Gone

I never intended to stop writing in this space when my Sunflower arrived.

I will admit that for much of the past six and a half months, I pretty much shelved my grief. It's not that it hasn't been present. I haven't had time to be present with it. Particularly in the first several months, I found parenting a living child to be far more challenging than I ever imagined. Not that I would trade it for anything. It just surprised me that I found it overwhelming...isn't this what I had been waiting for at least the last three years? This was supposed to be the easy part, the happy ending, no?

And it has been happy. Micah gives me a good reason to have a heart full of joy every single day. My Sunflower loves to smile and laugh...big huge belly laughs. It feels like he was sent to us to bring the laughter back into our home, to make sure we smile every day. I actually didn't know it was possible to be this happy again. And yet full of joy or not, my heart still has a hole in it.

Lately the grief has been getting to me, something about Micah turning 6 months and the slow march toward our grief season of August seems to have created the perfect storm. Ezra would be nearly two years old. And when I stop to try to wrap my mind around that, the idea that in a different universe I'd be running after a TWO year old while my 6 month old desparately trys to crawl, I just crumble.

I look back at these almost two years and I almost don't believe it is my life. How did I become this woman, the mother of two boys, one so wriggly and ALIVE, and the other so positively and absolutely...gone.

I just miss him, I really really do.