Empty Arms No Longer, Part III

It should be mentioned that from the time I heard that our angel had delivered, I barely set my phone down. I was getting phone calls and texts from Dana, from our birth-grandma, family, and people from my Army unit. I felt like I worked at the AT&T switchboard. Getting onto the plane in Alexandria was the first time I put my phone away, and that was only because I was afraid of the flight attendants. They are the scariest nice people in the world.

Sitting there on the the plane, itching to turn my phone on, but scared that the little blonde lady was watching me (they always are, you know), I had the first opportunity to really think about what was going on. Against all odds and laws of probability, I was on a plane headed to Utah (by way of Dallas/Ft. Worth) to become a father. After all the time of waiting and wanting to be a father, I never expected it to happen in this way. I felt a mix of surprise, worry, confusion, and stress, with a healthy dose of exhaustion mixed in, all swirling around in a base of completely giddy happiness.

I knew that Dana was ahead of me, and got to Utah first. She got to see our son first, touch him first. I was a little jealous of that, but overjoyed for her. I wished that I could be there to share those first moments with her, but mostly I was happy and grateful, well beyond the point of tears, that my wife was finally, finally, able to be a mother. I have written about this before, but it bears repeating here - by far the hardest thing for me to handle with the infertility was my own inability to give my own wife the thing she wanted more than anything else in the world. Now, at long last, our long slow heartache was coming to an end, and I sat in my window seat, looking out at the Alexandria, LA runway with tears of gratitude in my eyes. I said a silent prayer of thankfulness to my Heavenly Father that all of our years of prayers and patience were finally being rewarded. That same prayer also became a plea that the remaining obstacles would not trip us up. To come this close and still fall short would be more than we could overcome.

I don't remember much of either flight. I slept for most of them, which was a huge blessing. During my short layover in Dallas, I grabbed a bite to eat at the airport Chilis, and when I went to pay I was told that someone had picked up the bill for me. Things like that happen sometimes when a soldier travels in uniform. It is part of the reason that so few of us travel in uniform. While it is a wonderful gesture that I was tremendously grateful for, it is also embarrassing - I don't feel like I have ever done anything that makes me deserving of a free lunch. I was just a guy going home to be with my wife and child. But it warmed my heart that some stranger took it upon themselves to help a random soldier out. So whoever you are out there - thank you.

When I landed in Utah, the weather was crappy. It had been crappy for days. Dana's plane was almost diverted from SLC because of a blizzard, and when mine came in, the storm was apparently just taking a breather. When we landed, there was a little fog, some light snow falling. However, between landing and exiting the runway, the snow started in earnest. It got so bad that the pilot had to stop the plane. I have never heard of weather so bad that a plane couldn't drive, but that is what happened. The pilot got on the intercom and told us that visibility was so bad that we had to wait on ground vehicle assistance to taxi in. If that brief window in the weather had not happened, we certainly would have been diverted to who knows where - probably Denver - and I would have been delayed by hours if not the whole day. But in what I truly believe was a little miracle, we were able to safely put wheels on the ground in Salt Lake, and I was one step closer.

My best friend Jake picked me up from the airport, and took me straight to the hospital. We probably talked about all sorts of stuff, but I can't remember any of it. I was so close to seeing my son for the first time, that it was all I could think of. Dana kept texting me, worried that I would not get there before they closed the NICU for shift change. In fact, I only just barely squeaked in.

I entered the NICU, and there was Dana, pretty as the first day I saw her, sitting next to a hospital crib that contained a little blanket-wrapped bundle that I knew, from the moment I saw it, held my son. There were still some days of uncertainty ahead of us to be navigated, but as soon as I saw that little bundle, with his full head of black hair, his adorable little nose, and his big Fred Flintstone toes - I knew that he was our son. A feeling of peace settled over me that I can't even begin to describe. Looking down at him, holding onto my beloved wife, I knew that our years of drifting and hoping and wanting were finally, blessedly, over.