Why?

Why not them instead of us? Why not her instead of me? Why not their baby instead of mine? How is it fair that they get 2, 3, 4, 5...and I can't even have just him? Why would you take Matthew away after we fought for him for so long, but give others beautiful "accidents". Why do I have to go through this, without the comfort of a child at home, or even children at home. Why did you have to take my first. I would have been happy with him as my only. Why would you make us go through so much, so, so much, and then rip him away. Why can't one good thing happen in my life, and not lose it. Why did you have to give me such an overwhelming desire, from such a young age, to be a mommy, but refuse me a living child. Why would you make me go through all that worry and fear with his heart defect and downs, then make everything wonderful again, only to rip him from my arms 5 days later.Why do so many, so many, get to have children they don't even want, and yet I can't have the only one I do want with every fiber of myself. Do I not deserve children? What did I do that was so horrible that I can't be a mom. Why must I suffer every day with constant thoughts of pregnant friends and mommy friends. Do I need to pray more? Do I not go to church enough? Is it because I cuss? I don't know. I know I'm not that great of a person, but did I really deserve this? Are my wrongs so great that my little boy and my husband had to suffer for them? I have never been good at anything in my life until I was going to be a mom. I finally felt like a person, instead of a lump of useless nothing, and I was going to pour my heart and soul into that little boy. He would have been raised to love you, to love his family, and to love himself. But now I'm left here, so desolate, confused, ripped apart, broken, and lost. Constantly plagued with pitied looks, having to respond to "how are you" with fake responses to avoid making others uncomfortable, and feeling like everyone has forgotten the one thing that gave my life meaning: Matthew. I had 6 months of pure ecstasy, after a life of pain and anger, and now I feel like I will lose myself in it. I just want to know why my little boy, when he was my world and my love, and everything to me. Why does my heart go on beating when his does not. Why do I have to finish life here on Earth when my place is with him. Why must I agonize through each day, and minute, and hour, without him. I just want to know, why?

Things

I miss shopping for my little boy. Strollers, bed sheets, pacifiers, clothes...I miss it all. Spent hours every day browsing every website I could think of, dreaming of Matthew and the use he would get out of the things I looked at. Now I am shopping for a lawn mower, a washer, and broken dreams.

The things I bought for him sit in the empty room that was meant for him, in the empty house he was to come home to, while Mommy's empty heart beats on.

2 Months

Happy 2 month birthday Matthew. I wish you were here with me every minute of every day.

Mommy put your footprints on her skin to show herself and others the footprints you left on her heart.

An angel, in the Book of Life, wrote down my baby's birth. 
Then quietly whispered as he closed the book, "Too beautiful for Earth."






---

Better, Doesn't Mean Better

The last few days I've felt "better". A word I have heard countless times from friends and family. If better means not thinking about Matthew every second of each day, or being distracted for hours on end by a new game my husband and I are playing, or being able to sleep without crying first, then yes, I have been feeling better.

And I hate it.

I hate it so much. I miss the constant tears, the anguished thoughts, feelings of perpetual loneliness, the inability to function in daily life. I miss it all, because that's what Matthew meant to me. He meant everything. Every aspect of life, tiny and large, and without him, life shouldn't be able to go on. But it does. It keeps going. I can't stop the world from spinning, but in my heart, Matthew's death should have.

My grief is still incredibly great, but it is very slowly starting to not control my life. Very slowly. That scares me. When you have grief of this scale, it becomes all you know. I feel if I let go of it even the slightest bit, I will forget the intensity of love I have for my little boy. You don't recover from a loss this great, you re-learn life, you change, and you're never the same. The world looks different. Each moment looks different. You are different.

I think that is what scares me: I feel different, I act different, I think differently. My heart is harder, guarded now, and my compassion has dwindled.

Change. That's what it boils down too. So much change in so short a time. Not good, exciting change either, but hard, gut wrenching change. I've gone from young wife, to expectant mother, to mother of an absent child in less than a year. I used to have it all figured out. Now, I know nothing. When I finally was starting to understand and love life, it threw me a curveball. All I can do is hang on for the ride now, and hope that things get "better".

Today

Today, I should be 29 weeks pregnant.

Today, I should be larger than life with a belly that induces waddling.

Today, I should be feeling my little growing boy bounce off the walls of my womb.

Today, I should be a expectant mother, celebrating my first Mother's Day in a blissful state.

Instead...

Today, my son has been gone for 7 weeks.

Today, my belly contains only fat, and nothing to rejoice in.

