A Valentine's Day Story

I did some research behind the history of St. Valentine, only to discover the details of his/their lives are sketchy at best and manipulated by both Chaucer and Hallmark. (I know those are two names I always associate as well!) So I figure it is fine for my family to have its own Valentine’s legend. I mean if Chaucer can do it, right? Who was he anyway? The father of English literature? Whateves…

Artwork by Curly Girl Designs

This past summer I happened on two beautiful passages about the human heart in books I was reading. One was Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church and the other was A.J. Jacob’s The Know-It-All. For the life of me, I can’t find either passage to quote them for you verbatim. Sorry, things have been…busy…around here. Brown Taylor, once an Episcopalian minister, spoke of looking out at her farm in Georgia, thinking of all the beating hearts surrounding her, and becoming overwhelmed by the miracle of God’s grace in this world. Jacobs, a secular Jew, spoke of the amazingly sophisticated science of the heart and how it works to sustain life. He marveled at the sheer wonder of it all and was overwhelmed with gratitude for the beating hearts in his life.

Reading these two passages, written by two very different memoirists, in a relatively short amount of time, changed me. On walks with Sully, I found myself thinking of all the beating hearts around us. On days when life felt overwhelming, I would breathe slowly and remember to be grateful for all the beating hearts in my life. At night, I would lie in bed and feel Ben and Sully’s heartbeats as we drifted off together and feel so, so overwhelmed by the miracle that is our life together.

But back then, before August 29, 2010, I had no concept of the depth of that miracle or how much I would come to love the gentle flickering of a heart on an ultrasound screen or the sound of a strong, perfect heartbeat.

As of today, Valentine’s Day, we are past the first trimester in our most recent pregnancy. (Yeah, getting pregnant is obviously not my problem.) I’ll post an entry about some of the more angst-ridden early days of this pregnancy. But today I just want to tell you, we saw a perfect heartbeat on January 4. And after an anxiety-ridden minute or two, we heard baby’s perfect, healthy heartbeat on January 26. (Seriously, the doctor had to check my pulse while she was looking for baby’s heartbeat because mine was beating so fast, she thought it might be baby’s.) Now, on this day of hearts, we are out of the (statistically) most dangerous part of the pregnancy. Honestly, I’ve done too much reading to believe everything is “fine” now, but I will breathe a little easier today.

My pregnancy experience will never be that of the stereotypical first-time mother. For a long time, we couldn’t bring ourselves to talk about this baby, and now we talk about him/her in cautious terms. But really, we gave over our hearts to this baby at that early morning ultrasound in January. He/she was just a little blob on the screen, but that heartbeat was clear. That night, as we all lied together in bed, I counted the heartbeats – Ben’s, Sully’s, mine, and the baby’s. That was, and always will continue to be, a miracle beyond my understanding.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Love,
Ann, Ben, Sully & Baby

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