As surgery approaches, I find myself thinking about another medical office. Another moment that altered everything.

Nearly twenty years ago, I was fifteen months into motherhood and fully confident I was crushing it.

My son loved Celine Dion lullabies. Or so I thought.

Turns out, I was the only one enjoying those. If Spotify had been a thing twenty years ago, I would have been a superfan in the top 1 percent of listeners. Guaranteed.

At fifteen months old, Zach was diagnosed as profoundly deaf.

I can still picture the audiology office at GBMC. The quiet tone. The careful words. The way the providers looked at us with compassion before the weight of what they were saying even fully landed.

They did not rush it. They did not soften it. They just held space for us.

And then the words were there. Profoundly deaf.

Fifteen months of whispered “I love you.”

Fifteen months of bedtime songs.

Fifteen months of believing he heard every word.

I remember holding him in my living room and sobbing in a way that felt ancient. Ugly, loud, chest-collapsing sobs. I told him I was sorry. Over and over.

Sorry I made you less than perfect.

Sorry your life would be harder.

Sorry I did not know sooner.

The guilt was immediate and irrational, but it was real. In a matter of hours, I had built an entire imaginary future for him, and none of it was kind.

That day broke me. For about twenty-four hours, I let myself unravel.

And then someone handed me a poem called Welcome to Holland.

If you have never read it, it is about thinking you are boarding a plane to Italy and landing somewhere entirely different. It is about grieving the trip you thought you were taking while slowly learning to see the beauty in the place you actually arrived.

At first, I did not want Holland.

I wanted Italy.

I wanted the version of motherhood I had imagined. The conversations. The ease. The normal I thought we had lost.

But over time, I started noticing the windmills.

I noticed the brilliance of technology. The steady hands of doctors who became family. The resilience growing quietly in my boys. The strength forming in me.

Resilience did not look heroic. It looked like color-coded calendars, a diaper bag full of medical paperwork, late-night research, and sitting in waiting rooms convincing myself that information was power.

Then came September 21, 2007 – one month after his first cochlear implant surgery.

A small room. Wires everywhere. Auditory toys filling every nook and cranny. Hope sitting tightly next to fear.

Our team told us they were going to turn on his implant. Zach was playing with a plastic drum set, and he stopped. It is a moment that, when I am old and gray, I will still remember with absolute clarity.

And my perfect little boy with broken ears heard me tell him I love him for the first time.

Then he proceeded to rip that foreign object stuck to the side of his head off and throw it across the room.

Baby steps (preserved somewhere in the archives on video).

There are moments that divide your life into before and after.

That was one of them.

I still tear up thinking about it. I probably always will.

Then in March 2010, we did it again.

Ethan came screaming into the world, not to be left behind. Also perfect. Also with broken ears. I joke that it’s how I grow them. They were both 7 days early, both 7 pounds 14 ounces and 21.5 inches long…and profoundly deaf.

This time, we knew on the second day of his life. The grief was still there, but it did not consume me the same way. I already knew the road. We already had our people. The team at GBMC who had become family. The steady reassurance. The quiet confidence that this was going to be okay.

I walked that road again while still grieving my mother, who had passed just three months before.

Grief and action. Side by side.

Fast forward to today.

Zach is a thriving college sophomore. Ethan is living his best high school life. They both love music. They move through the world with confidence and kindness and a quiet strength that humbles me.

All the fears I built in those first twenty-four hours have been replaced by reality.

They were never broken.

They were becoming.

And somewhere along the way, so was I.

What I did not understand in those first twenty-four hours is that Holland would come with unexpected gifts.

We learned sign language, which turns out is incredibly useful across a crowded room, at the beach, or when you need to communicate something silently and dramatically in public. It also makes for a compelling college essay.

Technology evolved. Sound can now stream directly into their implants. Which leads to the lifelong household question: are you ignoring me, or are you actually deaf?

Their journey shaped them in ways I never could have scripted. They carry a compassion for others that is instinctive. They notice people who feel left out. They understand difference without being intimidated by it.

And somewhere along the way, mentoring other moms walking this same road became one of the quiet joys of my life. The frantic, terrified version of me from nearly twenty years ago now gets to look another mother in the eyes and say, “It’s going to be okay.”

Holland gave us windmills.

It also gave us perspective, community, empathy, humor, and a language that belongs only to us.

This past summer, standing in the actual Netherlands, I thought about that poem again. About how often life has rerouted me. About how every time I thought I was flying to Italy, I somehow landed somewhere unexpected.

And standing there, I felt something I did not expect.

Peace.

Not the kind that forgets the grief. The kind that honors it. The kind that looks around and thinks, this is beautiful too.

So when I say I can do hard things, it did not begin with surgery.

It began in an audiology office at GBMC, where compassionate providers delivered news that broke my heart and quietly began building my strength.

There are moments that rearrange you.

That was one of them.

And every brave decision I make now carries a little bit of that room with it.

A week from now, I will be thinking of tulips and windmills as I step into the next unexpected place.