Beautifully Broken

by Paige Wetzel

  Just to cross it off the list, I decided I had better take a pregnancy test. Since the diagnosis could be a number of things, I didn’t want to waste time on pregnancy testing if I were to go to the doctor. I took one and continued to get ready for work, planning to call the doctor during my forty-five-minute commute. I had the phone number of the doctor’s office pulled up and was walking out the door when I remembered I needed to throw the pregnancy test away. I walked back to throw it away and glanced at the result. Gasping so hard I almost passed out, I read the word: PREGNANT. “Ooooooh my…” My voice shook. Here came that panic attack feeling again. I slid down the wall just like I did when the Department of the Army called me about Josh being blown up. I stared up at the ceiling and felt hot tears welling up in my eyes. I looked back down at the test, just to make sure I could read, and then back up at the ceiling again. I repeated that pattern for about five minutes before I got up and got in the car. The entire drive to work, I sat in silence. My mind was swimming in so many half-thought scenarios I was actually surprised when I pulled up at work. I hadn’t even paid attention to where I was going. Still freaked out, I backed out of my space and went to a nearby drugstore to get another pregnancy test, because, you know sometimes they just say “pregnant” for no reason, right? I took it to the women’s restroom outside my office, and it confirmed the first result.

  I felt so different about this baby. This was nothing like the last time. Harper was the result of overcoming the ultimate odds. She was a medical miracle. We were already breaking down barriers every day in rehab, and then there came a baby for the victory lap. I couldn’t even remember the last time Josh and I even had had the opportunity to conceive a baby. When did we even have a good enough day with each other that would have ended in sex? I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me. I couldn’t hear myself saying through excited tears, “We’re having a baby!” like the last time. This time sounded a lot more like, “I’m pregnant.” Emotionless. Clinical. I’m alone. I’m making the sacrifice. I’m going to doing this by myself. I droned through my workday and locked myself in my room when I returned home. The only way I could pray about this was to write it down. “Today, I found out I am pregnant.” My vision blurred with tears as I read that statement over and over. “I feel really guilty for not being excited, but Josh and I are in a bad place. I just don’t know if we are even meant to be together anymore. We fight every day. Things are just so different than what I thought they would be. I always thought being in the hospital was our problem, but we truly don’t know how to handle ourselves. God, please forgive me for not reacting to this like the blessing that it is. It’s another scientific miracle! But our marriage needs a miracle too.” We went to church the next day. It was Valentine’s Day. The pastor preached a wonderful sermon on biblical love and the importance of intimacy and emotional connection with a spouse. Tears rolled down my face as I sat next to a person I barely knew anymore, knowing that we were light years away from what God wanted for us.

  When I went to the OB-GYN, I found out I was nine weeks pregnant. I kept my pregnancy a secret for a long time: thirteen weeks, to be exact. Working in a different town than Josh helped me hide the day-to-day issues with being pregnant. I pulled over in the same Walmart parking lot almost every workday to take a nap. The pregnancy added a new problem to my job situation as well. This baby was due in October, right in the middle of what was supposed to be my first season at AUM. I wasn’t going to have a full-time assistant coach that first year, so how was I going to do my job the full semester? I became so nervous about the situation that I looked up legislation on whether they could fire me or not. Our carefully constructed mountain of wins that was our trophy to show the world our success was starting to crack at the edges.

  JOSH

  The tension at home kept building because Paige and I kept adding things to our plates. Neither of us was good at saying no, and we had developed a pretty bad system of committing to things without consulting one another. The one mission we both committed to was pushing along our home build with Homes for Our Troops. When we first learned about Homes for Our Troops, I honestly wasn’t sure how necessary a handicap-accessible home would be. Of course, these are mortgage-free homes, and who wouldn’t want that? But I didn’t realize how badly we needed home adaptations until we had moved into our rentals after we left the hospital. By 2015, we had lived in two rental properties that had posed some major challenges for me. In both places I had to keep my legs on all day because there were areas in each place that my wheelchair couldn’t get to. This really started messing with my back and knee. I also didn’t have a handicap-accessible bathroom, so I ended up taking baths under the tub faucet. This really wasn’t a big deal, but I almost seriously hurt myself trying to hoist myself into my wheelchair from the side of a slippery tub. These are things you don’t think about when you are all of a sudden disabled. Other problems included not being able to take the trash to the road because the driveway was too steep, or use the stovetop in my wheelchair because I was at eye level with the pan, or go in the backyard in my wheelchair because it had steps. What worried me most was being at home alone with Harper, as I often was, and her getting somewhere that I couldn’t get to. My two-and-a-half-year-old could no longer be confined to the pillow forts I had built when she was a baby. There was no way we could buy a home and renovate it with the things that would make it safe for me to live in. We needed Homes for Our Troops, but we ran into a roadblock soon after we had finally picked out our land.

