Chapter One — The Night Before
Trent and I had been married just over a year when I became pregnant with Caleb, both of us genuinely excited despite the fact that, at twenty-four and twenty-six, we were younger than most of our friends who’d started families. We’d built a modest but comfortable life together in a small rental house outside Nashville, Trent working steadily as an electrician’s apprentice while I finished my associate’s degree in early childhood education, planning to eventually work in exactly the kind of classroom I imagined our own future children might someday attend.
I want to describe, honestly, how genuinely happy that pregnancy felt for most of its duration, because understanding the specific joy we’d both anticipated makes the devastating shift in that delivery room considerably more painful to fully process. We’d painted a nursery together, argued good-naturedly over names, attended every prenatal appointment with the specific, hopeful attention of parents genuinely excited for the life ahead of them.
Our twenty-week anatomy scan had shown no markers suggesting any chromosomal condition, a result that, combined with my age and general health throughout the pregnancy, had left us with no particular reason to anticipate anything beyond an ordinary, healthy delivery. I understand now that Down syndrome can occur regardless of these ordinary prenatal indicators, but at the time, that unexpected diagnosis landed with a specific, disorienting shock that neither Trent nor I had any real preparation for navigating.
