The things you can and can’t control

May 31st, 2011 5:16 PM UTC
By ONE Partners

Jyl Johnson Pattee, ONE mom blogger, mompreneur and founder of Mom it Forward, reflects on the marvels of modern medicine, a luxury that only a fraction of the world has access to. Without it, she would have had a harder time becoming a mom.

I played a lot of things when I was a child. School. I was always the teacher. Hospital. I was always the nurse. And family. I was always the mom. Sense a theme here? Yes! I loved to be in charge. And being in charge meant that I got to decide who the students were in my classroom. Who the patients were in my hospital.

And how many kids I would have in my family. How many, you ask? I had 11. And every year, at the beginning of the year, from the age of seven, I would write all of their names down in my journal. They’d switch up year over year, but one thing remained the same—I always had nine girls and two boys. Because I was in control, so I got to decide. Life was certain and sweet!

Fast forward to my late teens when my doctor informed me that pregnancy may be a bit difficult for me. I was diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 14 and going off my meds wasn’t an option if I wanted to stay seizure free. And having a seizure while pregnant wouldn’t be good for a baby. Not remotely thinking about childbirth at that moment (other than my future children’s genders and names), I felt the conversation more of a bother than anything else. Yet, it stuck in the back of my mind.

I married at 27 and immediately, the questions came: “When are you going to begin having all of those 11 kids?” “How soon will you start a family?”

For the first time since my doctor started discussing pregnancy with me nearly 10 years earlier, I got scared. Between that time and the time I became Mrs. Pattee, my platelets decreased (due to my medication) to a much more than below average rate. I had researched the birth defects and diseases my medicine was known to cause. I had too much information—information that caused me to feel that making it out of pregnancy as a healthy mom and with a healthy child was anything but certain and definitely something I couldn’t control.

So, I put off the decision to have children until my 30th birthday at which time I realized that nothing in life is certain and some things are worth the risk. Having children, to me, was one of those things worth risking.

It’s funny, because once I made the decision, I didn’t look back. My anxiety melted away. I moved forward doing everything I could to be healthy and focused on learning about the baby growing inside of me.

Ultimately, nothing I was nervous about prior to getting pregnant materialized. My baby boy arrived healthy and with a full head of red hair, screaming and ready to take on the world. I had other complications though—pre-eclampsia, a near stroke at birth, the inability to produce milk and nurse my baby. But all these things, however scary or frustrating in the moment, had quick solutions.

When I think of the potential complications I didn’t experience and the minor ones that I did, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for medical advances that made a happy and healthy mother and son and an ecstatic new father our reality. I am also overwhelmed with sadness when I think of places in the world that do not have access to the same or better medical advances—advances, that had I not had, would have made our family’s reality look much different.

ONE.org unapologetically asks for your voice. It doesn’t care on which side of the political lines you find yourself, the color of your skin, your socio-economic status, or your profession. It asks for your passion, your compassion, and your commitment to make a difference by missioning with them to “[raise] public awareness and [pressure] political leaders to support smart and effective policies and programs that are saving lives, helping to put kids in school and improving futures.” Bettering global health care, and maternal health care, is just one of the many initiatives ONE.org supports. You can see a full list here: http://www.one.org/us/issues.

Today, I’m not much different than I was as a child. I still like to feel certainty and a degree of control in my life. But, my definition of control has shifted and instead of thinking of things in terms of what I can control, I think of things in terms of what I can influence. And even one signature on a petition, one bit of knowledge, and one informed risk can impact great and positive change.

As a side note: I got my two boys! And as it turned out, my husband didn’t like any of my 11 names from any of my journals. The girls? Well, I’ll relish in my relationship with my mom, three sisters, mother in law, and four sisters in law, because apparently, marrying a guy who had four brothers wasn’t going to help me get nine girls of my own, let alone one!

Jyl Johnson Pattee is the hostess of the weekly #gno parties on Twitter, which started in September 2008. She is a social media enthusiast, mompreneur, cause marketer, and founder of Mom It Forward. Find her on Twitter at @jylmomIF.

TAGS: From ONE Members, Mother's Day Every Day Campaign, Mothers Day 2011, ONE, ONE Mom Bloggers