and parking my car in a spot where I could watch Logan play from a distance. Maybe I would catch him smiling, or interacting with his friends, or walking away from the game with his parents describing a play he’d made, or crying about a tough loss. The other image I have is of Carolyn and me sneaking into a church on Logan’s wedding day to watch with pride as he gets married. I see us doing these things in a manner that draws no attention to us but honors our love for him. Seeing him in person participating in his life would be a
thrill. There would be satisfaction in those moments, a satisfaction that Carolyn and I would share and treasure.

I hoped that time and reflection would give me perspective on this. Carolyn and I had no idea how our relationship with Logan would unfold or how it was supposed to unfold. I drew inspiration from a picture I once saw of Mother Teresa in an orphanage in which she has her arms stretched to welcome the children. I was confident that Carolyn and I would always be ready, with our arms open, to welcome Logan at any time we were blessed with a visit.

I have one other vision I treasure that comes to me when I think of Logan’s future and our relationship with him. I have imagined a day eighteen years from now when we hear a knock on the door. We answer, and a handsome young man stands in front of us and simply says, “Thank you for giving me life.” If he grows up with gratitude in his heart, we could ask for nothing more. Godspeed, Logan.

CAROLYN

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around and we still had no firm plans to see Logan, Sean started joking about showing up at the Morells’ house with a turkey. Needless to say, I didn’t think this was such good idea. As Christmas neared, I was beginning to wonder if we’d ever see him. Shortly before Christmas, we finally set a date. The Morells would bring their whole family to visit on December 29, just about three months after he was born.

It was a sunny day, and the landscape of northwest Ohio was blanketed with snow. I ran around making sure everything was perfect. I cleaned the playroom, dusted off some of MK’s old baby toys, and straightened our tired and very dry Christmas tree.

As I rearranged ornaments that had fallen from the brittle branches, I came across the impression of Logan’s foot that our nurse had made for us in the delivery room and moved it to a more prominent place on the tree. I wondered how big his feet were now.

The Morells were supposed to arrive at 3:00
P.M
., but they were running a little late. It was nerve-racking for Sean and me to wait for Logan’s arrival. By 3:15, Sean was peering out our bedroom window with the excitement of a child awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus. Three-thirty came and went, and then 3:45 and 4:00.

At 4:00 Sean decided to change his luck and went downstairs to look out different windows. Soon he was pacing the family room, worrying that they’d been in a car accident or had decided not to come. I was perched on the couch in the living room, staring out the window for the first sign of Shannon’s van. We couldn’t even be in the same room. Like Sean, I was nervous to see my Little Man. I was afraid of falling apart.
You won’t do that.
I was frightened that he wouldn’t come to me.
He’s not old enough to have a fear of strangers.
I was petrified that the Morells wouldn’t show.
They’d never do that.
I knew they were getting closer.
Could I feel him?

“They’re here! They’re here!” Sean yelled and sprinted to my side.

I saw Shannon’s car come around the curve of our road and creep down our street until they made the turn into our driveway.

“You okay?” Sean said.

“I’m fine. I’ll be cool. No worries,” I said.

When I opened the door, I saw Paul holding the most beautiful baby boy, bundled head to toe under a blanket in his car seat. Paul came in and placed the carrier on the kitchen counter as Shannon guided the twins into our home. Paul uncovered Logan and pulled his hat off. My Little Man had huge chunky cheeks, a belly that looked well fed, and the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen on a baby.

His eyes are crystal clear blue!

I had an answer.

I didn’t want to look too desperate. I understood that this couldn’t be comfortable for Paul and Shannon. I followed Shannon into the family room, and we all sat down while Paul remained behind to
change Logan’s diaper. We made chitchat about the drive, until Paul walked in holding Logan. He came right to me with his son. I stood up and reached out, and without any hesitation, Paul placed Logan right into my arms.