It isn't everyday your daughter turns sixteen.  It isn't every daughter/sister who is like our Alannah.  For these reasons today is a big day in our family.  She holds a special place in our clan.  Coming when she did, four years after the three muskateers, she was the baby of that era.  Coming when she did, before the six younger children, she is their mother hen.  Coming when she did, on the heels of a physical breakdown so nearly complete that I did not expect to be able to carry more children again, she was to us a herald of the "hope and future" God had planned. 

When I became pregnant the first time I fully expected to have a girl.  My Gram was a true matriarch in every sense of the word.  She raised three daughters, one of whom – my mother, had an only child.  Another girl.  As a single mother my mom had all female friends.  It was a woman-centered existence and it never occurred to me that there was anything but pink in my future as those months progressed.  To say it was a surprise when they told us we had a son would be an understatement. A happy surprise no doubt, but a complete surprise.

When I conceived again I figured naturally THIS child would be a girl.  After all our family did not have boys. Surely it must have been a fluke.  Two more sons followed. It began to cross my mind that God had another plan for me, hazy as that concept was at the time.  I had become a mother of sons and it was a role I loved.  Little boys, once such foreign territory, came to be my specialty.  I stopped thinking pink.  As a matter of fact, at that point in our lives, without benefit of Church teaching and with rapidly declining health, I stopped thinking baby – period.  Had things not changed our family would be missing seven critical members.  

Change happened however.  Like most change, it got much worse before it got better. 

I had not come into this marriage particularly healthy.  Like, ever.   A childhood racked by illness and poor nutrition left me completely compromised and the physical challenge pregnancy presented amplified the problems.  Despite my foray into vegetarianism and the effort to learn to cook, there was no denying I was going downhill and fast.  I spent most of the third pregnancy sick and took a nosedive after.  In 1995 we got news my estranged father had died.  I was introduced to that side of my family for the first time and the stress of it all was the last straw.  

We never did find out exactly what happened next, but pretty much everything that could go wrong did.  I had a significant arrhythmia, TIAs, abnormal EEGs and EKGs. Violent vertigo attacks prevented me from lying on my back at all and I was forbidden to drive.  I had recurrent migraines and parasthesia.  My vision was hindered by large black spots and heavy spider web floaters. Viral bloodwork was off but tests for Lyme disease and CFS were in the early stages and the military did not even have those diagnoses on their books.  If you did not have a disease for which they had an officially accepted diagnosis, you were not sick.  So, we left the system that had written a plethora of prescriptions which had only worsened the condition. 

What followed was  chiropractic care and dietary experimentation. Lots of supplements.  A strict yeast free regimen and vegan diet did help a great deal.  In time, much agonizingly slow moving time, the floor stopped heaving beneath my feet and my vision cleared.  My heart rate settled into a comfortable steady rhythm.  We began to consider a future again.

My husband had been going to night school throughout this period and helping with the boys where he could, doing all the driving for a good chunk of that time.  We had also gone back to church where we learned of our Faith's consistent teaching about openness to life.  We got news that Allen had been accepted into Officer Training School.  Healing had begun and life was taking all sorts of new turns, not the least of which was a positive pregnancy test.  

Allen left for OTS the winter of 93-94.  The boys and I were showered with loving support and hands on help from our friends and neighbors in our close knit base housing community.  I remember vividly the day of my mid-pregnancy ultrasound.  You did not get 'routine' ultrasounds in the military at that time, but rather a mid pregnancy and perhaps a followup later.  I hoped to hear that the baby – a boy certainly – was healthy.  That baby was healthy indeed, but unmistakably a GIRL they told me.  

I walked home from that appointment with the ultrasound pictures in hand, stopping at the doors of our neighbors to share this unbelievable news.  A girl? Us???  What had seemed like such an inevitability years before now seemed surreal. Hefty doses of retail therapy eventually helped us to wrap our minds around it and the house of boys filled with ruffles and bows in anticipation.

Allen returned home when I was 28 weeks for a 48 hour period in which we packed our van and moved our little boys to Texas. Colin would be hospitalized twice in those remaining 12 weeks.  My due date came and went.  My mother came (for the birth) and nearly went.  The day of her return ticket to Wisconsin I was induced last minute – my only induction. Later that night a baby girl joined our family.  My husband melted. 

Alannah's birth marked the end of one era for us and the beginning of the next.  

It has been such a joy to watch her grow.  I can honestly say that she is one of the easiest children we have raised.  She has strong convictions and knows her mind, but she is ever gentle about it, never overbearing. She has blessed her brothers and sisters and us. She is capable and kind.  She turns 16 today.  My prayer is that life treats her with half the great mercy and loving care which she has shown everyone around her all these years. 

"Time will fly; suddenly she will be grown, a young adult, ready to soar into the world and give what she came here for.  Letting go will be wrenching, and yet we know that she is not ours to keep.  She came to us to teach us our lessons, to give us joy, to make us whole, and to connect us with God." 

– Jennifer Lesefski, Chicken Soup for a Mother's Soul