Become a Better Parent by Reaching Out to Others

I was the weird girl that never wanted kids. My best friend, Janeen, always wanted children. While I worked to avoid them, she surrounded herself with children. She picked out names and bought things for children she wasn't even trying to conceive. She called it planning ahead. I called it insanity. That all changed when I met her niece, Stephanie.

My encounter with Stephanie was a moment in time that seemed ordinary but resulted in profound change in my life. Stephanie was born with cerebral palsy. While my mother taught me to have great pity for disabled children, Stephanie's mother, Susan, interacted with Stephanie as any parent would. It fascinated me and completely contradicted everything I thought I knew about special needs children.

Janeen and Susan pointed out subtle changes in Stephanie's facial expressions in response to her surroundings. As I watched her carefully, I, too, could see a shift in her expressions. The key to unlocking Stephanie was careful consideration and unconditioned love. She received plenty of both from her mom and Janeen. It didn't take long to see that Stephanie reserved her greatest expression of joy solely for her mother. Whenever she caught Susan's eye, a silent communication, packed with more love than words could express, passed between them. It was such a powerfully, intimate moment seared within me.

Years later when I learned my own son, DJ, would be disabled, I remembered Stephanie. Images of Stephanie rolled through my mind as I stood by DJ's hospital bed reviewing the doctor's grim prognosis. As my son looked at me, for a split second I saw Stephanie's loving gaze as it found her mother's. Stephanie had passed away but her legacy of hope was alive and well and ignited within me.

Fast-forward ten years and it's now Janeen facing her own parental ordeal. Janeen's dream of a having a baby girl was realized but not in the way she had hoped. Maggie was born premature and required the use of an apnea monitor. An apnea monitor is a very scary looking device that has the ability to detect a pause in a baby's breathing or heartbeat. More often than not it has the opposite effect by completely stopping a parent's heart each time a false alarm sounds. Add to that the pain you inflict on your child as you pull sticky tabs from frail skin, the aggravation of lugging around the monitor in addition to all the other baby paraphernalia and the need to keep your baby "plugged in" and you've got the makings of a nervous break down.

Janeen knew all about apnea monitors, premature birth and neonatal intensive care because she had been by my side as I endured it with my oldest son, Colton.

Clearly, Janeen didn't want her precious baby girl to endure what Colton did, but she was certainly better prepared than most. Little Maggie's first ride in my car was when the monitor decided to sound its first alarm. In an eerily similar scene, Colton's apnea monitor had sounded in Janeen's car 17 years prior. We each knew our parts and played them flawlessly in both incidents

Going about our daily lives, Janeen and I had a chance encounter that led to a lifelong friendship. God was working on giving us all we needed to survive ordeals we had no idea were coming. As our paths intersected, we each reached to help the other and became better mothers for our efforts. I'm reminded of the words from a John Hiatt song: we scheme about the future, and we dream about the past, when just a simple reaching out might build a bridge that lasts. Always opt to be a bridge for someone else. The great thing about bridges is they run both ways.