My husband and I have been together for almost 10 years. We got together when we were relatively young. This meant we had the advantages of growing together, of making important life decisions together, and enjoying many life experiences together at a young age. It also meant, that we faced some challenges such as… learning to grow with each other, and sometimes not having a choice BUT to make important life decisions early in our lives together.
We went through two miscarriages before I got pregnant with my son, and so you can imagine, when we finally crossed the three month mark, we were ecstatic. Every month thereafter, we were filled with more and more excitement every time we went for a check up and saw the foetus grow and turn into a little human child – our little human child.
My husband was wonderful during my pregnancy (though don’t tell him I said that!). He was incredibly considerate, he took so much care of me and my diet and my exercises to ensure I was fit and healthy and fattening up my son inside of me. In fact, so much so, that I had to do the horrid Glucose Screening Test TWICE because my baby was bigger than his calculations showed and so they were afraid I had developed gestational diabetes (which I didn’t!). He put up with my hormonal inconsistencies (I refuse to believe I was anything other than merely inconsistent… but that’s something to park for a latter discussion ;))
He was so excited to be a father, and that excitement turned into temporary terror (labour and all the fun that comes with) followed by immediate relief when our son finally came into this world. And pride came thereafter, and this pride continued to evolve and produce pure happiness and unconditional love for our son.
When our son became sick and we ended up in the Intensive Care Unit, I know my husband was shaken. We were so struck by the impossibility of the situation we found ourselves in, but our sole focus was to make sure we were there for our son. We even forgot about each other and would never hold that against each other because our priority was in the right place.
For three months, we went through an emotional rollercoaster but we were cemented to the ground because of our son. My husband’s professional industry is a rather unforgiving one, and so when our son started recovering, my husband started to go back to work. I agreed with him that he needed to focus on continuing to support his family for a number of reasons. We made a preliminary decision that I would not go back to work and therefore due to the volatile nature of his industry, it was paramount that he did. The most crucial aspect of this discussion was that we truly believed that our son would be okay and it was only a matter of time before we brought him home.
Of the three months that we spent in hospital before the heart-breaking end, if you had to pick one of us as the ‘stronger’ one – it was probably me. However, when things took a turn for the worst after two and a half months, I couldn’t do it anymore.
The mother’s intuition told me that something was not right and as much as I tried to be hopeful and pray, deep down there was probably an unconscious knowledge that things might not be okay.
My husband had the same unconscious knowledge, but he took that and turned it into his strength and carried us through the coming few weeks.
(cont. in Part II)