Realization, and its ensuing battle...

By twenty years old, I had been married for two years. Things had not always been simple, or smooth, but we got along. It seemed that whenever one of us was ready to give up, the other threw in the extra effort to keep us together. I loved him, and though I wasn't entirely aware of what I had gotten into, I knew that this would be a long hard road.

In April of that year, while living with my mother, I became the instant mother of two children. Born on April 19th, the day before Easter that year, Connor and Makenna came into the world guided by the skilled hands of a team of doctors and nurses who were all standing by in the C-Section room. There must have been twenty people in the room, but I was already under the influence of both adrenaline and pain medication, so to me, the world simply was.

I suffered a horrible case of the post pardem blues. Not only did I not seem to care about much, but I failed to notice the differences between the two children early on. Looking back, I can pinpoint many things that I might have seen earlier. For example, Connor seemed to cry incessantly. The doctors tried switching his formulas, running tests, the whole works, but in the end they could find nothing wrong, nor anything that could appease him. While he found some happiness in playing with his feet, it was not until he could move on his own that the crying settled down. Once he could move, Connor found freedom exploring places where no one was. There was little I could do to curtail this, as playpen time frustrated him greatly, so I simply kept my eyes on him and let him wander.

This would prove to be the first of many battles in a very long war...