Medical Mama-Ness: Sorrowful Yet Always Rejoicing

One foot here, another foot there.

How we walk — it’s a bit of a balancing act, isn’t it? A bit of an awkward dance in a minefield.

Jolting, yet fluid. Slippery, yet steady. Unexpected potholes, but given with Sovereign purpose.

The sun rose with a crying little girl in my lap, her alligator tears a result of the effects of her new seizure medication. And as I comforted her, another one of our sweet little bundles of joy came around the corner with a quiet stream of tears running down her cheeks and a pouty lip bulging out where her big smile usually resides. Her scar was itchy. Well, one of her scars — the one that spans the length of her chest, there from surgeries which have helped sustain, but not fully heal, her broken heart.

 I gathered up the alligator-teared girl in my arms and reached for the scar cream to rub on another daughter’s chest. As I squirted the cream out of the tube, my glance shifted, and I witnessed my own scars — those reminders of a horribly tragic accident last year and the hard days that have followed it.

We walk hardness and we walk hope. We walk in the things of ordinary days and sunrises and we walk in the things of long silences and dark nights. We walk in excursions to the park. We walk in countless trips to the operating room. We walk in bows and bubbles and childhood joys. We walk in catheterizations and feeding tubes and electrodes stuck to chests.

We walk in the recognition that our lives look nothing like we thought they would.

The becoming of a mama and the becoming of a medical mama happened in the same instant for me.

The sheer joy and magnificent anticipation of looking into little eyes that you were made to love. The agony and anxiety of fragile and foggy futures and a journey to be forged and bonds to be formed. They mingle — the sheer joy and utter agony, in all the strangest and most glorious of ways.

Hospitals. Therapies. Fatigue. Despair. Endurance. Growth. Perspective. Lament.

We walk here. In the sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. And yet we long for There, where weeping is no more. And while we journey, part of being a medical mama is living this conundrum. Such deep joys to watch them grow, such anguish to see them struggle.

But we are with them. They are not doing this alone and without. And we are so much better because they are with us. And therein lies the treasure.

And His very name testifies that He is with us — we are not doing this alone and without. And we are so much better because He is with us. And we are so much better because He gave us each other. And therein lies the treasure.

These scars, the ones easily seen and the ones well-disguised — He uses every scar to remind that He is the One who writes our stories, and He is the One who heals every wound.

God’s love is meteoric,
his loyalty astronomic,
His purpose titanic,
his verdicts oceanic.
Yet in His largeness
nothing gets lost;
Not a man, not a mouse
slips through the cracks.

– Psalm 36:5-6, The Message

This mama-ness and this medical mama-ness — somehow, the hardness and the ease, the grief and the joy all bear testimony to one true and lasting thing that gives breath and life to all the places we walk: grace.

Underneath are the Everlasting Arms.