It hurts. Still & Always.

One week before I am to return to work and the progress I’ve made is in some kind of gray area, which I’m thinking is how my life is going to be colored from now on. There is no longer a clear good and bad, right and wrong. It all seems to have shifted toward some middle area of being neutral.

I’m not the shocked mother to be whose baby just died anymore, nor am I back the being the person I was before I had Avery. The carefreeness of it all is gone, innocence lost. I don’t feel I have a right to say when something is going to happen anymore. “Whens” are reserved for innocent women who have never had tragedy touch their lives. “Whens” become “ifs” when you lose a child. There is so much that is out of my control.

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

James 4:13-15 NIV

Many grieving mothers share the triggers of pregnant women and newborn babies and I have to agree that there is specific pain assigned to witnessing a mother caring intimately for her baby the way I longed to do with Avery. Envy enveloped me at the sight of pregnant women at first, carrying the life of their baby when I couldn’t keep safe my own. I begged God to take this anger and envy from my heart because I’d never wish these mamas and their babies any pain. I’d never wish for a mama to lose her baby too and feel the weight this reality puts on life. Nor do I want her baby for myself. I just want to carry my baby again.

In a way God has taken my envy because it has turned into fear. I see pregnant women and worry they are going to lose their babies too. I see children and wonder if something bad is going to happen to them. I think about getting pregnant again, carrying another baby, treating my disorder right in hopes of bringing him or her home this time, making room in my heart for another child. All I see when I think about it is fear. Fear of failure. Fear of death. Fear of more loss. I want to get excited about trying to get pregnant again soon but I’m not there yet. I’m scared and still so very sad.

I’ve had many people pray I’ll have another baby and I can’t deny how wonderful that is. Right now I don’t need prayers for a new baby. I have a baby and I need prayers for me to have the strength and grace to be the proud mother to an angel. If He has children here on earth in my future, so be it, His will be done. Regardless of any blessings of life He uses me to create and allows me to raise here on earth, I will always have a son to spend eternity with. And a part of me will spend my days counting down until I meet him.

I miss him so much that it hurts more than the physical pain of the night he died. I sometimes wonder if it would be easier to have lost an arm or a leg. In no way do I mean to diminish the hardship of losing a limb but in my case then I could at least identify where the pain comes from.

Instead the pain of Avery dying comes from everywhere and exists everywhere, without me being able to put a finger on it and say “that’s it, that right there is where it hurts”.

Everywhere hurts, everything hurts. Everywhere he isn’t and everything he’ll never do, it all hurts.

I miss you, my love.