Loving Sully

"Keeping your heart oriented towards Sully is like walking back into the surf and letting the waves grind you into the sand again. It was all I could do to keep returning to the water to be hit again with everything he was and wasn't. I never could look up at those moments. I think if I had, I would have seen the air full of droplets sparkling like diamonds."

I think about these words constantly. I hang on to them because they perfectly picture my heart and my struggle. I need validation in that struggle. I have punished myself for struggling because what "good mother" would ever struggle to love a child. But, the more I think about it, the more I know without a doubt that love, true and deep, is always a struggle.

I have been fortunate in my marriage. It did start with all the butterflies we hope for in our American ideal of romantic love but also has grown to a deeper level - what really is more like love than those beginning butterflies. Motherhood has been a bit different. I guess that first pregnancy has something similar to those butterflies - everything is new and exciting. You want a baby but really have no idea what you've gotten yourself into. I think many of us picture it being easy to love our children (before they get here). But then the sleepless nights come and tantrums and the nightmare of potty training and so on. I certainly have not always felt warm fuzzy loving thoughts in the middle of the mundane of life. But no matter what, Brad is my husband, and Ella and Zane are my children and I choose to turn back to them and to care for them and to lay my life down for them.

And now, Sully is my child, too. And it does feel like turning my face into driving rain when all I want to do is run for shelter. Loving him is to let the waves grind me into the sand. It does take everything in me to "keep returning to the water to be hit again with everything" he is and he isn't. For now, I have to let go of the pressure I put on myself to be a certain way. I have to embrace the small ways I love him and ways I am "keeping my heart oriented towards" him. I have named him. Is that not love? I am carrying him. That has to be love. I still smile when I feel him move - something I find almost miraculous for myself to do but it must mean I love him. This, without a doubt, is the hardest thing I have ever done.