This Reminds Me

We’ve been through a rocky few weeks with Julia, who’s been battling a still-undefined virus that penetrated her spinal column.  After several difficult procedures at Methodist ER on Wednesday, then three days of hospitalization at Baptist (denomination switchers that we are) Hospital, we think she is finally on the mend.  She’s home as of this morning to a house caught up on laundry and with food in the fridge, thanks to Sarah coming in from Houston Friday.

Julia will be on meds for awhile, and wearing an eye patch for a few weeks (or months), and may have to have a few painful, necessary evils performed… but those are trivial inconveniences compared to other outcomes.

As Keith and I hunched over her ER bed Wednesday attempting to digest the possibilities and probabilities looming, he said, “Boy, I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

Yes.  Exactly.  Exactly. When Julia started getting sick a month ago, I didn’t know anything about “bilateral sixth nerve palsy.”  And I wish we hadn’t needed to learn about it last week.

I was stunned when we were told baby Lois would be premature.  A preemie?  Us?  No way.  No one in my family had ever had a preemie.  I always skipped right over those sections of the pregnancy books, smug in the certainty that crazy stuff like that applied to “other people.”.  And suddenly – in the midst of trying to keep two jobs, rear a two-year-old and prevent me from hemorrhaging – Keith and I became those “other people,” furiously reading about how to delay her birth, and what to expect after it occurred – information I never, ever wanted to have.  I wanted a Gerber baby.

When Judy and I could no longer manage to keep our mother in her home, we started researching assisted living centers.  I would physically and emotionally clench as we visited sites, gasped at horror stories and evaluated cost models.  I didn’t want to know anything about this depressing stuff.   No!  I wanted my mom in her own home, where I could plop down in the comfy chair by the kitchen and talk the latest Nero Wolfe or James Mischner.

Time after time in life – like everyone else – I’ve been forced to learn what I never wanted to know.

As Mick Jagger sang, “You can’t always get what you want.  But if you try sometimes you just might find  – you get what you need.”

Right now, I find myself thanking God for two things:  First, I thank God all four of our girls will be sleeping at home tonight. Second, I thank God for the things I do not know. Because I can’t always get what I want.  And only God knows what  I need.