  We bought the land, but then had terrible luck with the first builder. He seemed so enthusiastic to take on a veteran project, but then never showed up to the job site. We had a groundbreaking ceremony set for June 2015 that had to be moved to a restaurant parking lot because he hadn’t shown up to clear out the trees on our property. This was frustrating because the groundbreaking ceremony is not just meant to get the community’s attention on a veteran moving into the town, but to give the community the opportunity to get involved in helping the cause. It is a little counterproductive to gather sponsors, set up tents, bring in food, and invite city government to an event that is in a different location than where the home will be built. We needed to send a message to our community that legitimized both the need and the organization willing to fulfill the need. With a no-show builder and last-minute relocated events, our community was not getting that message. Entering 2016, we still had not found a new builder and our land was still covered in trees. We were in the same familiar place we’d been in at Walter Reed: providing all the warm fuzzies and the appearance of progress for our supporters while actually being at a standstill in almost everything. Paige was growing increasingly impatient with the process. She was tired of living with the daily risks of how I had to function in our home and worried about Harper the same way I did. Even though I was frustrated too, I just wanted to get the right person that cared about us the way the people at Homes for Our Troops did. The disappointments about the home build became another negative topic at home.

  PAIGE

  We had been civilians for two years, and I could have never pictured the stress I lived in. This secret baby, the ups and downs of my job, the demands from Josh’s job, Harper becoming more mobile, and this home project that just wouldn’t get started was enough to make me rub my temples in disbelief. I kept reaching for some level of control, and it would just slip through my fingers. I began to think about my unborn child. Harper’s gestation certainly took place in a less-than-ideal situation, but all my anxiety was about giving her a good life despite the surroundings. Did I feel that for this child? Had I spent one second wanting the same good life for the second one? I began to write down prayers again for this baby to help me drown out the distractions. I prayed that God would help me trade anxiety for excitement, knowing that with the way things were in my marriage, my attitude may have been the only thing that kept our family afloat. I also apologized to my baby, talking to him or her for the first time. I said I was sorr
y for not taking the time to show love and pray better. I committed to being excited and decided I was going to find an exciting way to tell everyone.

  One day, after I had dealt with yet another house building setback, Rick called me and asked if we could meet. I wasn’t sure what it was about, but it seemed urgent. I had seen him out recruiting the weekend before and wondered what could have happened between now and then. We met up for coffee, and much to my surprise, he offered me a job as his director of volleyball operations for the Auburn Tigers! I had no idea what a director of operations did, but with everything else going on, it was absolutely God opening a door. Josh and I would both work at the same place. I felt such relief. My prayers had been answered with this job, and I hoped this would be the way Josh and I could somehow get on the same page to get ready for another baby.

  With each prayer I became more excited about this baby, even though Josh and I weren’t getting along. Josh was legitimately happy (as in happy for me behind closed doors, not just in front of people) about my job offer at Auburn. With that momentum, I decided I was going to surprise Josh in a special way with news of this baby. Around Christmastime, I had already been waitlisted for some tickets to the practice round of the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Josh was turning thirty that year, and he had so many exciting things coming up: graduation, a new job, and now baby number two. With the help of the Auburn Athletics communications department, I was going to surprise Josh with tickets to the Masters on the largest video board in college football at Jordan-Hare Stadium. We invited Josh to the stadium for a “meeting,” where several of his friends and Aubie, the school’s mascot, gathered with us to yell “Surprise!” and give out cupcakes.

  We went onto the field for a special announcement. I had made a video for Josh celebrating his thirty years of life: “You served your country” and “You became a dad” rolled across the screen along with images of Josh standing for the first time and pictures of him holding his baby girl in the hospital. As he watched the images following “You joined the Auburn family,” I bent down to change Harper’s shirt. The video continued: “2016 is not done with you yet… This year you will have a bachelor’s degree from Auburn University, a handicap-accessible home, and… a trip to the Masters!!!” Shading his eyes, he read the scoreboard and smiled as everyone clapped for his surprise. I picked Harper up but didn’t let Josh see her new shirt. I pointed back to the screen, which said, “Wait! There’s one more surprise! Your last gift is the best gift… there is just one catch…” And then an ultrasound image of baby number two at ten weeks popped up on the screen with a caption that said, “You can’t open until October.” I loved the five seconds it took Josh to process what he was seeing. He whipped his head around to me with the same expression he had the day I threw the pregnancy test at him at Walter Reed. He read Harper’s shirt, which said BIG SISTER, and burst into tears. The next slide was a video of a wiggly little peanut baby in my belly with the caption “Baby #2 is on its way!” The crowd went nuts. Aubie came and hugged us both. Everyone was hugging, laughing, and crying. Josh was a puddle. He was hiding his face in his shirt from all the tears. He couldn’t believe it, and I was so touched and thankful for his reaction. We hugged for the first time in weeks.

