One Blinking Pixel

I'm working on putting the final touches on my new blog, so I hope you'll enjoy today's guest poster while I'm slaving away.


I don't even know how I "met" Nicole from The Mombshelter. But one day I clicked on her blog and it was love at first read. She's fabulous. She can make me laugh, she can make me cry,  she can make me want to stick a fork in my eye. 


Sorry. Couldn't resist the rhyme. But seriously? The woman can write. Maybe it's the cool air from Canada, where she lives (I'm SO international!). She also is someone I'd love to hang out with. Because I think we would laugh ourselves silly. Then we'd eat the leftover food that somehow landed in our bras. And? She has a son named Sawyer, which I happen to think is the Best Boy Name Ever. I might be biased. Whatevs. 


Here is the beautiful story of Nicole's Sawyer:

The story of my Sawyer's beginning is at the ending of another's. When the ache of motherhood was new in my heart, and the need to fill the emptiness left us feeling anxious and lost and wild.

And with the rising temperatures of that summer and the unforgiving sun beating down on us, we gave way to that wildness and maniac revelry in which it was easy to forget what was missing. Our irresponsibility, an abandonment and blatant disregard to the responsible, carried us through the months of long nights and left us, in the end, sunburned and tired and wanting.

The wanting was an uninvited guest which nagged and pestered and made its presence known in the wake of happy news from friends, we being at the age of happy news. Until the wanting, no longer content to stand behind wavering smiles and choked congratulations, found its way into my frenzied thoughts, driving me towards a preoccupation with recapturing what I had lost. Leaving me bewildered with my own inability, my failure.

The wanting had made permanent residence within, its consumptive nature peering out from behind my eyes. Until he, pained too, took my sullen face in his hands, looked into the green depth of where the wanting lay and said, Stop.

And I stopped.

In that airy, light time, leaves blew across our path and the coolness on our skin felt better. We felt better. And we laughed and embraced in the face of our new-found betterment. Betterment being a more welcome companion to the wanting.

So that our own happy news didn't seem news at all, on that cold November night; its arrival just being delayed. We forgave it its tardiness and waited.

We waited for things to take. For it to be okay. To get past the point where it had ended before. When things had gone awry.

We were hopeful, filled with cautious anticipation, singing Beatles songs. Pleading with it to hold on. To stay.

But then there was blood. Its familiarity allowing me a sense of composure, a numbness.

And this composure carried me on wooden legs, into a darkened ultrasound room where I explained to the woman technician that this was not the first and that I expected the worst.  And because of the numbness my words were wooden, too. Hollow.

Maybe it was that hollowness in my voice or the glassiness of my eyes or maybe it was just that she was a mom. But whatever her reasoning, she broke protocol and turned the screen so that both she and I would see the silvery images there.

Her voice was soothing and murmuring as she moved the wand across my still flat belly, searching. She held her breath when she stopped and I did, too.

"There," she said quietly, with warmth, pointing to the screen.

One blinking pixel.

One blinking pixel, until I am no more, will be the single most beautiful thing I've ever laid eyes upon.

And many months later, in the glow of a summer heat, my Sawyer was placed in my arms. Where I marvelled at the miracle of him and how I thought he had been lost save for the hope I'd found in that one blinking pixel.