Silja Tanner's Narrative Essay

Silja Tanner

Professor Van Dyken

ENG 090

25 June 2012

The Dolphin

The pain was subsiding, finally, like a dark, raging, Siberian sea coming to rest. The abuse of seven years’ marriage had ended, leaving numerous scars on my psyche.  I gained three more scars after a surgery confirming a disease that had been causing me such agony like a circle of barbed wire around my abdomen with hot daggers constantly slicing through.  I was finishing up my last years of a miserable ten-year block of service in the Air Force and I had ended up in San Antonio taking care of three children and dealing with my depression.  But soon an old friendship blossomed into sweet romance and brought out the full, silver moon over a warming, choppy ocean.  In the spring of 2010, after years of useless treatments and hormone therapy failed to alleviate the physical pain, my doctor reluctantly offered a radical hysterectomy guaranteeing a cure to my painful disease.  “Besides”, he bemoaned, “You’re infertile as it is.”  He offered the procedure reluctantly because I was only 27 but as I had tried everything else, he was willing.  By then, an old friend and I had found true love with each other and married, bringing together his son and my three young ones to try to become one family. 

The scars on my heart were healing as the sun was in full heat over a gently waving, blue ocean that slowly dragged my old pains out with the tide.  The doctor’s offer was tempting; it would be an end to the agony that was becoming debilitating.  Plus, the military offered 50% disability for such a surgery and I was seeing dollar signs.  Besides, between the two of us, my new husband and I already had four children and if we really wanted more, we could adopt.  I accepted the doctor’s offer.  But something kept tugging at my brain, telling me to reconsider.  So after the last meeting in the doctor’s office, I asked Heavenly Father in prayer every night for a week what I should do.  I unglued my own will and listened to He whom I’d asked.  The answer was clear: “There’s someone waiting for you.”  I pictured a little child lying on its belly looking over the edge of heaven’s clouds down to earth and waiting for their turn.  The doctor was relieved at my decision and gave me one last dose of hormones before I left the military and his care.

I began my new life as a stay-at-home mother and found my niche as an intern at a dojo.  After a while, though, I began to see babies everywhere.  Church is always full of them and soon it became difficult to be seated in a row behind a family with a baby.  My sunshine husband was feeling the same ache that had begun to grow in my heart; we wanted a child together.  Still assuming that, for the time being, I was infertile, we talked of adoption.  Meanwhile my last hormone shot had worn off but I allowed a couple weeks’ gap in birth control - what was the rush?  But a few days into my first pack of pills I was perplexed at the range of symptoms I was experiencing: nausea, moodiness, etc.  When the light bulb went on at the possibility of my being pregnant, I became giddy with joy, but I kept the thought secret from my husband.  What a wonderful surprise it would be if it were true!

I purchased an at-home pregnancy test and chose to take it the next morning when my dear husband would be getting up for work. With much giddiness, I jumped up out of bed before him and took the test, trying to suppress my hope while the test results appeared.  Hubby’s alarm blared.  He pressed snooze.  The little test stick finally resolved and I compared its results to the code on the box.  I squealed, but double-checked just to be sure.  This time I jumped for joy – the result was positive!  I had the promised baby growing inside me.  Love overflowed my heart’s ocean as waves, pushed by flourishing gusts, left me in peals of laughter.  Still giggling madly, I danced from the bathroom to our bed where hubby was now getting out of bed.  He smiled bemusedly at my antics as he shuffled to the bathroom.  “I’ve got something to show you,” I sang, then pointed to the test stick on the counter.  Laughter bubbled out again at his bewildered face.  “What’s that?” he asked groggily, rubbing his eyes.  “It’s a pregnancy test – I’m pregnant!”  I exclaimed.  He dropped his hands from his face, showing bulging eyes.  He had not been expecting this at all and was quite awake now.   “It’s a Godsend,” he sighed dreamily and hugged me fiercely.  We both cried with joy.  That afternoon, he presented me with a bouquet of sweet baby’s breath to celebrate.  The smell filled the house and our dreams with the hope of this little one to come.

It was a whirlwind pregnancy.  But it did not go smoothly and I ended up on bed rest before we had to move to Denver in my last month of carrying the baby – a girl – who was spiritedly strong and healthy despite my fragility.  Out other children were so excited to be joined by another sibling.  When she was born we all felt a little closer to each other.  Baby Ellie connected us by blood and by love.  She offered us a new beginning in a new city.  The pregnancy was also a chance for my husband to demonstrate just how very tender and obligingly patient he could be for me.  I felt even more cemented to him. 

The doctor who told me I was infertile probably meant that I should not have any more children.  He just wanted to cure my pain.  But now there is no ache.  That child I envisioned waiting for her turn on earth is in my arms every day.  She very nearly was not, if I had chosen money and to be pain-free and had not chosen to match my actions with the Master Planner.  I am glad that I was willing to put my immediate wants aside and to comply.  As my little daughter nears her first birthday, I see in her a dolphin that emerges from the glittering sea; she is a healer and a rescuer.  She healed the pain I had been carrying and she rescued my mixed family by uniting us.