if / else
I woke up this morning with that report-card feeling in my tummy. You know the one. It might have been more of a book-report feeling for you. Or a dentist’s-chair feeling. It’s the feeling deep in your tummy that makes smiling feel weird.
It’s because you know you have to do something that’s hard, or face the consequences of something you didn’t do well. Like studying or brushing your teeth.
Or growing a baby.
Oh, I know. I know it wasn’t my fault. Kind of. But I did a lot of things wrong and even though lots of people do the same things and still end up with a healthy baby, for me, that didn’t happen. For my baby, whose tests came back chromosomally normal, it is very likely something I did or something I just am caused him to die. It could have been my endometrial polyp or the fact I’m morbidly obese. Because it could have been those things, I feel I should have done more to fix them. I feel like I failed.
That’s the book-report feeling.
The dentist’s-chair feeling is because I have to let go and it’s going to be hard. I have to let go so I can do the things that will make room in my life for the new blessings to come. I have to trade the comfort of mourning for the fear that nothing will come to take its place.
This awful, awful fear that I’ll forget my baby only to realize no new joy is coming to rescue me from the emptiness.
Yet I know in my heart of hearts, in my tummy of tummies, that this fear is wrong. It doesn’t fit, doesn’t add up. One, I won’t forget Nathaniel. How could I ever? Ever? Two, new joy is promised to us again and again by our Lord.[1] Three, it may not look exactly like the joy I had pictured for myself, but I seem to have grown up just enough to recognize that God’s imagination might be better than mine.
So it’s time. It’s time to start getting up in the morning in the vicinity of sunrise. Time to start showering and getting dressed every day and not just when I have to leave the house. It’s time … really time… to put everything away. To put Nathaniel’s bunnies and sympathy cards into their own special memory box. To make a frame of his positive test, sonogram, and name in the sand photos. To find a new place in our lives for him that allows us to move forward both with and without him.
if not this, then what?
if not him, who else?
- John 15:10-11, Psalm 126:5, and my special favourite, Nehemiah 8:10b [↩]
Baby, one of the things I love most about you is your desire to grow, and to seek Him out when you are most vulnerable. That is something I can really thank God for! We are both blessed by Him, aren’t we?
We really are, babe. We most certainly are. =’)
The life that was created IS NEVER forgotten. No matter what we do, where go, how crazy life gets….we always remember. The comfort is given in the knowledge that our little ones are safe in God’s arms, waiting for us to hug them once again…not now, not for a while…but one day. I don’t think that as women and mothers’ it is possible to ever forget the little life that we once held….it’s been 13 years for me….my Andrzej (Andy) would have turned 12 next month (February 12).
Every spring I carefully clean and prepare a plum tree that we planted in the back, in remembrance. I always smile when the tree bursts with fruit and in a silly way, by enjoying the fruit of this tree….we can still enjoy a little bit of Andy down here on earth.