Today, the phantom jumps of my son haunt me.

Today, I am the mother of a boy in heaven, celebrating Mother's Day in grief.



Today, I can only hope in the future. I can only wish that next year I will have our second child in my arms to help heal the pain I feel today. I can only bury myself into my husband and wait for the clouds to clear, and for the sun to peep through.

Today, I am a Mother, I am a wife, and I am broken. Today, tomorrow, and forever, I love you Matthew.

It's Not A Competition

It's not a race. It's not a competition. 
Yeah, sure.
In my experience, people who say that are the ones winning.

...

Every day seems a race, and I always seem to be running backwards.

I hate to run. Ask any of my high-school coaches. The only time I ever enjoyed running was if there was a soccer ball in front of me, but I digress.

Before I got pregnant with Matthew, my competitors were all around me. My friends, the lady standing in front of me at the grocery store, cousins, and anyone close to my age. Every day of my life was spent anticipating and yearning for that promise of a step forward: two pink lines. Friends and co-workers would become pregnant, give birth to beautiful, bouncing babies, and start over again. Rinse and repeat. While I, on the sidelines with an "injury", would dream of the day I could step onto that track and run towards the finish line. Married friends, both older and younger, who'd been married less time than I had, became pregnant, and bubbled with happiness, smiles, and sported a round belly. Again, I looked on, smiling for them, savoring just the smallest taste of their new-mom joy, and envied each moment they had that I did not.

I spent years training for that big race. Years more than anyone else I knew. Did I need it more than them? Were they better prepared than me? Who knows. It was searingly clear that it wasn't my decision.

Then it came. The go-ahead from the Big Coach. "It's your turn. Run." Oh boy did I. Every moment on that track, each time my feet hit the ground that carried me closer to that goal, felt a gift from heaven, and it was. I rejoiced in each ache, pain, and discomfort. It was my turn, finally.

I could see the finish line. That glorious gold ribbon stretched out before me, waiting for me to reach it. Behind the finish line, my beloved husband waited, and in his arms there was a new face. A crying, hungry, beautiful, brand new face that had every feature of Jamie except his chin. He had my chin. My world was almost complete.

As I am running towards that beautiful face, only a short distance left to run, the distance between us growing smaller and smaller by the moment, my world is shattered. Suddenly, the finish line is upon me, sooner than expected. It's not supposed to be there, I should still be running. There is a flurry of people upon me, but not with the happy, congratulatory faces I expected. Instead I am met with faces of badly hidden pity, sorrow, and sadness. Faces that make attempts at forced smiles, but instead fill my heart with discomfort and fear. Faces of intense worry. All for me. All I can think is "What's happening?"

They hand me a child, attached to that beautiful face I had been running towards just moments ago. My mind rails against reality, rejecting what is, and gouged of what was to be. "It's too soon."

The face still holds that intense beauty, but smaller. Daddy's lips move to take those first breaths, Daddy's nose bubbles with leftover fluid as air fills tiny lungs. Little tiny hands reach toward me, even though those beautiful eyes I saw earlier, are still fused shut. Little feet kick my chest, weakly, but with my stubborn attitude. Mommy's tiny chin, finishing that beautiful face, rests against my breast. "It's too soon." I fall utterly, completely, helplessly in love with that face. Never to return. It shall be fused into my mind till the day I die, but it's taken away too soon.

Someone in a uniform comes and tells me "He's almost gone." I understand what she says, but don't grasp it. My mind tells me "No, he's supposed to stay forever. This isn't right."

What seems like seconds after I say hello to my new son, my dream of dreams, I have to say goodbye.

"It's too soon."

...

I find myself on the all too familiar sidelines again. Reeling from my unfinished race, and my agonizing grief, but telling myself "You have to run."

In a cloud of cruel deja vu, I see again my friends on the track, starting a new race, before mine had even ended. Their family stands on the other side of the finish line waiting, larger than mine. Happier than mine. The prizes of their previous races there to cheer them on. 

Jamie stands slumped alone on the other side of the finish line, waiting for me. The absence of our beautiful face all too blatant to both of us. A weak smile, full of sad encouragement, crowns his lips. I stare at my feet, still unsteady, still recovering, but determined to run. I look to the Coach, and ask to be put in.

Now I wait. Again. The fresh memories of that race over too soon still slicing in my mind and heart. The overwhelming desire to still be running for that beautiful little boy grates my insides. The track stretches out before me, looming and impossible. I've picked up what pieces I could find of my broken heart, bound them together with the thinnest thread of hope, and I wait to be put in.

