After I hung up the phone, my hands were sweaty and shaky, and tears covered my eyes. Good thing no one saw my pale face. I couldn’t concentrate or tell anyone the terrible news. How could I? “I will have an ill child? It can’t happen to me.”

After few minutes, I calmed dawn, walked to my supervisor’s office and asked for permission to leave work and see the doctor. She let me. It isn’t safe to drive, when you are scared and can’t concentrate, but I drove to the doctor’s office.

“Olga, we can do an amniocentesis test to make sure the ultrasound results are correct,” the doctor said.

“How do you perform this test?” I asked.

“With a needle we will poke your stomach and will take a small amount of amniotic fluid to check for genetic abnormalities. We don’t have to do it today. You can talk to your husband and let us know of your decision.”

The doctor gave me a brochure with this information. I spoke with Oleg at home. He was calm, but I worried.

“Our child is healthy. Everything will be okay,” he said.

In the brochure I read that there is a 60% miscarriage chance after this test. I called the doctor.

“We will not do this test,” I said. “Even if you did the test and it was abnormal, we would still not abort the baby. We know abortion is a sin, and we love our baby so much. We will pray, and God will help us.”

Oleg didn’t show that he worried, but I did. I couldn’t calm down. Being pregnant, I still had to continue working, drive children to Mom’s house in early mornings, pick them up after work, clean, cook and take care of the children. At night I would wake up at 2 or 3 A.M. and pray to God, begging Him to heal our baby. Only Mom, one of my sister and few friends knew about this problem. I was embarrassed to tell this news to someone or ask for prayers. I kept it all to myself. “How can I go back to work and show him to my co-workers? How can I show a disabled child to my friends and family? What would this say about me?” I thought.

When the time came for our baby to be born, I was in tears and couldn’t imagine what he would look like. But God heard our prayers and saw that we were not ready to accept a disabled child into our family. With tears of joy, we welcomed our healthy baby Michael. For us it was a miracle from God! Michael’s name means “Who is like God”.

When we brought Michael home, at first David and Kristina were happy to see him, but then they started acting up, crying and being jealous. Oleg was at work, and I thought, “What is going on?” Then I understood that they needed more of my attention, and I had to learn how to be a mother of three children.

Being parents of three is vastly different than being parents of two. I wanted to stay home to breastfeed Michael. WIC, my employer, supported my choice to combine maternity leave, saved sick and vacation leave, and time off without pay to enable me to be off work for eleven months.

…….

When I returned to work, there were some changes at the WIC program due to budget constraints. This required all clerks to also be cross-trained as Nutrition Assistants. Thus, in addition to scheduling appointments, issuing WIC vouchers, and answering a multiple-lined phone, my new duties included diet and weight assessments, checking hemoglobin and teaching the nutrition classes.

This offered several challenges. I was scared of blood. To do a hemoglobin test, I had to poke a client’s finger and deal with the blood. I also had to speak in front of people, but had no confidence to do so. How do you get up in front of a group of people when you have an accent and have no confidence in your ability to speak? I expressed these and other concerns to my boss.