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Sit. Still. Settle.

Do you ever hear yourself saying something that one of your parents would have said to you? There’s often a mixture of horror that you are turning into one of your parents and a realisation of why it was that they said it in the first place.

I was sat with Sully on the stairs, actually i was sat on the stairs semi hiding from the children who were watching trying to read some more of my book, but i digress. Sully came and climbed onto my lap. He snuggled in for a cuddle and then shifted position and snuggled differently, then he knelt up and tried another position, bumped his head, got frustrated and then tried another position. To say that it was irritating would be an understatement.

I found myself exclaiming “if you are having a cuddle would you just sit still and settle”. He settled into the original position he had been in, snuggled in and had a good long cuddle.

As we sat cuddling I felt one fo those God nudges that said “That’s what I’m trying to say to you” and so I stopped and I thought for a few moments about what I had said:

“Sit still and settle”

Sit. Still. Settle.

For a number of months I have been avoiding just stopping and sitting with God. I occasionally set out to spend time with Him but I fidget, get distracted, DO something instead of just BEING with Him but I don’t just sit with Him and rest in His arms.

The thing is that it’s really hard to just sit with God at the best of times. It’s an even harder thing to do when life is tough, when your heart is broken, when you’re filled with grief and when you don’t understand the segments of your life.

Pain makes stopping and sitting with God so hard. It means coming face to face with the fact that the realitiies of your life don’t match up with the goodness of God. It draws your heart to the fact that you don’t feel that goodness and it doesn’t feel like God is in your reality. That’s a painful place to sit.

What’s even more ridiculous is that I know if I were to make the effort to BE with God I would find that those two conflicting states would become less conflicting. God’s peace would become a reality and that pain would be experienced in the presence of a loving God not on my own.

So God wants me to just sit and stop fidgeting… not an easy call but if it’s something God is calling me to, it’s probably for a good reason.

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Set backs

I wonder if you ever find yourself trying to workout how you ended up back somewhere that you thought you’d left behind for good? I mean emotional and spiritually as well as physically.

As the result of one life change event I find myself wondering how I’m back here. By back here I mean experiencing deep and painful longer for a baby in my womb and in our lives. I also find myself back to comfort eating and having lost the belief that I am worth the effort.

Losing a very wanted baby back in September at 10 weeks pregnant has left such a huge hole in my heart. That grief has tapped into emotions and experiences that we faced when we spent 3 years and 3 months trying for our first baby. Although we have only briefly (so far) been in this situation we find our selves longing for a baby and I find myself feeling the weight of infertility on my shoulders again – despite the fact that at the moment that is not our situation.

The feelings of helplessness, despair, grief, longing, hopelessness, loneliness, jealousy, overwhelmed and sadness flooded back in with the grief of our lost baby and the hope of his life that went with him.

Losing Toby, who’s name means God is good, has not removed the desire to have a baby, it has amplified it. Just because I can’t have THAT baby does not mean that I do not desire to have A baby. Not that a baby will replace Toby and all those lost dreams and the place he would have had in our family and our hearts because there will always be a hole for him. BUT we chose to have Toby because we felt our family was missing one more member, felt we had love to give another baby and so that feeling remains.

3 years of infertility were accompanied by 3 years of comfort eating and dieting in vicious circles of failure and backward steps. In the years since we had our first and second babies I felt God speak to me about how I was worth the effort that it takes to lose weight. Worth the investment. Worth the time. Worth it. I felt that God showed me that was the problem. I never believed I was worth the constant investment that losing weight would take.

When pondering life with God through fasting I found that God spoke to me and revealed something more.

In experiencing infertility and now in experience grief of a miscarriage I find myself having to ask God to get me through each day, because each day feels like a mountain bigger than I can climb alone, sometimes bigger than I want to climb full stop.

In wanting a baby both during infertility and now I find myself committing to petitioning God to give us the desires of our hearts.

In having children I find myself praying that God will protect them, help them to grow, help me to care for them well and make wise decisions.

In a world a throw away marriage I ask God to protect mine, with some baggage from the past to make this feel harder.

God revealed to me that I feel that as I’m already asking so much of God which all feels so important I don’t want to waste His love and grace on something that is just for me. I don’t want Him to be with me and help me to lose weight if it may mean that one of the other things I’m asking for will fall through the gaps.

