My Pregnancy Story

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It was a normal day for me at Wright State University when I saw the Equip4Life table and their members passing out roses to everyone for Valentine’s Day. They stopped me and asked me if I would like a rose. I felt really special and I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I took the rose and brought it home with me. About week later, I had been feeling ill and my fiancé mentioned that he wanted to get me a pregnancy test. I began to pace around my empty house and I called my Grandmother and to this day I remember her words “Paola, if you are pregnant you will get through it just like I did and just like millions of women before you”.

I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t visualize “getting through it”, maintaining my identity, my dreams and my life while being a mom.
We eventually went to the hospital for we thought I may have miscarried without knowing it. We waited, and finally the doctor came in and said, “Based on your blood work you are most definitely pregnant. 5 weeks”. Could this really be happening? All I could think of was that my parents were going to kill me, Zac was going to leave me and I would never get my Ph.D. (As I was working on my bachelor’s at the time).

My fiancé was scared and he knew I was very pro-life but he hated to see me feel that my dreams would shatter. And so he said, “Babe you could always get an abortion; your life doesn’t have to be over”. 
  I know at the time he didn’t mean it, he was scared for me and for us. And he felt at fault. I said, “I could never do that”. But in my mind, and in my fear, it seemed plausible. I wanted a reversal. I wanted to be where I was before all of this. I then told myself I never could do it because of how pro-life I was and how I didn’t want to be a hypocrite and I can honestly admit that. My fiance took me in his arms and told me “we  are going to get through this”.
About a week later, I experienced heavy bleeding and we rushed to the hospital again to see if the baby was still alive. When they finally took me to get an ultra sound, there on the screen, I saw everything in existence in one innocent, vulnerable, strong, magnitude of human glory flickering before me. It was her. My little (name).

She was so tiny and yet I knew her in all of her wisdom in that moment. The nurse asked me if I wanted to hear the heartbeat. And when I heard that sound, I was beside myself. All thoughts of wanting a reversal had disappeared. I had something not one thing in the world could match in its value. I could never lose her. I heard the infinity of creation and the might of God in that sound. I saw her entire life, who she was and who she would be with each vibration.

That sound alone carried the spiritual and physical structure of the only human in the world that was her. I was overwhelmed by it and the nature of its beauty put me and my years to shame.
I continued with school while pregnant and I continued with work. I even volunteered in my last semester at the Equip4Life table at school to give back to other students what Equip4Life had given to me; support, encouragement and hope.

I now have my Bachelor’s degree and will be moving on to my Master’s in Theology and my once fiance is now my awesome husband. Motherhood was not a death sentence. It was an initiation into my spiritual development. I do not have less now that I am a mother. I have more!

Having an abortion would have negated and subtracted all of this from me. And even more so, it would have plucked away the phenomenal life of that powerful girl that I bore.
  Giving myself so that she could have a self is the ultimate epitome of what God did for us. And following in these prints of his nature is something that nothing can surpass. To this day, I still have the rose that Equip4Life gave me.

I know that God sent Equip4Life right in my direction that day to give it to me, because he knew I was pregnant and he wanted me to feel that he was there for me and that I had support.

God’s warriors work in his mysterious ways and I am so grateful to Equip4Life and to the Women’s Center for being his warriors. Because it’s things like a small rose that can be a reminder that beauty and hope are not always in the apparent and in what you can see, but that they lie in the small lantern that God is holding in the darkness.

-Arianna Vairico

A poem for my girl:

My heart never saw true reason, I never knew a dream, I never had one true thought or one true beginning. Never did I know my way, never have I understood. Never did I know anything in my entire life. Never have I loved. Never did I encounter meaning until there was you. From my womb you were born and in my womb you were perfectly formed and infused with the spirit of the infinite. And before you were in my womb, you already existed in the mind of the divine. From the moment I heard your heart beat at 5 weeks I heard the sound of your entire world, your soul, your person and who you were and who you would be. In that eternal sound I knew you already and I stood in awe of your wonder. From the moment I saw you swimming in my belly I was the most blessed among the world. You have changed my life for all of eternity. And in your weakness, in your nature and in your vulnerability you have such a wisdom that you put me in my years to shame. I am inspired and in awe of you my child. My heart before this… just never knew…♡

-Arianna Vairico

Photo info: Photos are of my ultrasound, my husband and I at my college graduation ceremony