Dallas Days
I may be a count or two off, but we have somewhere around eight “Dallas Days,” left until we deliver our fourth child. Dallas Days are what we call our four hour round trip treks to our high-risk specialist appointments in Dallas every one/two weeks.
It registered to me this most recent Dallas Day how much I’ve cherished visits with my husband and kids to the midwife during our previous pregnancies, including this one up to our 20 week visit. The peace and calm, the smell of fresh coffee, the worship music on the speakers, the kid laughter in the waiting room.
This past Dallas Day, I figured out my way through the entire hospital by myself in between specialist appointments, while my husband trekked back to the coffee shop I left my ENTIRE PURSE at, only to realize in the hospital parking garage, forty minutes later that I had done so.
The hallway that leads to the elevator that takes us up to our specialist’s suite smells like jasmine. It’s right in front of the oncology hallway, and I often catch glimpses of folks in masks going to their radiology appointments.
It registered to me that I love the smell of jasmine- I diffused it daily for a week straight the week I had my third baby. Jasmine is my birth scent. I hope it stays that way in my olfactory memory.
I adore our maternal-infant specialist, she is truly a gift from God. If it weren’t for her, our baby wouldn’t be here kicking around in me today.
Yet, hand in hand with that adoration is a loss.
The waiting room at the MFI is quiet enough to hear a pin drop. There is a sign about getting your flu shot and your TDAP and a COVID protocol binder on a corner table.
The crunchy mom in me stopped stressing about those after the first visit, and now, I wait my turn testing my 20/40 vision trying to read the pamphlets next to the intake window about genetic screening, family planning, and other such high-risk topics, until the sweet nurse calls me back with a gentle, “Mrs. Price?”
Kids aren’t allowed, but this past visit, a sweet baby boy who I’m fairly positive had down syndrome sat beside me on his mama’s lap, wearing an adorable outift-set depicting little Santas and milk and cookies, and I couldn’t help but talk gibberish to him and gaze into his humungous brown eyes as he sighed and smiled back at me.
It registered to me that I don’t actually sleep the night before a Dallas Day, subconsciously, my mind is on high, high alert, silently preparing to see the worse pop up on the sonography screen, even though for the past eight weeks, our baby’s scans have been miraculously improving. The night of and the day after, I am beyond tired, my body finally releasing all the stress it’d been apparently storing up for the fourteen days between visits (hence leaving my purse in the coffee shop).
I wonder now, will I ever function in life again not feeling like every rug is going to be ripped out from under my feet? I don’t mean to feel that way, but I realize I do feel that way.
Visits to the city don’t hold nearly as much mystery to me anymore, even though it does highlight a place of promise…
In between appointments, I put it on the calendar to go to storage and get out the baby basinet and changing table mat, but I just can’t get myself to do it…I’m too anxious. This nesting season is just not the same, because I spend my energy preparing for Dallas Days.
“Do not fear, for I am with you;
do not be afraid, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you; I will help you;
I will hold on to you with my righteous right hand.”
God, how to I dispel my anxious heart? Because I’m quaking in my Birkenstocks. Does not being afraid look like deep cleaning the baby bed? Is your help and strength the little energy I have left to cook dinner and teach my children their debriefed schoolwork?
I am not angry at God, nor do I mean to question His righteousness, I am simply…asking for a friend…err, myself.
Really though- doesn’t anyone out there have similar questions?
Surely, I’m not the only person reading Isaiah 41:10, coming away and wondering, “Okay then, show me how God! Show me the strength and the help! Show me the righteous right hand! Pick me up, help me forward! Show me how to be brave!”
It’s not just me, right?
I used to love being that friend that could give out advice when going through hard times. I felt like I could see through the fog to the other side of the storm, pulling my friend's hand a little to the left so they could catch a glimpse of clarity from the new perspective I was offering them.
Interestingly, I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like Riley from Disney Pixar’s Inside Out 2, who is aging out of childhood and into pre-teen years, and her previous main emotion, Joy, has an epiphany that maybe, to grow up, Riley needs more than Joy to run her life and shape her beliefs and perspective.
I don’t feel like that mature friend that could fix you a cup of coffee and let you pour your heart out, feeling the Holy Spirit lead me to a verse that made all the sense and shed hope and light. I can picture those days, but they’re gone.
I feel that I’m just that comfortably silent friend now.
“I listen and I don’t judge,” like the goofy TikTok trend says.
I don’t feel somber, I don’t feel impenetrable, but I do have this sense that there’s not much I could ever say to pour wisdom into the life of a friend anymore.
Somehow, this experience has just broken a part of me. Maybe it’s just for a season, but I just have one of those feelings that just like Riley’s childlike innocence and joy was replaced by anxiety and envy, I’m maturing into a character that’s come too close to the precipice of the reality of death in a way that leaves an incredibly deep scar.
I’ve entered a club that I didn’t ask to join. In fact, I deeply prayed to never enter the speakeasy of pregnancy trauma so-help-me-God, but here I am. I’m jitterbugging in the hidden confines, sipping on bitter herbs, when all I crave is the taste of warm waiting rooms and fetal doppler monitors.
Lord, Jesus, I trust that someday, I won’t be so afraid to be a part of this club. Today, I’m not there, but someday, maybe I will be.
