We talked about how I made homemade butter by shaking cream in a baby food jar, how I watched monarch cocoons and released them, how we took a field trip to a nearby stream and I caught a crayfish and he lived in a wading pool in the class room with a cool whip container with a cut out section for a door for a house, and how I named that crayfish CP (shortened for Cutie Pie). And then the term CP hit my heart like a ton of bricks. The acronym that now stands for my son's severe disability... cerebral palsy. All these things like maybe what was eventually going to become the story of my life foreshadowed in some way even in my earliest of years. Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not. As beautiful friends sharing the same condition as Noah, sprinkled in my childhood and to this day remain lovely friends in my life. Could it be that I was simply being groomed for the ultimate challenge?
Thoughts like why me? "Why anyone?" I asked my mother.
As she replies "Because you had what it takes to do this."
Some argue the theory that children with special needs are not given to special parents. Maybe because we want to believe that anyone in our shoes would rise to the occasion if it they had to. But the truth is, not all would make the same decisions that Chris and I did. There are people that would have consented to doctor's encouragement to starve their child to death, who would have given him up for adoption, or who would have taken him home and wished him to die, or felt he was a burden, or neglected and abused him. There are endless stories, some tremendously tragic in the media, that tell a darker side than the path Chris and I chose for Noah. It does take a special person to look into a doctor's eyes as they are telling you the worst thing that you could ever imagine and say as you are holding hands and crying simultaneously with the person that helped you create this amazing person "it doesn't matter we want and love him anyway."
And if the big hand of fate quietly went about making me this student all these years ago so that I could handle it all now, then so be it. Then I'm thankful that God wanted me to be as prepared as I could be, and rise up to do what needed to be done - then and now. John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, stated "Life is short and… we are simply passing through here. We cannot stay. It is therefore essential that we find guides whom we can trust and who can help us discover and realize our higher purposes in life before it is too late." Noah is my guide, and I now understand my higher purpose.
Love,
Noah's Miracle by Stacy Warden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.