Re-Entry

Wow - this blog has been neglected. My children, you will be glad to know, have not. I have updated the pictures on the sidebar to represent the season change, and will have to do so again soon when the (whisper it) white stuff arrives, and plan to post a comeback show and tell tomorrow that is sure to melt any heart!

Since I have last posted they have grown so much. Yes, in a month they have not only become taller, but also more grown up indicating that their birthdays are really just around the corner and I can't deny it one more minute.

Soon, very soon, I will have a five and seven year old. whew. That just doesn't seem possible.

And not just because time flies and we all can't seem to figure out where the years went. But, because I truly can't remember a great deal of their littleness. I know. It sounds odd. No, it sounds terrible, but it's true.

The long and short of it is this. I lost a baby. I broke. A few years later I had another one and she lived. I had proved to myself that I could make, grow, and deliver a healthy child - and then what? I did it again, just to be sure.

And during that time, the trying, then growing, then being amazed she was here, was chaos - both in my world and within my soul. I had no idea how to reconcile the emotion and grief that was still churning within me with the screaming, struggling to latch-on-baby, gifted to me.

I had only thought as far as that first cry, the measuring of the cord, the lightness of a baby holding some of her own weight in my arms. The rest was a mystery.

I think I'm finally getting it now, how to live with Emma's spirit and live moments with my walking, talking kids. The integration has happened and it is lovely, inspiring more than one contented, if not a little bitersweet smile from me daily. Yet with it has come a new grief. A wave of guilt that I did know how to 'just be' with my babies when they were little. That the 'they might still die any minute' fear led my life instead of allowing joy to overwhelm me.

I missed it. It didn't just go too fast, I truly missed parts of their infancy. I never stopped. It's true you can stay busy enough that you don't have time to fall apart. I wish I had. Our time together would have been better for it.

I know what I must do. I know I have to sit with these reality of memories, forgive myself, and let it go.

I know, but it's not easy.

The upside? They don't remember any of this. It is my internal dragon to slay.

Onguard dragon.

Well, till tomorrow then and be sure to come back -- for my show and tell is a perfect example of how the memory of my first and the realness of my others co-exist now.

Oh - and part of it is video...