Phone calls had piled up again, like they do when you’re a person who doesn’t like making them.  I got caught up, and in doing so, I realized my voicemails weren’t coming through on my phone.

Not a good thing when you have as much phone communication as I do regarding scheduling appointments and finding equipment and some of my own personal appointments and college things lately.

I did figure out how to go in and access the voicemails, but I still haven’t fixed the issue that notifications aren’t coming through when I receive them.  I’ll figure that out later today or tomorrow.

Anyway, that led me to a somewhat-related task of going through old voicemails and deleting them from my phone.  The oldest voicemails I had dated January 2015 – before I even knew I was pregnant with Kiran.  The two oldest ones were messages left to confirm reservations at one of our favorite restaurants in Seattle.  Bittersweet to remember that time in my life, the Before.

And then I started getting to the medical voicemails.  Confirming appointments with the midwife and then the ob/gyn (when insurance wouldn’t cover the midwife) and then ….

Then came the voicemails that marked the Transition from Before to After.  Phone calls regarding a follow-up ultrasound and recommendations.  And a very long message from a kind and excellent maternal fetal specialist (I had forgotten about) who went above and beyond to help us find care in Iowa, as our After with Kiran started just two weeks before a planned move halfway across the country.

Nothing in the messages, save the last one, was particularly heart-wrenching.  But it all took me back to that time, to those moments, to the place when I thought my entire world was crashing down all around me.

It wasn’t.  It hasn’t.  Though there have been many more such moments, with Kiran, with his dad, with my own internal struggle, when I have thought my entire world was crashing down all around me….it’s still intact.  It’s just different.  You crash and then you rebuild, you fall into the darkness and then climb back out into the light, you stumble and trip and then you keep putting one foot in front of the other.

We have come so far from that first moment.  The After isn’t all bad – it’s not even mostly bad – it’s just a life redefined.

It’s a long road ahead, but we journey together.