Before, I knew Grace but maybe only like a long-distance lover.
Now, as I struggle and revel in being Mother,
Grace is my best friend, living right here.
God in the form of those five letters,
coming close to rescue me from feeling a failure or not enough.
This job is just too big to not finally see it, really see it.
To feel the most unconditional kind of love
that's mine for the giving and taking.
These are gifts and I am grateful and a little dumbfounded
at the magnitude of a Grace that makes me a butterfly kind of Mama.
All cocooned in the trials and daily grind
and then flying around with joy
that is these children of my very own.
{The above was taken from a blog I read (Love Sara Sophia) - photo credit is there.}
As I said before I still get all the emails reminding me of my "what could have been children." It's my choice to stop them and I haven't - yet. I'm getting all the getting ready for pre-school guides and all that fun stuff. With fall fast approaching I've been seeing more and more comments and photos on facebook with all the kids dressed and standing by their front doors - ready for their first day of school... a new beginning - for parent and child. To be honest, I always get a little jealous. That's kind of bad, I know. ;-) I'm jealous of the cute little outfits and the lunch totes and the perfectly pony-tailed hair... I'm jealous of the fresh start and kind of circle of life thing too... I missed that. We missed that. During a time when we should have been picking out the back to school clothes, my husband and I were charting cycle days and taking temperatures and giving shots and trying herbs, etc... I think both of us underestimated the effects of all of that. I did.
I just wanted to have a family and do all the things involved with that. No - I never really was the one that had to hold the babies or sniff their powder smelling bodies... Still - that's the only job I really wanted. Maybe that's a silly thing to aspire to these days and I should have wanted to have a real job - but to me - that's as real as it gets... The spoiled brat in me wants to stomp my feet and say I don't want to be a first time mom when I'm 50... then the realist says that's the hand you were dealt and you can't turn back time. I'm just at a weird place in my life and I don't like it very much.
Life as I thought it was going to be is over... I get that. That doesn't stop me from knowing and grieving for what kind of parents we could have been. I would have been worthy of the mother of the year - with my expert craftiness and expansive expertise in a multitude of topics ;-) and he, with his big heart and child like spirit, would have been worthy of any best dad ever figurine bought at Santa's Workshop. No doubt. And I do hope he gets that trophy one day even though, honestly, it will more than likely break my heart a little more. I know this effects both of us in some way and I'm sad we never really got to talk about it together.
In a way I was cocooned with my "motherly" duties for my puppy dogs - definitely not the same but I flew around with joy with them in a weird way - that wasn't missing, even though children of my own were. I didn't need to be a mother to complete me. I've said it many times before... I always would have chosen my husband over a baby any day. Even with the infertility and all that went along with it, I was just disappointed and sad and mad. Believe it or not, I never really felt like I wasn't enough. The only time that came into play was when I heard the words I would have stayed and tried if you were still pregnant.
Those words will stay with me forever.
That's when I felt like I wasn't enough.
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