Squeaky Shoes

A very dear group of women gathered together this past week to celebrate the impending arrival of this little one I’m carrying now. It was such a lovely evening down to the very last detail: a beautiful home filled with fresh flowers, a delicious and savory dinner, choices of wine, decadent desserts and best of all, the dearest of friends each of whom over this past year have loved me in their own special way through one of the hardest seasons of my life.

And they brought gifts, oh so many sweet little gifts for this baby boy! Out of one pastel blue bag I pulled a pair of shoes that will squeak when walked on. My friend shouted out that they would fit him next summer. Next summer. We will have a next summer with this baby. All the way home her words played through my head. Do I dare believe we will really have a next summer? And the oh so fun bright green Christmas overalls, will he really be with us this next Christmas to wear them? Hope is pressing forward, pushing me onward and I want to embrace it, and yet it feels so very dangerous still. But I can’t help but fall into it, to want to embrace it. How compelling hope is.

I have been regularly meeting with a couple of my friends for a few years and lately we have been reading the Francis Schaeffer book, Affliction, together. We discussed this past week the topic she brings up of our asking the “why” questions. My friend gave the example of her 11 year old daughter asking her father (a highly intelligent surgeon) a question and then doubting his answer as if she really knew more than him. It is so easy to see how she doesn’t even have the fundamental knowledge to be able to grasp the true answer which her father could try to explain to her. How very like her I am to demand an answer and think that I am capable enough to judge whether it is the right answer or not.
I forget or don’t want to accept that I am the created being, not the Creator. Then I think on how very patient this father is with his daughter, how caring, and how bright and delightful this little girl truly is, and it makes me wonder if despite my questioning and doubting that perhaps I could be loved in that way by a “father”, too.

I see that I will never understand the why of what has happened in our lives. I see that as this little boy comes to us I will always think of Sully as well. They are so connected. I don’t know why this little boy has the hope of staying with us for a lifetime and our last didn’t. It’s very strange to think that if all had been normal last time this little life wouldn’t even be here growing in my belly. And yet, this is our story. As Brad keeps reminding me lately, we each have to live our own story. Everyone has suffering and heartache. No one can escape it in this life. But then there is the hope that pushes above it all in the gift of squeaky shoes, there are the friends who gather around you to cushion your fall and to pick you back up and help you celebrate life despite the loss and the tears. This, too, is part of my story.

A New Season

The first half of this month was hard emotionally. I was prepared for some of it and other times, as always, it would just surprise me. I think that's when it was the hardest. This past week has felt different. On Friday I woke up and went through our normal morning routine but somehow, I felt something different. I felt hopeful. I felt like a new season was beginning for us. I felt joyful and excited about our next child coming to us and really thought for one of the first times that all would be well. Not perfect but that, like I just wrote, a new season was upon us, a season of joy and new hope.

A friend sent us this scripture recently as her prayer for herself and for us. I think about it all the time: "And now, God, do it again - bring rains to our drought-stricken lives. So those who planted crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest. So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing..." Psalm 126:4-6.

The weeping mother

I cried more today than I expected. Everything just hit me in that way, and maybe because it is the one year anniversary of his birth I allowed myself the liberty to feel it all and weep, no keeping it together or carrying on with normal life, just stop and cry. I kept thinking of an image another mother who lost her son gave to me, the image of how we build a room onto our emotional house and in that room is the weeping mother. Over time, we go in that room less often but she will always be a part of who we are. Today it felt like I opened the door for her and she walked all through my house.

Tonight, I found myself sorting laundry in a desperate attempt to ground myself in something very mundane and ordinary, something necessary and functional, something non-emotional. I am very tired and emotionally drained. I thought I would want to relive each day of Sully's six days but I told Brad tonight that I don't know if I have it in me to take myself there each day. We relived so much today, so many memories. It has been good but very hard. We are grateful to the dear friends in our lives who have shown us particular tenderness today with cards and calls and beautiful tulips. You have been Love surrounding us once again...

Surround Me

Brad put on the music that he made Sully's memorial movie to last year. This was the second song and it fit so well then and seemed to even more now. As I heard the gentle guitar and then these words I just lost it. Everything came rushing back so vividly, with the same force of the ache that I felt then, that I feel now...

Surround Me
Ben Taylor

Love surround me with all your reach, now while we're here alone
Now our bodies our ocean our beach, blessings of waves and stone
Floating a lonely sound you found me
Now that the tide is finally down

Surround me, surround me
Surround me

Love, move for me, roll beneath the sky
Shadows and silver cross your face, pools of moonlit night
Weak from standing on sandy ground, you found me
Now that I'm finally fallen down

Surround me, surround me
Surround me

Love surround me while you can till these waves get cold
Gone too deep I can not stand, I burned before I froze
Running to save my life and leaving you
And now in the heat of this dreadful dry
I'm needing you

