Twenty Days of Comfort: Day 1, "Darkness"

Neither Christy nor I saw this coming. We were done having kids, physically and mentally. The age of thirty-six is when you should have a settler mentality and not a pioneer vision, right? So imagine our surprise when we discovered we were going to have a third child. And imagine the consternation when we were informed this would be a boy, and thus he'd have a 50/50 chance of having the same X-linked myotubular myopathy as his older brother Joshua.

But resolutely forward we went. The magic day of April 5, 2007, arrived and there we were in the delivery room at Wellington Regional Medical Center in Wellington, Florida, for Christy's third birth--not to mention her third C-section.

Sweet little Jordan, all comfy and warm and snug where he was. And then the adventure began, in Jordan's words, through a child's eyes.

Darkness

In darkness warm my quickened heart

Beats time on time in sudden start.

No place to see, nor inch that's dry,

Nor thoughts of sun, of trees or sky

Invade my mind's rampart.

Yet all sweet dreams the world does thwart.

I follow my Creator's chart,

And so from here I bid goodbye

To darkness warm.

With grasp and pull of rigor smart

Of ache brought on like spear or dart

One takes me out, and then I lie

On surface cold without a cry

To spite the chill as I depart

From darkness warm.

Tomorrow's poem: "Life"