"My Sister's Keeper"

Sometimes I like to go into Kyler's room while he is sleeping and just stare at him. As I am looking at him in a daze, I think about just how lucky Josh and I are to have such a healthy and happy baby. I also think about how amazing life is. We created Kyler with just one simple act of love. He grew inside of me for nine months - everyday developing more and more. The creation of life is such a beautiful process, and I have been fortunate enough to have experienced it first hand.

This process has really changed me as a person. For obvious reasons, I am now a mother and I have a child that relies on me. But I also feel as though I have a new found appreciation for all parents, especially my own. If I would have known just how much my parents cared about and loved me, I probably wouldn't have been so horrible to them in my teen years. A parent is a very special person - you have to be in order to love someone as much as a parent loves their child.

I just got finished reading, "My Sister's Keeper" by Jodi Picoult. This is a story about a sister's battle between keeping her sister alive and the right to her own body. If you have read any of Picoult's work, you know that she likes to write from the different viewpoints of the characters. To see the many sides to every story, each chapter views the story through someone else's eyes. "My Sister's Keeper" was a very difficult story for me to read for the sheer fact that I am now a mother. I probably wouldn't have really thought much about it had I not been a mother. Anna was created by her parents as a "perfect match" for her older sister with leukemia. They were only going to take the cord blood from Anna and use it to help her sister, but it didn't seem to stop there. This really got the parent side of me thinking. What would I do if I were faced the a situation like this one? As a parent who would do anything to help either one of her children, what could you do? If I had one child dying and another one suing me for the right to her own body, what would I do? This book really got me thinking about how thankful I am to have a healthy child, what I would do if I didn't have a healthy child, and hoping that I will never have to deal with a similar situation. I highly recommend it.