The Gifts of Today

This morning I was tired. Yesterday the Monkeys were off school due to no heat in the building. I'm not used to having them both home. This following the ice delay the previous day, which had canceled school for the preschooler. Add frustration because Monkey1 had no idea where she had taken off her glasses -- in the house somewhere -- and school mornings have no extra time to allow turning the house inside out to search for things. So after I dropped off both Monkeys at school, cutting back through the church to get to my parked car, as usual I dodged into the tabernacle chapel. I sat there and cried. I was tired and discouraged. I needed something.

At home, a joyful email greeted me from the woman I had asked to be this baby's godmother.

I took a shower and a nap.

A surprise package came from my mom with a wooly cover-up to bridge the gap in my winter coat that can't zip closed (and hasn't for several months).

At grade school pick-up I saw and had a chance to talk with a friend I haven't seen in a few weeks. I expressed to her my bafflement and distress over my OB practice's attitude toward my repeated preference to VBAC for this baby. The doctors were saying okay, but seemed to be setting so many conditions on it, generalizations not even particularly related to me, my present condition or my history. I just changed practices a month ago, so as to be able to deliver at the hospital two miles from our house, but that hospital's policies and statistics were not looking too friendly to VBAC's either.

My friend understood; she was over forty when she had her two children (same years that mine were born). "It was like the doctors saw 'C-section' tattooed on my forehead," she recalled. "Unfortunately health care providers do not have your best interest as their primary interest. It would be nice, but we often can't get someone that we see eye to eye with." And then she pointed out all the ways that my husband and I are attempting to stack the deck in our favor and get around the doctors and hospital: taking a Bradley class, seeking out a birth doula, planning to do most of the laboring at home, and living just two miles away from the hospital is convenient to our intentions as well. She pointed out too that while I was not thrilled with the two OB's I had met at the practice this pregnancy, half the staff were midwives, unlike most practices in the area, and they will have a bit different attitude; to them, the OB's are the surgical backup. (My next few appointments will be with midwives, now that I've been accepted into the practice.) Her words were so encouraging.

So thank you Lord for the gifts of today. I cried out, and you answered me!