  He asked how far along I was, and he couldn’t believe I was already out of the first trimester (probably the biggest favor I’ve ever done for him). I posted “Josh’s Jumbotron Surprise at Jordan-Hare Stadium” on YouTube, and it went viral!

  JOSH

  Shading my eyes from the sun, I was so surprised when I saw “You’re going to the Masters!” That was a huge (and expensive) bucket list item for me, and I was really shocked that Paige had gone to such an extreme for my birthday. When she said there was more, I just thought, What else could there be? When the 190-foot screen showed an image of an ultrasound that captioned “You cannot open until October,” the gears in my head ground to a halt. Wait… What is that?… Is that an ultrasound?… Is this a pregnancy announcement?… Is that MY BABY?… ARE WE PREGNANT? I turned to look at my wife and my two-year-old, who confirmed it with their smiles and a BIG SISTER shirt worn by Harper. I was overwhelmed. I didn’t think I could stand any more, but Paige kept pointing at the screen. There was the little miracle on a live ultrasound wiggling with life on Auburn’s scoreboard. This was one of the happiest moments of my life.

  What a miracle this was! We had done it again. We had naturally conceived another child, the probability of which became less and less the older I got. Paige had gone to such extravagant measures. She had conspired with some of my own co-workers and somehow created a video that would be shown on a scoreboard that I looked at almost every week. I wanted to jump for joy, but when I considered how at odds Paige and I were, it brought me down a notch. I thought, This is going to be harder than the last time. Reflecting back on Harper’s early life was like thinking about the glory days. We were such a great team, and even though we didn’t know what we were doing, we tackled it together. Right now, all I could think about was my job, Paige’s job, and Harper, and I wondered how we were going to balance it all. I’m sure every parent has this thought, but Paige and I were just coexisting in the same house. However, I think we both saw each other as good parents. I brought a lot of energy as Harper’s playmate, and she was at ease when she was with me. Paige was more of the disciplinarian, but she had done great things in Harper’s education. The daunting thing was, you don’t really raise a baby. You care for a baby. That requires communication and the desire to help each other out. How was I going to check that box and still show up for my career? Especially when I felt like my wife would eventually expect me to somehow sacrifice more to make things “fair,” since she would be the one to have the baby and take time off work.

  Life was perplexing for the next several weeks. In so many ways I had everything I wanted, just like Paige’s video had listed—being a dad, getting a degree from my favorite school, working with athletics, working toward a handicap-accessible home, and now being a dad again! Paige had many prayers answered too, but conversations about making it work ended with us defending our separate priorities. Every conversation was like entering a courtroom, except we never reached a verdict. For the first time in our relationship, we brought opportunities of equal importance to the table. Gone were the days of my job telling both of us what to do. These things felt like a blessing from a distance, but somehow when we got everything we wanted, it felt like we were drowning. Soon, I found myself doing everything I could to numb and avoid. I came home and played with Harper by myself and then played video games until I was sure Paige was asleep, refusing to think about the sacrifices I might have to make after I had worked so hard.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  RELIEVING PRESSURE

  Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.

  —Psalm 25:16

  PAIGE

  Our fighting became more frequent. Every conversation regarding the baby was dripping with hostility. I either hated talking about planning for the baby because I truly didn’t want any more drama in my day, or I brought it up because I felt like winning a fight. We didn’t just make snippy comments and walk away; we screamed at each other, we cursed at each other, and we tried to emotionally hurt each other. I had finally had enough of both him and myself. Not because I was ready to lay my weapons down—I was certainly still selfish enough to keep trying to win fights every day—but I couldn’t risk the health of my growing baby.

  The fighting and bad coping mechanisms opened the floor for divorce. I contacted a divorce attorney to get the particulars of how our situation would work out as far as assets, finances, and custody. I had threatened to break up with Josh before, but I knew deep down that I didn’t mean it. This time, I was numb to emotional consequences. I was too drained to even be mad. We had discussed splitting up in one of those conversations that ends in both people shrugging their shoulders and saying “fine” over and over. It might have seemed like anothe
r breath-holding contest, but my mind was considering everyday life as a single mom. It took a second conversation for Josh to understand that the more I thought about it, the more a plan was coming together. I told Josh we could get through the exciting stuff like graduation, moving into the new house, and so on. Then when the dust settled, we would just discreetly separate, and we could tell everyone together at Christmastime.

  It wasn’t a dramatic monologue about leaving and never coming back; I actually wanted to do my part in making our divorce successful. I had no reason to take the kids away from Josh. He was a great father. I planned to stay in Auburn, because this was my town, where my career was taking place, too. When I laid out my vision, Josh finally told me he was scared because of how easily I could see all of this taking place. As cold and nonchalant as it sounds, I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “Yeah, but at least we can have some peace in our lives.” As weeks passed, we slept in separate rooms, and I didn’t allow conversations about or gestures toward making things right. I didn’t need any more apologies or flowers delivered to my office. I needed him to agree to be a good roommate and to just worry about our children.