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I’ve been a
mother for almost thirteen years. From the struggles to conceive to the battles
to stay pregnant, from losing multiple pregnancies to raising multiples, and
the agony of having to say goodbye to a child I’d only begun to know, I’m no
stranger to the heartache that sprouts from a heart that was only intended to
know pure love.
Thirteen
long years full of hopes and dreams for the twin boys I was over the moon about
welcoming. Eleven long years on an emotional roller coaster with the one who
couldn’t wait to get here. Nine long years with the one who seemed to exist
just to be cuddled and doted over. And five long years with the one who would
save me, the one who gave me a second chance.
The second
chance I feel like I’m failing at every day.
Amidst the
dust and construction dirt of our basement remodel sit all the years of
memories I’ve been too busy to organize – thirteen years’ worth of pictures and
ten years’ worth of school projects and so many mementos of first games and
first theater experiences and first lost teeth it seems like there will never
be enough time in my life to organize them all.
But every
once in a while, I find the time. It’s there somehow squeezed in between
basketball practice and substitute teaching, Pinterest dinner recipe searching
and bottom wiping. And laundry, of course.
Always with the laundry.
So I get out
the printed scrapbook paper and the stickers purchased so long ago – a whole different
lifetime ago – and sit down to do something so simple.
One simple act that leaves me
wrecked.
I’m wrecked
as I look at the stickers that a younger, more optimistic me chose – Twins,
Best Bros, sports, fishing, THE JOYS OF BOYS.
It’s obvious
that I thought this life of ours was going to be different. Like the eternally optimistic
character Poppy in the movie Trolls, I
somehow thought I could scrapbook our way to a happy life.
But then
life got busy with so many little boys and so many surgeries and therapy
appointments and cancer.
And all of a
sudden, it’s thirteen years later and I’m looking at these stickers wondering who
it was who bought them and put them in my craft cart. She obviously had no idea
how life really works out sometimes.
I feel sad, but I shrug it off because after all they are just stickers, right? They’re not life.
But then I
open the drawers that contain the pictures. Pictures of a sweetly smiling Slim,
eyes wide in a forced preschool photo day smile. Pictures of a pious
eight-year-old in a little man suit, hands folded in front of him on the day he
received First Communion. Cub Scout badges and a Pinewood Derby car that never
quite made it to the end of the track. Class pictures of him always standing in
front by the teacher, some of the same faces of his classmates present every
year. The classmates who have watched out for him, helped him cope, been his
friend, had his back. The classmates who know that he has a brother who is not
with him anymore. The classmates who, along with him, have gotten taller,
voices changing, interests expanding.
The children, like my own, who have
grown up in the blink of an eye.
And then I grieve.
I sob like I
haven’t sobbed in what feels like a million years. And for a change, I’m not
exactly sure why.
Am I
grieving over the life I thought my sons would have – best friends forever, brother buddies that never got to be? Am I grieving over all the ways that I
planned to Mother my sons that I could never make materialize? Am I simply grieving
the passage of time, of which ancient poet Virgil said is “never to be
regained?” Am I grieving like all mothers grieve as their babies grow and
change?
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Or am I grieving all of
this through the eyes and heart and soul of a mother who has lost a child?
I have found
in my thirteen years of being a mother that grief doesn’t discriminate. It can
get to us all at any time. It can find us through the lock of baby hair we
saved from that first haircut.
It can grab
us as we place those unused ballet shoes in the “donate” box.
It can pull
out a piece of our hearts as we close the trunk on the hand-knitted baby
blankets we intend to pass on one day.
It can brush
us off as quickly as he did, refusing to hug us in front of his friends.
It can rip
through us at high school graduation, as she waves and departs for parties with
her friends.
It can be
subtle and surprising; but make no mistake: it is just as wicked as the obvious
kind of grief. When it sprouts from a heart that was only intended to know pure
love, it hurts with a pain that feels as if it can never be quelled.
The only
relief comes from knowing that while time truly does fly, memories last
forever. Where time is constant, memories are fluid, createable, renewable. While that heart, that pure mother’s love that can’t stop time, can make more memories.
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