The Holidays

This year marks our second Christmas without our sweet boy, but our first with our precious baby girl. To simply say that we are experiencing a myriad of emotions is a huge understatement. Since losing our son, my husband and I have felt such a range of differing emotions that we didn't even know we had. Now, we have our rainbow baby and even more feelings have come into play. I know I had certain expectations regarding how life would be after we had a baby that we could actually take home. I knew it'd be hard. Not in the typical "being a parent is a lot of work" hard, but in the "now you get to experience this amazing journey of motherhood and love it, but at the same time mourn the loss of the baby you didn't get to raise even more" hard. I had no idea I could feel such joy and sorrow all at the same time. It's actually really incredible in many ways and really, really heartbreaking in many ways too. I have one child in heaven, and one snuggled nice and warm in her crib, a mere two feet from my bed. It's like having one half of my heart within arms reach and the other half is pulling me towards the infinite; I constantly feel the pull of both my babies. This time of year is hard for anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one. I always find myself missing my great-grandparents and my grandmother more at this time of the year. But the catch is, I always knew growing up that eventually it would be this way because that's the natural order of things. People are supposed to live long, fulfilled lives and leave a legacy of their children and their children's children, and so on. The young are supposed to bury the old, not the other way around. My husband made a very powerful comment tonight that really struck me with it's simple complexity: "I just want to feel normal." That's really what my soul has been yearning for and to hear it said out loud was so profound. Here we are, five days from celebrating Christmas for the first time with our baby girl, something that should bring overwhelming excitement and anticipation, yet we have to make a conscious effort to not be overpowered by the sadness that comes with realizing we never got to do this with our son. We decorate his grave, and we hang our Lizzie's stocking. This is our normal, and honestly...it really, really sucks. We are beyond thankful for our sweet girl and I would never want anyone to think otherwise. She has brought so much light and healing to our lives with her sweet spirit and happy countenance. She is probably the most easy going child and constantly smiles. It's like having a piece of heaven in our arms. But we mourn the fact that she will never know her big brother in this life. I don't think we'll ever feel "normal" again because we will always have that "but". There will always be someone missing. And especially missed at this time of year.