The Power of Work

A couple of years ago, my wife, Alycia, was pregnant with our 5th and youngest child. It was an unexpected pregnancy, but welcome surprise! At the time, we already had a 2 year old and under 1 year old triplets, all through IVF. This was a spontaneous pregnancy and we were excited and grateful!

We had just recently moved to North Carolina, and were in the process of trying to make new friends there. I was working remotely as a government contractor in NASA’s organization. If I had to describe life at this time in one word, I would say it was splendid. Everything seemed to be going perfectly. We had just sold our home in Utah and moved into a beautiful home in North Carolina. Work was going well, and of course adding to our family with Alycia’s newly discovered pregnancy.

At about 12 weeks into her pregnancy, Alycia began to experience some complications. I’ll never forget how the coming months changed my life for the better. Although it was some of the most difficult, trying times we had ever faced as a family, I believe we came out of better. So many lessons were learned, as well as some incredible, miraculous events.

We had just wrapped up a short weekend at a cabin on Lake Norman. It was the week after Christmas, still a bit chilly. Around dinner time, Alycia started to have some bleeding. We packed all 6 of us into the car as quickly as we could and headed for the OB/GYN. We were informed that Alycia had a pretty severe subchorionic hematoma. She had experienced this with both of her previous pregnancies, but the doctors seemed a lot more cautious this go around and ordered that she be mostly on bed rest until the hematoma had time to reduce in size.

4 weeks later, Alycia’s water broke. At 16 weeks pregnant, there is not a lot that can be done about this. You just have to hope that things get better and that your baby can be ok. Alycia was sent to weekly specialist visits at Maternal Fetal Medicine. I’m sure some of you have been there. We were told that our little boy would likely not make it. That if he did survive he would have lifelong health complications. The reason being that he had no amniotic fluid around him. This is a critical time for lung development and amniotic fluid is needed for that.

After a few more weeks, and lots of prayers one of the Maternal Fetal Medicine visits showed some promise. Amniotic fluid was beginning to fill up around our little son. The doctors couldn’t explain why, but they expressed how positive of a sign that the pregnancy might be able to get on a healthy track again. At 22 weeks in her pregnancy, Alycia went into labor, collapsing on our kitchen floor one morning while getting some breakfast ready for the kids. A furiously paced ambulance ride later, we were in Charlotte, North Carolina in a special wing of the hospital for high risk pregnancies trying to stop her labor. While she was laboring, the NICU doctor had come to us to explain that if our son was born that night, his chances of surviving were extremely low. It was just to early and he was too little.

Through what I believe was some help from Heaven, The doctors and nurses were able to slow, and eventually stop Alycia’s labor all together. The next morning, the doctors explained that Alycia would be in the hospital until she delivered our son. they hoped she could make it to at least 28 weeks, preferably even longer if they could. It would turn out to be a little over 5 weeks. The hospital in Charlotte was not far from our home in mileage, but depending on the time of day it could take over an hour to get to or from the hospital to our home. With no family living nearby we relied heavily on visiting family from Utah and Puerto Rico as well as our new found friends from church so that I could go back and forth from the hospital every day, as well as trying to get the kids there when I could.

One night, after about a week or so of Alycia living in the hospital, I went to visit her after I had gotten our oldest 4 children to bed. We were watching an episode of the office where Michael has to lay somebody off. I thought to myself, “Could you imagine if you got laid off right now? That would really turn things upside down”. Two days later, I got a call from the owner of the contracting company I was working for. NASA was going to have to terminate 30% of the workforce that was on our contract. I was part of that 30%. My brother was visiting from Utah at the time. I remember walking downstairs to let him know what was happening. I think I was a bit in denial or maybe just shocked. It just seemed surreal that so many things would be crashing down at once.

At first, I didn’t want to tell Alycia. I felt she had enough on her plate already with everything going on in the hospital. The doctors were continuing to tell us that it would be touch and go for our little boy when he was born. Even if she was able to make it to 32 weeks or longer. He had gone without amniotic fluid for so long that they were worried about his lungs functioning properly when he was born.

