The Day You Were Born

Today was a bad day, one that made me question my progress and mental stamina. I felt low, anxious, hateful towards myself and regreted every decision I made parenting up to this point. Grief doesn't slowly get better, it gets better and then worse and then kind of better and then new feelings emerge. This happens day to day, hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute. That is the complicated nature of grief you don't know about until you are experiencing it. I started to worry again that the scary side of post pardum depression was making its way back to the forefront? I wondered if it was another wave of grief unfamiliar to me? Then while walking our dog, I happened to look up at the stars in the dark night, and it became clear, it was actually much more simple, I simply missed her. For a moment I allowed myself to believe that I deserved that feeling, the deep missing of what could have been. This feeling, by far, has emerged to be the single most impossible one to aknowledge while being depressed and managing other built up dissapointments in my life. But there it was, the sky, her spirit, that feeling. I know that Piper was telling me that she would have been born that day, during the evening protected by the night sky just as her brothers were. Those uncomfortable feelings I had been experiencing all day, all related to her birth that didn't happen. I have so many questions of what it would have been like and how our relationship could have been. The knowing you will never know, is another waves of grief that just flat out sucks.

I am not connected with a specific faith and I have never considered myself deeply spiritual. But I am learning that connection with your baby can come at any time, in any form, to anyone who wants to receive it. Just as a physical relationship would grow so can the spiritual one. The real beauty is that this can even happen to those of us that are the least grounded in faith and spirituality. You don't have to have been anything or anyone before this moment, you just have to show up to recieve. She came to me on that day and she has come to me before in between wakefulness and sleep showing me her cute, little rolls, her toothless smile and her bow wrapped around her head. On the day she would have been born, I would have felt her wet, warm body on my chest. I would have heard her cry and sighed relief and pain together. When I was tired of football and being tackled, and confused by boy energy, I would have my baby girl to help me connect to the world in another way. She wouldn't have been here just for me, and her spirit doesn't continue on just for me, but sometimes I let myself take a special, silent moment to believe in what we could have been together in this world. I would have been a mother to my daughter exactly how I wanted to be.