"We just want her to be healthy." I feel it's a fairly common thing for a soon-to-be-parent to say about their little one on the way. Can anyone mean it to the extent that a parent who has lost a child means it or wish for it with their entire being in the way they can? Not that it's a competition or that it even matters who means it more. I guess I just mean that it's so more than a routine cliche when I say it, and the perspective and significance of what's important regarding health and life in general is so enhanced because of having Miles.
Yes, my biggest hope these days is that our baby girl will be healthy. It's a complicated wish that I have so little control over but that I hold out hope can still happen for her and for us.
Yet I hate the comment. I feel that it's too simplified. Yes, I hope that she's healthy. Lord, please watch over her health. Lord, please let us keep her. Yet...the state of her health will be what it will be. We will love, adore, and care for her no matter where on the spectrum her health falls.
But here's why I don't like the comment...it makes it sound like we only want healthy babies--as if Miles' health problems were his fault instead of just a wildly unlucky fluke that he (and we) fought so hard for months to combat. Of course, I desperately wish that Miles' health had been better. I wish that he was able to live a healthy life with heart problems or that he had never had health problems at all. But we loved him, loved him, loved him and he wasn't healthy. It's not like him being unhealthy ended up changing anything at all except that we lost him. Ultimately he was perfect, perfectly him--just as our little girl will be perfectly her.
And so it's loaded. I just want our baby girl to be healthy, and Miles' health problems didn't make him any less perfect or any less loved. And that's that.
I don't think it makes you (or anyone) sound like they ONLY want HEALTHY babies. I think we all pray and hope our child will be healthy, but I do think that people who haven't been down your road, stood beside someone who has, or cared for a child with health problems say it without realizing how much more other people REALLY WISH for a healthy child. To be honest, before I worked as a NICU nurse, I never questioned that a child I bore wouldn't be healthy. Now it's what I pray for all the time.
ReplyDeleteAndrew and I actually have had this SAME conversation. I am not condemning anyone who says it, and we pray it as well for ourselves as well as you; but I hate the phrase. I understand where you are coming from.
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