Picture Perfect

It’s Wednesday and I spent the morning running errands and keeping busy prior to my doctors appointment. All the while I was keeping track of the movement in my belly. Ensuring that it was constant. That I could feel her twirl and kick and spin. My plan was to be able to confidently go into my appointment knowing that the heart beat would be there. And it was. In fact, the appointment itself was encouraging.

Baby b is there but just kind of in the background - not growing, not getting smaller. Summer is doing well and the high risk doctors said I don’t necessarily need to see them every week if my regular doc would take me back. That I would continue with them for ultrasounds but see my regular doctor for prenatal visits. However, they warned, it’s possible that your regular doctor won’t want to take you back because of how complicated this pregnancy started out as.

That kind of sums up this whole pregnancy – being somewhere in the middle. Not being totally high risk anymore but not low risk either. Not quite out of the woods but not quite in imminent danger either. The fluid on the brain could be this or that or it could be nothing. I’m just somewhere in the middle. And that’s a hard place to be. In fact, God himself even says not to be in the middle. Not to be on both sides of the fence. Pick a side and go with it. That’s better than just being lukewarm.

In these situations I can’t even pick a ‘side’ because I have been placed in the middle. But here, in the middle, I can choose what to focus on. And instead of focusing on what might be, I need to focus on what is. What I know to be already true. Not what the possibilities are but what is real today. Right now.

At this moment. Today, I have a husband. A daughter. Am pregnant. Have a job. A family. And way too much more to list. Those are things I can focus on.

A friend told me recently that she lost a twin. And at the unexpected times, that twin surfaces in her heart. When she sees her daughter dancing in front of the mirror – she thinks of the twin there. That’s what the 2 of them would have looked like together. When she sees her 2 boys and her daughter in the rear view mirror, she thinks of the twin and what it would have been like. But she also said something encouraging – when she sees her family portrait, it’s picture perfect. It’s just as it should be - nothing is missing.

That sentiment really touched me somewhere deep inside. It was that reminder that while the what could have been’s and the what should have beens can be so powerful in our minds, the WHAT IS, is what matters. It’s what counts. It’s what’s real.

My family portrait, if and when we have Summer, will look exactly as it should look.

My family portrait right now; me, Paul and Mia, looks exactly as it should.

Because it's what is.

And it's picture perfect.