Sending you lots, and lots of hugs,

Kell

I don’t think though, at least from my experience, if we continue to face our loss and grieve whatever it is, no matter how hard, wrenching, re-forming that is, that it won’t eat away through everything. And if it does, maybe it leaves room for another, unrecognized something to come alongside and fill in the gap. Not that the loss is EVER, EVER over or gone or replaced… never, but sometimes, as I have seen in this journey of living with loss these years that sometimes there’s other stuff that would have never come to pass had I not embraced the loss head on and feel it and let that loss, even the hardness of it, become a part of the hopefully stronger, more compassionate, more thoughtful and thinking person that I have become.

There aren’t many books that affect me so deeply that I feel compelled to keep them close to me, but this one was one of them. Just wait until you’ve finished. Then re-read it. And see how it changes…like a kaleidoscope. It’s like grief and loss itself…many, many layers make up the final product. Once you think you’ve read it and you’ve got it down, you find another layer to the puzzle and it changes things.

It’s a very compelling book by a very talented author. It’s funny how everything ties to adoption when you look hard enough. And I’m not a first mom. I can’t imagine…Jenna, you amaze me sometimes. You just do.

My loss issues came up in a big way when we were waiting on the bee to be born. I missed my babies. Those six little souls that I miscarried. My body knew it was carrying children, it prepared, my stomach grew, my excitement mounted, I had food cravings, and then it stopped. Then the babies died.

When Punky decided to parent her daughter last year I felt consumed with the loss. And it was much more for my babies, than for her daughter.

I laid in bed for days and pictured my children, what they looked like. The oldest would have been five at that time. Starting school, reading, singing silly songs, telling silly jokes. But he wasn’t there. He was like a shadow, something I would turn my head to look at because I could almost see him. My chest physically hurt when I would think about him. I miss them, daily, and I was and am their mother.

When I would look at the queen, pregnant I would become sad for myself sometimes. It isn’t fair, I would think. She wants to be a mom, and can’t, I can’t be a mom and I want to. Nobody should have to go through this type of pain, on either end. She wanted me to go to her midwife appointments with her, and I did. It was awful for me to listen to the heartbeat.

Being a mom to the bee doesn’t take away or fix the pain of my lost babies. I miss them, I always will. I was a good mother to them, while God let me be. He only gave them to me for a short season, and I don’t understand why, but I know that he trusted me to take care of them the best I could while they were with me. I miss them.

One loss that hit me so much more than I expected was the death of my school’s principal when she was only 46, from a sudden heart attack. We weren’t really close, but her spirit so infused our school, that a light really went out of us all when she died. I remember getting in my car that night and just driving and yelling and crying. I didn’t know where to go and I was really agitated about it. I ended up at a friend’s house, a teacher who also worked at the school. I couldn’t settle down, just paced back and forth declaring how unfair it was. It was a long time before I could think of her without tears. They will be opening a school named in her honor this fall. I hope it will live up to her spirit.

It it an unwanted frenemie. Always with me.