And YES I can see how proud that statement is, that I think that I can influence God’s actions in such a way, but it is just the truth of the thought process and to be honest I am at a loss on how I will move forward.

It’s so hard to feel like you’ve gone backwards in emotions. It’s so hard to see the progress but feel those past feelings. Emotions are hard.

I don’t have the answers. I’m full of uncertainty and confusion. But I hope that I can help you somehow to feel normal?!

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Waves of grief

I found the following on website that the link didn’t work when I sent it to anyone else so copied it and emailed it to a couple of people. But I’m sharing it here too because I think that this description is so accurate. It’s something that EVERYONE should read.

When Asked for Advice on How to Deal with Grief, This Old Man Gave the Most Incredible Reply

Someone on reddit wrote the following heartfelt plea online:

“My friend just died. I don’t know what to do.”

Many people responded with words of encouragement, but one response in particular, by an older gentlemen, really stood out from the rest…

“Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love.

So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out.

But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

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Not ok

A quote I found on the Saying Goodbye Facebook feed:

“She watlks, she talks, she cooks, she cleans, she works, she IS but she is NOT, all at once. She is here, but part of her is elsewhere for eternity.”

 

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Wave of light

It’s october 15th – it’s a day for lighting candles for babies and children who have died. Who good to remember them. How much it sucks to have joined those who do it for such a personal reason.

We grieve and remember our lost baby and all that they would have been to us in our family. Those lost dreams.

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Unformed and raw….

 

I keep thinking that I want to write out my emotions. I keep feeling like I want to share. And then I decide I’m too raw, I’m too weak, it’s too fresh and that people don’t want to read or hear feelings from that place. I recognise how those thoughts won’t be well formed or even linear because that entirely how my thoughts are. There’s this overwhelming fog that stops some level of process and function. Not so much that you can’t focus but so much that you don’t feel you always makes sense. Why would I put that down on paper?

But the reality is that maybe I need to do this for me, for our baby, for our family and for those who walk alongside us or others.

Our baby was ‘only’ 10 weeks gestation. We never even got to see that baby. We didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy, although in my head he was totally a boy because it is what I know. But what hits me so hard is how much love my heart has for our little one. I am flooded by this feeling of love I will never get to share with its recipient. Flooded with a sorrow that a part of family will always be missing. Devastated that a part of my heart will always be broken. When the sonographer confirmed our baby was gone a part of my heart shattered and though I am assured and understand that the rawness of that reality will go, the brokenness of that reality will always remain.

At 10 weeks gestation our baby was just a quarter of an ounce heavy and only around 4cm long. Such a tiny speck but the baby had our DNA and all of it’s arms and legs and a heart. At 10 weeks they were our baby as much as when they would have been 10 weeks post natal.

I fight the feeling to lessen the reality of this babies life. I fight the feeling people will think we are ‘over reacting’ in our grief since we had not met them, or seen them or held them. I fight those feelings because this baby was every bit our baby as Zachary and Solomon and every bit a part of our family and my heart.

I grieve the love we never got to give them and the fights they never got to have with their big brothers.

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Miscarriage processing

I want to write but my words feel lost. I feel pulled to write but I don’t know what to write. I’m nudged to put thoughts down but don’t know what those thoughts are. It’s like there’s two parts of me fighting over what I should do.

We were pregnant. For 6 weeks we knew about a baby who would join our family next April. We were apprehensive about the change that this baby would bring but we were excited. Excited for our boys to have another sibling. Excited that this baby would get to have our boys as it’s big brothers. We were excited for Christmases and birthdays and family holidays and weddings. We had dreams and we thought about practical things like bedroom arrangements and car seat positions.

At 9 weeks and 5 days pregnant having excitedly told some of our closest friends the night before about our new baby I discovered I was bleeding. I struggled to get the words out to tell Ross. My voice wouldn’t work. My brain could not comprehend. I tried to reason that this happens to so many women whilst at the same time being filled with this dread that I knew what was happening to my body.

We lost our baby over that weekend and I lost a part of my heart with it. Our family will never feel fully complete as there will always be a part of it missing.

1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I knew that 1 in 4 end this way and yet somehow, despite a totally normal fear that we would lose the baby, I never dreamed that it would actually happen to us. I was comfortable being 3 in 4. It was safe there.