Good Days Bad Days

Some days are good days and some days are bad days.  Yesterday was a bad day and today was a good day.  I am trying to eat healthy and take good care of myself...anything to lift me out of my funk.  I feel like have lost time.  I have so much to do, the guest room is a mess, I still have all the baby stuff sitting around the house as as a sad reminder that my sweet baby didn't come home with me but I have a hard time being at home alone.  At first  all I wanted to do was sit on my bed and lose myself searching for answers on the computer.  I guess I am just going through different phases of grief and healing.  The good news is their are rays of light but the fog is still there.  I will keep pushing through and hope that some sort of normal will return.  

Thank God for my son.  He is smiling bouncing breath of fresh air.  We are hoping for a new baby.  That baby will never replace my sweet baby girl we lost but could complete our family of 3 children.  We will love her forever.  She is there buried deep forever in the healing break in my heart.   I am so sorry that we along with others in our life didn't get to know her.  We will have to wait all of us until the day we meet again in heaven.  Until then I will carry on, try to make her proud.  I will try to be the best mom I can be for her, for my son and hopefully for another baby to come.

New Hope

A few weeks after we lost our sweet baby girl, Anna,our adoption attorney told us she had received a call from someone who maybe interested in us as adoptive parents for her child.  We struggled with what to do but knew we just weren't ready yet.  As hard as it was we had to pass.  We worried that we may not get this opportunity again anytime soon but felt that it would not be fair to the baby, to the birth family, to Anna or to us to move forward with a new situation right then.  We missed Anna so much we did not want another baby.  We wanted her, we still do but now feel we might have room in our home and our heart for a third baby.  

We feel ready to try again.  We will  trust in God's grace and timing.  This doesn't mean that the pain of losing Anna is gone.  It is still there and I believe always will be.  I must admit somehow I feel a pang of guilt at even the idea of adding another child to our family.  Anna is a part of our family and there is no other baby who can replace her.  I will love her for the rest of my life and look forward to being reunited with her in the next life. We had talked about having three children and now I think that may just happen.  I do believe that three might be the right number for us.   I have always liked the number three.  It reminds me of the trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost and both my husband I were born on the third of the month.  Three is a good number. I have no idea what will happen or when but I once again have a seed of hope in my heart. 

Oasis of Fun, Hope and Laughter

It was my son's birthday party, the day I had been dreading.  I just didn't feel up to it and it had been hard to think about celebrating since the loss of my sweet baby girl.  This party was a labor of love for my son who is a text-book extrovert and loves a party.  The party was a bit late but I was bound and determined to have it for him.  So I did, I just wasn't sure how I was going to make it through the day. 

I went into the event feeling a bit nervous, I am not a great entertainer,  I was a bit overwhelmed despite the fact I had it at one of those places where they do most of the work for you.  I knew I would be seeing people I had not seen since the birth and which meant talking about our loss. 

Thank God for the kids.  16 of them running around having fun and wearing party hats.  They created such fun and festivities that I was swept up in it all and actually enjoyed myself.  I laughed, talked, enjoyed watching the kids and my son's delight at all the attention and my husband I even discussed getting together with some of the people we saw there.  I felt happy and somewhat normal.  Life is still there.  I am so glad I had the party.  Thank God for the healing power of good friends and kids with sticky fingers, wearing party hats and batting around balloons.  They grabbed me out of my sorrow even if it was just for an afternoon.  This oasis of fun and laughter is a guide post telling me that joy is still there.  This gives me hope and renews my desire to move forward in learning to live with my loss in a way that will let me fully participate in life....the happy as well as the sad part of it

Misery Needs Company

Today I am simply mad.  Everything irritates me.  I am the one who is out of sync with life.  I am the one lost in my grief and unable to see the world  with all of the good in it.  All I can feel right now is my loss of the watching my sweet daughter grow up.  I feel so awful.  I know that I need to reach out and find others who understand this swirl of sadness and anger that is currently my life.  Where are they.  I went to a mom's group this morning and was surrounded by wonderful women and felt completely and totally alone.  They understand the struggles of motherhood and tending to small children but I don't believe they understand the pain of having one of those precious little ones gone, no longer needing care and feeding.  Thank God that they don't have to know this pain.

In my mind I rail against the sense of being different, being one of those people bad things happen to.  I look for the exit door from this personal hell and can't find it.  People tell me that this is something I will learn to live with and not necessarily "get over" which just fuels my anger and sorrow.  I do not look forward to living my life with the heaviness of this sadness.   I just don't know how to do that.  I pray to God for peace.  I know he is there but I am less sure that I was before that payers work.  When someone dies does that mean that a prayer has not been said right or does God just allow what will be to happen in which case why bother asking him for anything?  I guess I am mad at God.  It feels like a sin but in my heart of hearts that is what I feel.  This leaves me feeling more alone than ever.  Perhaps I am weak that my faith can be shaken or perhaps I am just human.  I prefer to think the later, but I am not really sure.

