Dear Bluebird,

Life is unexpected. Some days are hard, the hours trudging one after another. Waiting can feel as long and heavy as a northern winter. But one unexpected day, it will all change. The train will roll into the station and the answer descend.

And there you’ll be. 

You see, even though I had been longing and praying, my soul asking, I still didn’t expect to get the positive pregnancy test twenty-one months after receiving the first one. It wasn’t the timing I had pictured. Your dad and I were having perhaps the most hellish week of our lives, and as I stared at those darkening lines, I struggled to comprehend what God was doing. 

As shock blossomed into comprehension into joy, it was quickly met by fear. Terror of loving and losing again. My own dread mirrored in your daddy’s eyes, “I couldn’t stand to go through it again.” This whole journey into parenthood was supposed to be simple until it wasn’t. 

The first few weeks with you stretched like empty years – each nauseated day a test of my willingness to lay down fear. To trust and to rest. To hold on to the truth that you, just a blur on a sonogram, are no less fragile in the hands of Jesus than I am. That if it is God’s will for you to grow up and belong to me, nothing in all the world can stop it. Sustaining you is no more difficult for Him than sustaining me. Or an Olympic gymnast for that matter. 

But that lesson isn’t easy to accept. It’s nearly impossible to accept. Because you see, there was one that came before you. Another tiny blur, another I loved so deeply. He died like such a fragile thing – a seashell trapped under a pounding surf, a spider’s web caught in the rain, a leaf in a storm. His life ended like one lonely note on a piano, and it’s nearly impossible for me to grasp that this was in God’s perfect control, too. That Raspberry was not some accident, some twist of fate that slipped through God’s hands. Not a single, lonely, forgotten note, but a line in a symphony that I’ll never hear on earth. 

Beyond this earth, we know only joy. We can see the truth. But here and now, it’s difficult to relinquish the sorrow. Hard to believe that the train is coming. 

The night before our appointment I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, my mind replaying that fateful day in a long-ago September, when I listened for a heartbeat that never came. In the morning I went to the doctor’s office and stared out the window, wishing I could go home, preferring a pretend world to the real one. 

Your dad couldn’t come due to a pandemic so once the doctor arrived, we called him over speakerphone. I laid back, gel squeezed onto my stomach, the doppler moved around like a probe searching for a UFO. “The baby’s so tiny,” the doctor started to explain, preparing me for disappointment, “not quite eleven weeks…” 

He searched for a while, and I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t feel anything but the wild beat of my own heart, thinking of you, loving you more than I could bear.  

You’ll learn one day that hope is a powerful emotion. Sometimes we fight for it. Other times it arrives against our will, unbidden and unwilling to be shaken off. Despite weeks of telling myself not to become too attached, hope burned in my heart like an ember trapped beneath ash. As silence stretched, I could nearly see that ember of hope waver – our future hanging in the balance like fire flickering under wind, uncertain if it would be extinguished.

And then – “There’s your kid.” The doctor moved the doppler again and I heard it, the swoosh-swoosh, swoosh-swoosh of your heart, too fast to be my own. Swoosh-swoosh, swoosh-swoosh. It was the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard, a symphony all on its own. 

I cried, tears slipping down my cheeks and onto my face mask. “Do you hear that?” I tried to say to your dad but couldn’t get out the words. The doctor explained instead – That’s the heartbeat. 160 beats per minute. It sounds perfect.

I learned another important lesson after that appointment – there is no singular moment when you can take a full breath. No “arrival” into certainty. Each day comes with what ifs. Nothing in life is guaranteed. Infertility shows us that each new life is a miraculous event. Miscarriage reminds us to grieve the life of even the smallest of hearts. And you, my growing baby? You are the harbinger of lost control. 

Each day you remind me of my dependence on my Creator. That although much of my life is built on the choices I make, so much else is built on those things I can’t control – elements as unreachable as rain and storm, illness and frailty, the cancers we can’t cure. There’s so much freedom in acknowledging the scope of life beyond my control.

Because I don’t have to carry it. 

Hope burns within me, even without sight of the future. Each day I lay a hand on my growing belly and marvel in the miracle of your existence. The miracle of today. And I rejoice in the goodness of God that will endure through tomorrow and the next day and the next. Because He isn’t good for giving me you. He is simply good. No matter what.

Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” – Matthew 11:28