Months have passed. I feel quiet...tired. Unfocused. Lost. Lonely but never alone. Tired. Days melting into weeks into months into years. I am still here. Where is here? I still wonder, Is this really my life?
Life is busy, hurried. Too much so. Chaotic. I want to be still for a while, but life refuses to slow down for me.
Three beautiful miracles fill my heart, along with the emptiness of the miracle missing. The tiny miracle that wasn't to be. I still count her a miracle, even though it wasn't the miracle for which I had begged, but by the world's standards she is not. The world doesn't count her at all. I want her to still count. I look at my children and out at the world, and I see her. I see her everywhere. The world doesn't see her. They never saw her. But she was here. The tucked away birth certificate proves her existence, despite the big, ugly, red stamp across the certificate, DECEASED. She was here.
Two small precious faces fill my days. And I feel like I am failing them, just like I failed her. How different would it be if she was here? If there wasn't the shadow of a child missing in every moment? Would I mother these two here better if my attention was not split between heaven and earth? If I wasn't so lost? So broken? They deserve so much better. I hate that I am not the mother I thought I would be, the mother I dreamed of becoming. I failed them all.
I feel I am grasping for something that cannot be reached. Illusive. I want to touch her again, to feel her soft skin, to kiss her blond hair, to smell her sweet head, to hear her small cry, to taste those fleeting moments of her life one more time. I want to know the color of her eyes, eyes that opened only when she reached heaven, eyes that never saw the suffering of this world.
To do it all again. Would I go through it all again? Yes. If I could have those two hours back, yes, I would take them again even at the price of the nightmare that followed. I wish I could have done so many things differently. No one tells you when you are pregnant what you should do if your baby happens to die. If I could do it again, even with the same outcome, I would do it better. I would love her better in those two hours. I wouldn't waste one of those 137 minutes. I would cherish every moment, every heart beat.
Yet here I am. Is this really my life? Stumbling along this path on which I never wanted to be, upon which I'm not sure how I came to be or why. Stumbling. Fumbling. Failing.
