I chose my son, and his life saved mine.

Everything becomes a gift, if we let it: the tears, the broken hearts, the long nights.

Auggie at age 4, wearing Ben’s boyhood vest, in our backyard. Spring, 2024.

To hear the audio version of this essay, please listen below:

I think Auggie saved my life.

The moment I discovered I was pregnant with him, I became convinced that my life was over. Truly. I remember the instant I saw the two blue lines on a cheap, drugstore pregnancy test. A pall overcame me. My heart darkened. I felt suffocated, trapped, like there was no way out. I could only envision the devastation to my health, my marriage, and our finances:

Joey is only six months old. I just started feeling more like myself and less reactive. How can I manage another pregnancy so soon?

Ben and I already barely speak, because we’re so depleted at the end of the day. We have four kids, two of whom have diagnoses that require regular therapies and visits with specialists. Two of them are under the age of two. Will this wreck what little relationship still remains between the two of us?

I’m struggling to pay bills on one income as it is. How can we afford another baby?

I tried to find the good. The only good I came up with was that Auggie was a human being who deserved a chance to live. If nothing else, I wanted him to grow up and believe that someone—his mother—fought for him, defended him. Would he realize how much his life mattered?

I always wanted my life to matter that much to someone else—enough to fight for, to sacrifice for.

Recently, as I listened to my suffering speak to me, I realized that Auggie saved me.

Every day, from the instant I learned I was pregnant with him, I awoke with five words: Why am I still here? Every day. The mental anguish was unrelenting. I wanted to die.

The reason I didn’t conjure a specific plan was this: I kept fighting for the little human growing inside of me. It was the one thing, the only thing, that kept me going each day. I figured that, even if my life had come to this place where all I was good for was to churn out baby after baby while racking up multiple medical and mental health diagnoses, at least I could give this new person a chance.

All the while, I felt hopeless. I see now I was not actually hopeless but perhaps more hopeful than I’d ever been before. Because hope was tested by the possibility of despair. Hope was the invisible hand holding me up when I was dangling perilously close to the edge of Giving Up.

I chose hope. Somehow, in ways still nebulous to me, I chose to believe that my life might—could, would—improve one day. And bit by bit, it has.

Listening to my suffering, whether in the form of depression or loneliness or hopelessness, has opened a pathway to understanding that, even though my life will never be as I wish, it can still be good.

Hope. I know it may seem far, frail, even lost to you. I know this, because I have felt it, too. I have sought hope when it wandered away from me, when I could see no light or goodness or gift.

Everything becomes a gift, if we let it. The tears are the gift. The broken hearts are the gift. The surprises are the gift.

Hope isn’t what I thought it was: a peripheral confidence in things going my way, in my dreams coming to fruition. Hope instead is more tenable and tenacious. It is the reflection of what may be but is not always guaranteed. It is a fragment of a smile, an unexpected present, a hug, a song, a handwritten note.

Every single person we encounter is meant to teach us something. Either that, or we are meant to bless them in some way. Joyce Rupp exhorts us to “believe in the possibility and power of blessings.”

Auggie was the blessing for me. But before he was born, all I could think of was the burden—of carrying yet another child in my body, of the physical pain of my autoimmunity flaring up, of failing my glucose test, of high blood pressure. I wanted to drift away when I slept, which was often, yet I hated myself for being absent to my other four children. They needed a mother, but I needed me, too.

While pregnant, I didn’t know I needed Auggie to save me from self-destruction. It’s only evident to me years later. It’s often hard for me to look outside of myself and recognize that the very things I believe are going to ruin me are the gifts themselves. I think we are each given a gift, at least one, but we forget that we are the gift.

Everything that happens today bears the touch of hope. Everything is meant to be lived—both the suffering and the healing. We are not created to live in certainty or predictability, but receptivity and attunement.

Auggie is now four years old. Nearly every day since his birth, I have resisted his gratuitous love. He doesn’t yet know what dark thoughts consumed me while he was in utero. But I cannot forget them: wanting desperately to miscarry in the first trimester, wanting to fall asleep night after night and never wake up. When he hugs me, I am awash with shame, mostly because I don’t believe I deserve his love. I don’t believe I deserve him.

A few weeks ago, he waddled up to me while I was making lunch, and said, “Mommy, our hearts are never broke. God opens our hearts.”

How does a four-year-old know such things?

Auggie doesn’t know that his mom’s heart was “broke,” that because I wasn’t sure I could love and raise another child—him—I turned against myself and thus against love. Against the gift.

I never would have heard him speak these words if I had died four years ago, as I wanted to then. I never would have felt his arms clutching my legs, or his sweet voice whisper, “I love you, Mommy” before naptime. I never would have seen him wrinkle his nose in delight or console his siblings when they are sad.

In order for me to recognize the gift, I had to live through the suffering first. The pain.

I won’t say here that suffering is the gift, but I do think being fully human entails a resolve to embrace even the darkest parts of ourselves, the things we want to shun, the shadows and specters.

Maybe it’s true what my therapist told me recently: “The most beautiful parts of you are the broken parts.” Maybe the gift is in our brokenness, not in the wholeness we desperately seek. Brokenness reveals our need for each other, our need for love and connection and belonging.

Maybe in order to save a life, something else must be shed. We risk losing what is tangible and familiar when we let go of it in order to gain some new way of being. When I say Auggie saved my life, what I mean is that I was choosing both him and myself. In learning to nurture another human when I was on the edge of exasperation, I learned to nurture myself.

The gift.