We’re expecting our first child!
Yes, cue the confetti cannons, fireworks display and tears of joy, all of them worthy of this moment of pure elation from two individuals who became one and are now excited to be a three. That saying, this was a 3-0 win where the score hardly told the whole story. Though I must preface that while this was certainly a backs-against-the-wall, huddled in, hard fought victory, it was not won thanks to a ricochet off the derriere of a defender and two goalmouth scrambles but by a sparkling hat-trick in second half extra time by the Big Guy himself. The story? Here goes.
It started on a fairly inconspicuous morning on September 2. My wife had her usual Kiwi breakfast and me my cup of coffee. We had taken the day off for our first trimester scan. The morning was bright. We had the confetti cannons loaded, ready for launch that weekend to happy smiles from family and friends. The pregnancy had been smooth thus far – a little nausea and a sudden taste for sweet drinks aside, my wife was checking more good boxes than a heavyweight champ.
I went into the scan much like how I’ve approached most important milestones in my life – certain of the best, unaware of the worst. That’s not to say I am a raging optimist, but I will concede that I can be as thick as a concrete slab on occasion. To be fair to me, in this case I was urged on by how well the pregnancy has gone thus far. My wife on the other hand is not me. She had strongly considered the possibility of the worst but hopeful that things will be okay. This is as close to a winning hand as my wife would allow herself to have in most circumstances. I took that.
On hindsight, the events leading to the scan were mostly blur and hazy. What I remember earliest was sitting next to my wife as the doctor tried coaxing our baby into a clearer position. The ‘Nuchal Translucency’ scan is to measure the clear (translucent) space in the tissue at the back of your baby’s neck to assess your developing baby’s risk of having Down Syndrome and some other chromosomal abnormalities, as well as major congenital heart problems. She was running through a list of things that she could see during the first part of the scan. Limbs, check. Brain development, check. Spine, check. Go baby go.
Then, some silence. Followed by more silence. Keep going doctor, baby is doing well right?
Right?
Next thing, like a movie with choppy editing, I found myself sat at her desk as phrases such as ‘Below 3 is normal and your baby’s is 3.95’, ‘Down Syndrome’, ‘Turner’s Syndrome’ and ‘blood test to see what we are dealing with’ started washing over us like a bucket of cold water in winter. The conjunctions and verbs did not matter. Those phrases are like zombies, and you want to keep them as far away from your kid as possible. Here they were, right in the same room as our baby and we were powerless to do anything.
It’s interesting. When you are served with the worst news possible, words become the least valuable commodity in that exchange. What said more than her assurance that she has presided over cases with these readings where it came back all okay (“1 or 2 cases”) was the prolonged silence as she combed the scanner over our baby. The skip in her voice as she relayed what her recommendations were. That painful millisecond of eye contact she avoided when she said the words ‘it is more likely to be Down Syndrome than Turner’s’.
We were told to take a blood test that will confirm or rule out the possibility up to 99%. The ultrasound scan only provided an accuracy of up to 70%. Let me try and put this in language that makes sense to me. 70% is a pretty decent score. I would spend my valuable weekend afternoon watching a movie with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 70% without question. The numbers were really against our little one.
We would need to wait 10-days for the results. Yes, 10 days.
Both of us experienced the moment quite differently. For me, it was like being invited to a high tea but unknowingly ending up in a shark tank as the day’s feed. For my wife it was like seeing her car crash happening in slow motion but being assured that there are air bags but being told at the last moment that, “Sorry miss, your model doesn’t have air bags.”
We were distraught and dismayed naturally. My wife took it worst than I did mainly because I could retreat into a fight or flight survival mode, a state of mind that had served me well during the more distressing seasons of my existence. I can best describe it as strapping a bullet proof vest on my emotions and preparing to take heavy fire. My wife had mostly lived a charmed existence up till this point, something I’ve always appreciated and valued because it tempers the more cynical sides of me but it did not serve her as well during this crisis.
That saying, compared to my more challenging seasons in life, this one had different taste of poison to it. It’s one thing to contend for one’s own life with some cards to play, it’s another to contend for the life of a helpless being with a pretty bad hand. The more accurate depiction is that we had no hand, no cards left to play, we were flayed out in the sun, awaiting our fate. We turned to binges of ‘Midnight Diner’ and ice cream (Inside Scoop’s ‘Cempedak’ and ‘Peanut Butter and Jelly’ the chief comforters) to soothe the days over, to distract us from a 50/50 fate with vastly different repercussions.
Terminating the pregnancy, if we were given the news we did not want, was of course not an option. Even removing the obvious Christian reason, I was never going to do it. Not after my little one raised its hand and waved during the ultrasound. Once you accept a wave, you can never take it back (I have since considered the possibility that it was not a wave but a gesture representation of The Beatles’ 1970 hit ‘Get Back’).
There was really nothing much to do but pray. I don’t want to say this like ‘it’s the last girl in the tuition class who is single so you ask her out’ kind of thing but that we were desperate for a miracle and God was really the only one who could provide it. We prayed as soon as we opened our eyes in the morning and prayed just before we shut it in the night.
