A Story About My Mom
My mom and dad were married in November and the following November, they had their first child. Child number 2 followed 15 months later. Somewhere along that time, my mom began bringing a friend of hers to church with them. This woman’s husband did not support his wife going to church and he began to threaten my mom, and when she became pregnant again, he told her he would harm her baby if she continued taking his wife to church. Mom felt she should keep bringing her friend with her, but she was afraid that this man would make good on his threats, so she decided not to take her anymore.
Part way through her pregnancy, my mom began to suffer with toxemia. She was taken to the hospital and labor was induced to save them. My mother died before the baby could be born. The baby was already descended into the birth canal, so a normal caesarian was not possible. Instead, the doctor cut her from below and delivered the baby that way. Surprisingly, the birth of the baby caused the toxemia to remedy itself, and my mother recovered. However, the baby was too premature and didn’t survive. My mom felt this was a punishment on her for not trusting God to protect her and staying obedient to her commitment to helping her friend go to church. My mom was not recovered enough to attend the funeral for the baby who was named Sarah Jane.
It wasn’t long before mom became pregnant again. This time, she delivered a baby boy 12 weeks before her expected due date. Little Paul arrived with cerebral palsy because of his premature birth. A year later, Mom again delivered early, and this time little Danny lived only 1 day. Again an early delivery, Jonathan lived ½ a day, and again James lived 2 days. Now my mom learned, after so many months of pregnancy, she must go to bedrest, or she would deliver too early.
The next baby was me, and I was full term, with no health issues. Next was a boy, no issues. Then another boy, 3 weeks early and needed a transfusion, but lived. Next, a girl, 2 weeks early, also needed a transfusion and perfectly healthy after it.
After that, she had a miscarriage at somewhere around 16 weeks. The baby delivered intact within the amniotic sack and she held it whole in her hand. Whenever she would hear anyone say that an unborn baby was just a blob of tissue, my mom knew that was not true. She would rise up and claim very loudly, “I held an unborn baby in my hand—and HE had fingernails!!”
It was six years before they had another child, and mom and dad always joked they should have named the baby of the family after a Chinese friend of theirs, Wat Whet Wong.
I don’t know when my mom found out that her pregnancy problems were due to malpractice on the part of her ob-gyn doctor who had assumed she would never recover from the toxemia and had therefore never sutured where he had cut her for the caesarean. So as soon as the baby she was carrying became too heavy for her damaged body to support its weight, it would spontaneously deliver.
I honor my mom because she respected life so much that she was willing and joyful to go through so much to bring life to her children.
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