Surround me, surround me
Surround me

The gift of Sully

One year. I feel like I'm in a time warp. It seems like a life time ago that Sully was with us. Other times I can hardly believe that it has been an entire year that he came and went. I told a friend the other day how disappointed I am in myself sometimes. So much fell away while I carried Sully and in the days surrounding his life, all of the meaningless struggles, the stupid cares that sometimes could cloud my vision. I thought that I would forever be changed after Sully, that I would never again struggle with some of the things I had before he came to me. But, a year later, I am still just walking through daily existence with the same tendencies and proclivities towards sin that I once had. I still lose my temper at times with my children, I still struggle in certain relationships, I still feel overwhelmed by dishes and laundry. A year later, I still am just like everyone else. But Brad reminds me that while we haven't been made perfect, we have been forever changed.
We will celebrate Sully's life tomorrow. In the morning on our way to school, we will take six heart balloons to his playground and tie them on his swing. Ella and Zane want to take their Sully picture books to school to share with their friends. After dropping them off, Brad and I will go together to find our Sully tulips, this the final journey finishing a year of my monthly quest. Then, we will head to the beach where we last said good bye to our boy. I think I am looking forward to the solitude of the beach at this time of year, to the magnificence of the ocean reminding me that Sully is a part of something so much larger than I can comprehend. We've promised the kids a celebratory lunch and so we will pick them both up at noon and head somewhere fun (they have voted for either McDonald's or Moe's - kid's are so easy to please - me 8 months pregnant not so much). Zane and I picked out a rainbow cupcake mix and Diego cupcake liners the other day for us to make on Sully's birthday afternoon. After dinner, we'll take out his candle holders and light them in honor of his life and dive into the sweet treats. At some point during the day, we hope to look through our special book of Sully's photos and remember our favorite moments with him.
I think it will be a good day mixed with tearful moments, but even those will be good to have. These seem like small activities that we have chosen for the day but the quietness and simplicity of it all feels right for our family. What I want most is to celebrate the gift he was to us and the ways that he did change us for the better.

It's coming

I sense it with everything in me. It is now less than a month for the year marker. As I drove to get my 11 month Sully tulips I thought about how next time it would be an entire year since he was born and died. I talked with a friend whose little one shares the same birthday as my Sully. I wanted to know the details of what she was doing, how she was growing all though I can imagine everything. We couldn't talk long because her little one began screaming in the background and needed her - a pretty good indicator of the 11 month stage. So, I went on their blog and checked out the daily details that way. It's so strange. All I want to do is see every detail, to see that sweet face and imagine my Sully but at the same time it just hurts so much to do that. What an odd push and pull I feel within me.

I imagine what I would have been doing at this point in preparation for our third turning one had everything been different, had he been well. In just three weeks we would have had a birthday cake and presents. Ella and Zane would have been so excited. I wonder how to mark the year instead. I know I want to light his candles for each of his days, the sterling circus shaped holders I bought for him when I first learned of my pregnancy should parade candles somewhere, somehow. Should I give a gift to each of my children since presents should always be at a birthday celebration? What about the day he died? What do you do on that day?

I feel my anxiety about this pregnancy growing immensely. I know it has a reason and it's place but I also wonder if it is connected to the fact that this year anniversary is slowly coming upon us, a year since I gave birth to a child destined to die. I find myself worried about things in this pregnancy fearing that somehow I will end up with empty arms again. I don't want empty arms again...

A New Year

I am ready for it. I want it, all things new. I want the hope and possibility of days being brighter and full of happier times. I feel myself embracing it as I eagerly return all of the Christmas decorations to the attic, as I clean out old toys and boxes full of things not used in years, as we empty out Zane's room and wash it from top to bottom in preparation for the kid's bunk beds. There is something very cathartic about it all to me. Underneath the bustle of all this cleaning and sorting activity is what can only be hope that 2009 will be very different from this past year.

There is also the nagging thought that something else can happen. I don't know if that will ever go away. As we create a new room for Ella and Zane to share in preparation for a new baby, I see that we still hold back. Ella's old room is now the "play room" because even though we are hopeful, that hope does not move us to the certainty of setting up the crib yet. In time that will come, I hope...

Ella has asked me three times now if this baby will die like Sully. Then, on New Year's day, she happily sat on her top bunk and said that she just loved the new room and she wanted it to stay the same even after this baby died. My heart sank. I've tried to explain before as best I can how Sully was made differently so that he just couldn't stay here very long but that this baby is made more like her and Zane and that we hope he will be with us for a very long time. But her uncertainty is my own uncertainty. I can't say to her without a doubt that everything will be fine from here on out. Yes, this baby is genetically well but more than ever I know the fragility of life. We heard of a family who lost their 20 year old son in a car wreck New Year's Eve, and I thought, we could lose them at any point, 6 days or 20 years, we have no guarantees. I try to be as hopeful as possible with her, but I think it will take this baby actually being with us, actually becoming an annoying little brother, for her to know he is here to be a part of her life for a long time. I think it will take the same for me, too.

I read parts of Job today. It has been the book that has been in my mind most often. Growing up, the book of Job didn't quite fit with the "health and wealth" gospel espoused in our church so it was just blown off as an exemption to the rule. But in these past months how glad I am that the book of Job is there - right in the middle of the Bible - there for me to see Job's angst and frustration - for me to see him not understanding why tragedy had come to him - for me to see his friends give him terrible explanations and accuse him of it being his fault. At one place, Job says of God, "how faint the whisper we hear of him!" How that resonates with me. It seems as if my understanding of God is so very dim. Yet, as I struggle with God and wrestle with my faith, I see the beauty of the very end of Job. God does show himself to Job and make him see how understanding God is not even in his reach. And, then, I would expect God to say, you little peon, how dare you question me and accuse me, go back to the tragedy that your life has become and stay there forever, you don't deserve anything good. But he doesn't. I weep as I read that the "Lord blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first". It must have been so different for Job. Surely the blessings were sweet, but it seems that his greatest comfort must have been having seen the Lord and living with those blessings given with such humility. Perhaps that is my hope for 2009 and for whatever days are ahead.