Some days, I have the best job in the world. I’m lucky enough to meet people every day and share with them the most extraordinary moment of their lives. I meet these women who come to give life. Women who come to receive Cupid’s most enchanting arrow—the one that pierces your heart to change it forever, to fill it with a love never before known, greater and stronger than the universe… Every day, I witness this transformation—from woman to mother for those visiting us for the first time, and a heart that grows ever larger with the birth of each of their new little ones…
Then there are those nights—the kind you wouldn’t wish on anyone—when the best job in the world takes a beating, and even though it remains just as intense and important, it becomes the most unfair job on Earth… There are those nights when I feel as though the world has momentarily stopped turning, when, despite my searching, the sound of her little heart has never echoed…
There are days when, even though everything seemed to be going as it should, the wind shifted to make way for a storm… People will talk of anomalies; a geneticist may or may not find the cause… With their hearts in pieces and their minds elsewhere, they’ll search for a reason, a “why” that sometimes will never come.
There are those days when this mom knew something wasn’t right. Those are the times I recognize them even before they open their mouths… I can see it in their features, in the tears they’re holding back, and in the anxious glances they cast around them.
While they had hoped to meet the love of their lives and be struck by Cupid’s arrow right in the heart, they’ve come to say goodbye to the one who brightened their last few months in a moment that passed all too quickly… With their hearts swept up in a whirlwind of emotions as intense as a storm, and a love as powerful and radiant as a flash of lightning, they cherish the one who is here now but will soon be gone, holding him for a long first and last time. He knew only the warmth of a mother, the loving voice of his father, and sometimes the cries of joy from siblings who had already fallen in love with him—before he left as quickly as he had come.
I watch these women leave, changed forever… Yes, time will ease the pain. But that scar will always remain—the mark of Cupid’s arrow that pierced their hearts, leaving the imprint of an intense love, the kind that pierces your heart to change it forever, to fill it with a love never before known, greater and stronger than the universe…
To all those mothers I’ve seen change right before my eyes, know that you’ve changed me too, and that I’m a better person and a better nurse thanks to you. xxx