It is a race. Those ahead are too focused on what's at the finish line to look behind, and those behind are left to watch the winners as they reach their beautiful faces.

Here We Go Again...

Jamie and I decided we would be trying for baby #2 right away. While it is extremely difficult emotionally to even think about being pregnant with another baby, when I still should be pregnant with Matthew for another 10 weeks, I know it's what we need to do. I'm scared to death. I have anxiety attacks sometimes when I think about it. Not because I am scared to have another child, but more at the possibility of losing another precious life.

The road we have traveled together over the last 4 years has been intensely, ridiculously, frighteningly difficult. Countless times I have envied friends around me who have had "easier" lives, and then I realize, I wouldn't be the same person without our trials. To be honest, I don't know how I've made it this far. After 3 1/2 years of desperately trying to get pregnant, then the miscarriage, the out-of-my-mind scariness of finding out about Matthew's heart defect and possible downs, and now losing him to a fluke. There is no time more apt than now for us to say "life is unfair". I used to say that a lot, when I was going through what I thought was hard times. I laugh in irony at those times. How naive we are until we experience life for ourselves.

It's so hard not to let my bitterness grow. I try to keep it at bay, but it's still there. Bitterness towards God for taking him away after we'd been through so much, at the world for continuing on without him, at those around me, family and friends, for having children and healthy pregnancies, and at myself for failing to bring a healthy boy into the world at the proper time.

You can't imagine the thoughts that pass through a grieving mother's mind unbidden. I look at people around me, and wish they would know just a hint of what I have gone through. If only they could understand a little bit. Yet, I don't what them to understand. No one should have to understand this horror.

More than anything, you want to trade for your child's life. Anything you could give, you would. I would have gladly given my life for his. Jamie would have as well.

It is so hard to have an overwhelming need to sacrifice, but not have that choice.

Every day, I dream of a world that I would have had a choice. I've dreamed of time travel, heavenly intervention, just about any fantasy you can think of that would make it possible for him to still be here. But no matter how many times I dream of these possibilities, I wake up to the real world. A world without him.

In the midst of all this, we have the desire for another child. A younger brother or sister for Matthew. Our second, yet they will live as the first because Matthew cannot. I am scared of the pregnancy; of the months in between those 2 pink lines and that first wailing cry. I'm scared I will get attached, and love that baby as much as I loved Matthew when he was growing within me. I know I will, and that scares me the most.

At the same time, I yearn for the day that baby will arrive, healthy, pink, full of life, and ours to keep. I live only for that day. All else is unimportant. It is our main focus, our only life goal, and the desire of our hearts. We are parents without our son, but one day, hopefully soon, we will be parents to another child. One who will stay with us, and that, is the reason we are able to make it through each day.

Embracing the Pain

Each day brings it's own trials. I never know what to expect when I wake up in the morning. Will I be reminded suddenly of all the feelings I work so hard to control and break down in sobs? Will a friend announce a pregnancy, or birth, throwing me into a pit of despair and aching? I just don't know. Each morning I put on my face of normalcy, but every shred within me fights against the display. Nothing is OK. Nothing is right.

I miss the hope and joy. Never before have I been without both. I was so hopeful, my entire life. Now every small piece has been scattered to the wind the moment my little boy passed in my arms. I mourn it. I miss it. I miss being happy. I miss enjoying life.

No one knows me anymore. The person they knew for 25 years is gone. I feel myself so incredibly changed. Yes, some remnants remain. Yes, more will surface as the years go by and I find my purpose again, but for now, I am a stranger to myself.

People still pray for me and Jamie. We need it desperately. People try to tell us to find our comfort in God, and to look to him. What I know they don't understand is, He feels our grief just as deeply as we do.

There is no complete comfort, at this point there is very little comfort. Only distractions. We do not wish to be rid of that which makes our days so hard. Our grief is our comfort. Our sadness is our healing. I am so thankful for each stabbing pain, debilitating ache, and agonized tear. They mean that Matthew mattered. He was loved more than anyone else will ever know. His father and I feel each throb of unending love for him every moment we live, and it's because of our grief that we are able too.

It does not get easier. You learn to cope a little more each day, but it does not lessen. I've learned, I do not want it to get "better". I want to feel that intense emotion every time I think of him. I do look forward to the day it turns to different emotions, instead of just pain. Love to replace bitterness, hope to replace despair, and joy to replace sorrow.