Pass the potatos

Look to the stars, little one, and dream.

My daughter is a lot like me. I'm not sure if she completely hates it, but sometimes she does. However, I think sometimes she likes it a little.

In 1988, after I had suffered the loss of my miscarriage, I was laying there in a little lonely room in Wilmington, Delaware. I was on call for the hospital where I was doing an internal medicine rotation during my third year in medical school. I had been married about six years or so, and my husband and I tried for about eleven months to conceive. When I was pregnant, I was very excited, but some relatives were a little worried, about the timing and all, that I was still in school. But they didn't bother us too much about it, since they knew us and knew me and knew that we were going to do what we were going to do and so that was that.

When I was supposed to be 18 weeks pregnant, I went in for my follow-up exam and there was no heart beat. The friendly OB/GYN MD kept looking for the heartbeat and couldn't find it. He quickly arranged for an ultrasound, when it was soon discovered that there was no heart beat to be found. I still remember the kind and perfect words he said. "It's okay to cry."

So a couple weeks had past, I suppose, and I was laying there on that little on call room bed thinking about my lost baby and my heart was heavy. I thought that the Lord was there, as I was thinking about Him also. The song went through my mind - well- specifically the word from a song, "crystalline" from Fleetwood Mac. The song is called, “Crystal.” (I just found it and pulled it up on Napstar while I was writing this blog.) The sentence from the song is: “Then I knew, in the crystalline knowledge of you.” I didn’t remember that entire sentence, as I lay there that night, but just the word, “Crystalline” swept into my mind, like a single and perfectly formed golden and beautiful leaf that blows into a kitchen on a fall day.

I thought, “That’s what I want to name my next baby!” The weird thing was, I didn’t think it was much my idea, but it was more like a premonition, a promise, a secret vow.

Crystalyn was born 18 months later. (It took another nine months to get pregnant. Turned out to be perfect timing really. The first child took therefore 33 months of planning and preparation to arrive. Each subsequent child came within 18 months, 23 months and 27 months, respectively.)

Anyway, while I was pregnant, I prayed and yearned for a child to be “just like me.” I wanted her to be like me because I knew no biological relatives. You see, I had been adopted and I wish I had someone that looked like me.

When Crystalyn was born, she had what I thought was black hair, looked nothing like me and had blue eyes. The blue eyes matched mine. I’m sorry to say, but I was disappointed, because I couldn’t recognize any similar features.

The child was three days old and I was in the bathtub. Hubby was home attending the baby while I was in a state of utter shock from a series of difficult changes. First, as I lay in that tub, my bottom was so sore because it had been cut what seemed like several inches due to the vacuum extraction procedure required to get the baby out fast enough since she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Also, I looked at my depleted body. It had no beautiful baby in its tummy to carry around, but looked like a tire let out of all its air. There were stretch marks everywhere. There was fatness I never knew. It was a body I never met before. It was the new me. Third, I was weepy from the hormones, that I didn’t understand, that nobody told me about. There were other changes as well, like breasts that were full of pain. There was the heartbreak that I could not nurse my baby like I thought was supposed to be natural. There in my water of tears I prayed, “At least let Crystalyn keep her blue eyes.” (Silly, really. Boo-hoo tears.)

Okay. I need to move this along.

Bottom line. My little 16 and a half girl is so much like me, you would not believe it. She looks like me (doesn’t have black hair). She has the same voice even. She is so driven and I see the things in her that have taken me 20 years to begin to undo, yet they are the traits that also have serve me quite well, but in and of themselves can lead to a dependency on self, rather than the Lord.

Maybe another day I will blog a bit more about what is going on her life lately and with our relationship, but basically, I am helping her apply to colleges and it is so fun. She is a star academically and more gifted than I. May God be with us.