At 27 weeks, with the help of God, and some incredible doctors and nurses, our son was born and rushed to be put on a ventilator. His lungs were working, but he needed some help. We had to be away from him for a couple of hours so they could intubate him and get him to a special floor in the NICU. All the ups and downs of this pregnancy, the turmoil with worrying about my wife, our son, my 4 other little children at home, and my employment situation, melted away as I got to see our 2 pound 7 ounce little miracle in his incubator. The NICU doctors set the expectation that he would have a long way to go, but they were confident that he was on the right track, and blown away that through everything with this pregnancy he was in the position he was.

3 Months later, we finally got to bring our youngest son home to meet his brothers and sisters. The triplets, being just 17 months old at the time, were interested, but fairly indifferent. Our oldest son was ready to dote on his little brother and wanted to be with him all the time. It truly was the climax to an arduous 7-8 months. We were just grateful to finally have our family back together, all under one roof.

Despite this miraculous moment, I still did not have a new job. I only had a couple years experience in the software world when I was laid off. I had not built very many connections in the industry yet and was finding it difficult to get my foot in the door somewhere. I felt that it was unfair that I had been let go from the NASA project. I had done enough to get by and sometimes received accolades for my performance. In retrospect, I could have done so much more during my time there to provide more value, to make myself more indispensable, to achieve/accomplish more. Had I worked harder would I still have been let go at the time I was? I will never know, but this experience changed the way I view work forever.

Thanks to a good friend, I got referred to a great company and was hired a couple months after we brought our baby boy home. I was determined to make this job stick and was ready to make some changes in my work life. Through everything that we had just experienced over the previous year as a family, I knew that I needed to provide value to this new company and provide it fast. I needed to solidify myself as a vital asset. This is where Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged come into play.

Ayn Rand and her works are, to say the least, controversial, but Atlas Shrugged holds a lot of great examples of trying to do your best work and achieve in your everyday work. Whether you are a stay at home parent, or a working parent, you have a difficult job. I think it’s important to try to achieve at the highest level at home, at work and wherever else you want to apply yourself. This could be in a sport, in the arts, or anything that you love. Working to be the best that you are capable of at home, at work, or at anything else can bring immense satisfaction. This is especially true when only comparing you to you. We shouldn’t be using others as measuring sticks of our success. Have you become better in comparison to the previous you? If you can say yes to that, then you have truly achieved, regardless of the achievements or accomplishments of anyone else.

A couple of notes from Atlas Shrugged that I think apply here. One of the main characters, Henry Rearden, observes “No matter how hard a struggle he had lived through in the past, he had never reached the ultimate ugliness of abandoning the will to act.” During my time being unemployed, I felt like I had reached that point. It had been a few months and a couple of jobs/interviews had already fallen through. This type of feeling can sneak in intra-day as well. Sometimes we get so overwhelmed with how many things need to get done. At home, it’s how many chores you have to do after the kids get to bed, or the up and down nature of having to do so much for your little ones that you just want to veg out on the couch. At work, struggling with a problem that is difficult to solve, it can be easier to devote your mind to an easier task, or even to just scrolling through emails/social media. Sometimes we give up on passions because we have hit a plateau. As parents, as people, we have to fight through this. We have to push through the difficulties, especially the extraordinarily difficult things. That crux is where character is continually built. Where you can look back and say to yourself “I did that, and I did that well”. It doesn’t always mean we won’t fail. Failing and failing fast is so important to improving.

Atlas Shrugged is chock full of nuggets about trying to become the best that you can be. I would recommend it to anyone. Reading it changed me and changed my life. It forced me to realize that I can do better as a dad, I can do better in my work, I can do better as a husband. Not only that I can be better at these things, but that I should be! I view my role as a husband, father and provider through a different lens than I did before. I am far from perfect in my pursuit to become better in all things life, but striving to achieve and accomplish more has made me feel so much more satisfaction. I of course have days where I waste time, where I make mistakes, where I lapse into some laziness. We all do, but as we try to improve in all facets of this life we can find a lot more joy and happiness.

From Elias Wyatt in Atlas Shrugged: “…because they know there is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it”. Whether it is in or out of the home, there are no lousy jobs. Achieve what you can, compare yourself to you, try to get better every day. It can only benefit us and our families as we TRY!

I would love to hear your thoughts. Have you read Atlas Shrugged, or any of her other novels? What drives you to succeed? What challenges do you face as a parent, an employee, a spouse?