I have a lump in my throat. Probably because I just went through the photos from ‘that time’ to find one for this post. The wheelchair is gone, as are the crutches and the walker and the cane…but the memories aren’t. Of the time I sat on the ground positive that I would puke or pass out while trying to force myself to tell the paramedics that “I am pregnant.” Secretly not wanting to, afraid to see the alarm that I feel reflected  in their faces. When I do, he takes pause and says into a walkie, “Scratch that, we have three patients…not two.”

I write not for sympathy, or pity or effect, but to remember and to tell you, since you’ve so often asked in your kind notes and e mails that have certainly not gone unnoticed. Yes, my baby is here and he is safe and healthy. Yes, I can walk and fetch my own water from downstairs as I silently (and often times not so silently) wished to do for a full year as I lay in my bed. I sometimes still get a pang when I see a mother strolling her newborn and remember how I never even carried my second and last child until he was well over six months old. How I never stood over his carriage, proudly telling strangers his name and age as he slept soundly, like only a newborn can. I remember these things in a way that no one else does, and silently mourn them – not often – just sometimes.

Don’t be mistaken; I am as grateful as a person can be, but there are…things. I wonder who Z would be now had I been able to be his primary caregiver for all of that time – a full third of his life at that point.  I think about the time that my mother told me not to let him hear me cry in pain, because it would scare him. And how during physical therapy when I tried to walk for the first time, my brain knew what to do but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make my body follow suit. About the first time I ventured out alone on crutches (against the urging of my husband and father) to ‘my’ Marshall’s to prove to myself that I could; where I promptly fell, embarrassed and afraid once again as I pretended to be okay when a stranger inquired, only to drive back home, shaken and sore.

I write because you have asked, “How did you get through it?” and I’d love to be able to say, “because I am brave and strong and fearless.” Truth be told, I had no other choice. I had babies both in and outside of me, which changes things. I had a husband that proved to be a bigger person than I ever could have imagined. I had a strong marriage to begin with, that transformed into something completely different, in the best of all possible ways.

I can tell you about the day that I fell, that I shattered the tibia and fibula in my left leg, on my father’s birthday, after seeing my unborn son’s heartbeat on a sonogram for the first time. That they loaded me into an ambulance, without drugs, to the words “It’s probably just a sprain” and sent me en route to one of the scariest hospitals I can think of. That I lay on a gurney for close to twelve hours, until it was finally my turn for surgery and that I asked the surgical assistant to hold my hand. That my husband absentmindedly voted for American Idol from his cell phone, because he could think of nothing else to do. That I won’t ever run again in my lifetime. I can tell you all of it, but it will never be quite like I remember. And maybe that’s a good thing.