I will continue marching forward hoping for some relief and peace.  I have yet to find it but will search for it again today and again tomorrow.  I do believe God and life is generally good and that my family deserves a joyful wife and mother.  Hopefully I will find a way to give that to them and to myself.

Searching for the Light

I have very purposely constructed a life that revolves around being a mom.  I volunteer in my son's classroom belong to mom type organizations and attend playgroups.  I left my job which kept me away from son way too much to spend more time with him but now I am not sure this new life of mine fits.  When I lost my daughter at birth things changed.  Some of those little things that brought joy now bring pangs of pain.  It is hard to see all the new babies and to realize that my precious daughter will not be going to the infants playgroup and that she will not need the clothes the bigger babies have outgrown.  

She is fine.  I believe she is safe in the arms of God but I am left here without her.  I miss her everyday.  My grief is new.  We lost her only 6 weeks ago.  My pain ebbs and flows.  Sometimes I can see joy and humor in life and other times I am enveloped in sadness or angry at the world.  I don't know if t his is normal or not, but whether it is or it isn't it is my world right now.  I am hoping to get to the other side of grief but the path is unclear and I feel more lost than ever before.

I keep going, putting one foot in front of the other and doing all the things I feel I should.  Rarely are the things I do "want tos"  they are really "should dos".  I am hoping that by continuing to participate in my life I will at some point start to feel some sense of normalcy but I must admit it drains every once of energy out of me that I have.  I bow out of most of the girls night outs.   I fall into bed after my son's bath and prayers.  I am exhausted from living my life on edge.  I hope this will end soon.  I have never suffered from this type of grief, so I don't really know.  All I can do is hope.

I am waiting for a call back from the social worker at the hospital with information on infant loss support groups.  I hope I can find one that feels right.  I also am trying to figure out how to add some non-mom things to my life.  I have a need to interact with other women in a way that is not based on kids.  I though about joining a book club but I am not sure I am up to reading an entire book right now.  I quite frankly am not really sure how to go about this.  I will have to add this to my prayer requests.  Hopefully God will show me the way.   I am desperately trying to find the path forward but I am still lost in the dark.  I know the light is out there.  I hope to find it soon.  For any one else out there looking for a way through the grief, know you have my prayers and that I pray for light in your life again too.

God bless.

Now I Know it Can Happen to Me

Sometime in life things happen and you are never, ever the same.  As much as I wish my life was like it was before, it will never be.  I have a hard time accepting this but I know deep down is true.  Before I lived a life where things mostly worked out and if they didn't I could usually in the end say that it was for the best.  Those awful things that happened, well they happened to someone else.  Not me.  That was the person I was when I walked into the hospital expecting to welcome my daughter.  We had an ultrasound and knew that things were not quite right but everyone said that things should be just fine.   With a few days in the neonatal ICU she would be just fine.  Of course I believed that, with all my heart.  Things always work out...just have faith.  I had complete trust that I was immune from tragedy.  Several hours later things changed.  My daughter arrived stillborn.  Life as I knew it was shattered.   

The doctor told us they did everything they could.   Minutes before they had a heartbeat but despite their best efforts were unable to revive our daughter.  I cried and cried.  We held our beautiful baby and muddled through that night and the days that followed. We picked out a tiny casket and got together the going home outfit and gave it to the funeral home for her to be buried in.  Everything felt backwards.  I thought it was that we were buying a burial plot instead of one the high chairs I had been looking at just a week before, and it was that.   It was that but it was something else too.

When we lost my daughter I changed.  I can never be the person I was before.  That innocence and trust that things will just work themselves out is not longer part of who I am.  I have joined the ranks of those to whom bad things happen.  I am part of the club that no-one wants to be a member of.    At times I wish with all my might that I could go back to how it was before but I know that will never happen. Still I have much to be grateful for.  I thank God for my son and and the light that he has been and continues to be in my life, friends who have rallied around me and for my husband and family who are also grieving with me.

I am still trying to figure out exactly who this new person is that I have become.  From all outside appearances nothing has changed but my heart which has been broken holds the light of the little girl who couldn't stay and the world I live in seems less certain.  I hope the new me will in some way be a better person.  That I will live more fully, be more compassionate and hold more dearly that which I have, for I now know that not all stories have a happy ending.