January

In the valleys, may I lift my hands in worship to the One who never leaves our side.

Have you ever been in a season when it seems like absolutely nothing is going the way it’s supposed to? It’s one thing or another, back to back, with absolutely no space to breathe.

My youngest daughter was born in January. The day we brought her home was the first real snow of the season in Illinois and I vividly remember looking outside the window to watch the white start to cover the buildings around the hospital. Our hospital stay was short; mostly because Eden wasn’t allowed as a visitor to meet her sister because of all the viruses that were making their rounds. I looked at Brenden shortly after Cana’s birth and told him I couldn’t fathom staying in the hospital an extra night and I wanted the entire family to be together.

Eden was born to be a big sister. Her excitement, her gentleness, her tone of voice when talking to Cana. However, she was two and a half at the time, which means all of her desires to hold and snuggle her baby sister came with the snot and cough of a daycare-attending toddler. Only a few days after Cana’s birth, we realized Cana was sick. At seven days old, Cana was coughing, sputtering, and sounded congested. At the time, my biggest fear was Cana getting sick and I remember the fear that gripped me that we would end up at the ER (which spoiler alert, we did… more than once.)

This all came at the same time that Illinois was experiencing insanely cold weather, with the temperature feel hitting below zero multiple days in a row.

If there was a punch card at our pediatrician’s office, we probably would have gotten at least two filled out in the first two months of Cana’s life. Weight checks, supplemented feeds, lung checks. At one month old, my baby was only six pounds. She wore preemie clothes to her baptism.

At five pm every single night, I would sit in bed and be overwhelmed by the doom of my baby not being healthy. My mom instinct knew something was wrong. I spent so much time in steam showers, trying to suck snot out of her nose, rocking her and shushing her. I’d watch her breathing and just know that it was wrong. Trying to nurse her and ending in tears that it just wasn’t working. Seeing her little body gasping, wheezing, struggling. I spent a lot of my time youtubing videos of retractions, tracheal tugs, and “how do healthy newborns breathe”. Every time I thought, “something’s wrong”.

When our doctor told us she probably had laryngomalacia, I spent hours on google. He set us up with a feeding therapist where Brenden started to give Cana a bottle and was immediately told to stop. The next month was a whirlwind of a swallow study, learning how to feed Cana so she didn’t aspirate, finding out that her congestion was probably feeding related, having to fortify bottles with formula to help her get the calorie intake she needed. The swallow study was easily one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to witness. I had to give up nursing and switch to pumping, which broke my heart into smithereens. When you’re worried about your baby’s life every minute of the day, it’s hard to think about anything else.

If you ask me how I handled those four months, on the outside it might have seemed like I was okay. If you ask Brenden, he will probably have a completely different perspective. Every night I’d lie awake. Every night I’d watch Cana sleep. At every little sound I’d peer closer to her bassinet. Every night I wondered how we were going to make it out of this. Every night I asked God why.

So many people checked up on us, so many people cared for us. But I was quietly dissolving into a shell of a human. My desire to be productive, to be a functioning part of society, to even attend church was dwindling into nothingness. Panic attacks were becoming daily, and I was in the deepest valley. In the midst of this, our family got hit by the flu, I started having strange episodes of shock, my grandfather’s funeral happened in another state and I was unable to attend, we found out Cana was allergic to dairy which meant completely eliminating it from my own diet, Eden got hit by the stomach bug, and it was cold. SO COLD.

I felt like Job.

Except I was definitely not blameless and definitely not the “Best man among the people in the East”. But I felt like there was blow after blow to our family. The running joke in our family was, “would we even know what to do with boredom?”

A deep dive into Job brings a lot of questions and honestly? A lot of frustration towards God. Job 1:13 starts the domino effect Satan created to attack Job. Job was there, with messenger after messenger bringing devastating news, each seemingly worse than the one prior. I’ve always struggled while reading Job. His righteousness is one to strive for, but the intensity of death and destruction to those he loved and cared for gets me in a space that questions God’s goodness. Through the pain that occurred in the beginning of 2024, my first instinct was not to kneel before God and worship. My first instinct was to question and to wonder and ask why.

Looking back, I saw God’s presence through the season. There were hardships, tears, hurt. But God was there. He never left our side, He held our hand through it all and gave pockets of joy and laughter.

Our little one year old is mostly healthy and mostly has grown into her laryngomalacia. She gets sick easily, we’ve become pros at using a nebulizer, and I find myself pausing to listen to her breathing often. But she is chunky, happy, and nurses whenever she has the chance to. The journey here was hard, but God never left us just like He never left Job.

In times that are purely hard, where it feels like the valley is so far down there is no way out, I pray that my first response is to kneel before God and worship.

In the darkest moments of 2024, I wondered what the purpose of life was. Looking back, I can find solace that the purpose of life isn’t health and happiness. The answer is one that won’t find itself in a short blog on Substack, but God is present. Through the celebrations and the joy, through the struggles, through the temptations, through the anxiety. In all honesty, this blog post is vulnerable and as Brenden reminded me, only the surface of the struggles we faced. But may my vulnerability be a reminder of God’s faithfulness through all things.

John 16:33, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”.