Our close friends literally cried with us and called us every day to pray for us, prayed with us and encouraged us. They prayed prayers of comfort to war cries for a miracle for our little one. They did communion with us. They had calls with us to just catch up to get our minds off the wait. They recorded prayers and sent them to us. They sent us articles and stories to encourage us. They contended for a miracle for our little one. Our close friends formed a wall around us and protected us from all sides. We are so grateful for them.
Our families prayed with us. My in-laws very sweetly invited us over, uncharacteristic during this pandemic mainly because my wife was not vaccinated so they preferred to keep a distance, and awkwardly suggested a prayer session with my father-in-law penning his prayer down in a notebook. If you don’t know them, I will tell you this – it was an amazingly sweet gesture. My mom went nuclear positive and started suggesting doctors make mistakes all the time and medical machines are never always serviced properly so readings can be wrong. In hindsight, I wish I had the faith and positivity of my mom because as ridiculous as it sounded to us at the time, she was not far from the truth.
I was hopeful, my wife did not dare hope. I tempered my language, toggling between a very niche space of not giving into despair and putting on the complete cloak of hopelessness when speaking with her. My wife asked me how can I so easily have hope. I told her that if you’ve been in enough hopeless situations, a little hope is better than not having any at all.
I know the language I had used up till this point to describe the less desirable outcome can sound too negatively-slanted and perhaps disrespectful to parents with special needs children but this cannot be further from the truth for both my wife and me. All parents begin this journey wanting their children to be healthy and normal but the love we have for our child is not conditional at all. We took the week to process both possible outcomes. Our very human and fallible nature would of course lean towards God tying everything up in a neat bow for the two of us at the end of the 10 days but we also equally processed the possibility of us having a special needs kid.
I won’t lie, the start of the process was difficult for the two of us, owing mainly to having a metaphorical carpet being pulled from under our whole lives. We were mostly reeling from that. As the days flipped by though, we started coming closer and closer to a place of beauty about having a special needs child. I told my wife that in some moments when I think about our family in the future, our kid in that picture is a special needs child and it looked so beautiful to me. I told my wife that if God’s plan is for us to raise a special needs child then I can’t think of two people more qualified for the job.
We were encouraged by stories of people who raised a child with Down Syndrome and how the whole experience was like a positive atom bomb of happiness and love being detonated in the middle of their lives and their other children’s lives. I don’t want to sound condescending because I really am not, but I truly came to a place of such respect for people who have raised special needs children with love and hope. It’s a thing of such pure beauty in this world where the word ‘love’ is sometimes thrown around so cheaply.
But God had other plans though.
At around 3.45pm on September 13, 11 calendar days and 7 working days after we got the news and submitted for the blood test, my wife burst into my work room while I was on a work call with tears in her eyes. Fearing the worst, I haphazardly got off the call and walked up to her, intending to comfort her that everything will be okay because God has a plan when she showed me the message from the clinic that read …
“Good day, your screening blood test report is low risk. Do you want to know gender?”
And just like that, nonchalantly, we were delivered the news. No screeching ring of the phone. No dramatic build-up or necessary verbal gestures over a call. Just a by-the-way message in mid afternoon from a nurse who has probably presided over hundreds of these tests with low risk results, unaware of the week we’ve had. And with a snap of a finger, God had tied the destiny of our little one back into a neat ribbon and restored the carpet back under our feet. It was both a thing of unbelievable beauty and pristine tidiness. God is indeed good and God was indeed willing to give us that miracle. And so He did.
September 13 was in many ways a culmination of a journey that God brought my wife and me on to land us at this perfect place. From my reservations about being a father, my wife’s mental hurdles regarding unrealistic expectations of her and our slight travails during conception, God managed to bring to attention and answer each of those things for us with sharp, emphatic gestures. It’s been quite an adventure but one I am glad to report, brings about the satisfaction of a happy ending. I say this in a way that encapsulates the entire journey and not to suggest that any outcome besides this would’ve been an unhappy ending.
I think God quite wonderfully brought us to a place where we were assured that any outcome would’ve inevitably been a happy ending. We reminded ourselves that despite the scare at the scan that by all accounts our baby was developing well in all other areas and that no matter what hurdles we would have to jump, we would have provided a refuge of love and protection to our child.
I guess for those of you that do not accept stories of the miraculous without a fistful of salt, I unfortunately have no well-drawn charts, roll of citations or 10-point arguments to offer you. It’s always been a struggle of mine to explain the personal relationship I have with God in a way that satisfies a skeptic’s penchant for not wanting to believe. I know, my wife knows and our child is now well despite all the numbers and statistics working strongly against us. There is a strong emotional connection that is form between you and God when you cry out to him in despair, against the odds of the world and he answers in a way that makes it so clear to you that He hears every word.
The beauty of this miracle that God was willing to do for us is none more perfectly incapsulated than in the smile that returned on my wife’s face the morning after we received the good news. She had asked me if it was a dream, during the harrowing 11-day wait. I had said unfortunately, no. She asked me again on the morning of 14 September if it was a dream. I was so glad that I was able to tell her, “Fortunately, no.”
I’ve taken to challenging myself to sing my little one a Beatles song a day every night before we sleep until birth day. On September 13, I sang ‘The Long and Winding Road’. I had told my wife days earlier that no matter the outcome, I would sing that song on that day anyway …
‘The long and winding road
That leads to your door
Will never disappear
I’ve seen that road before
It always leads me here
Lead me to your door‘
adrianyapck 