Parent's Pride

Today was the last day of school. I had no idea it would be such a tough day for me. Closing out the school year that my daughter was not a part of at all was not easy, but was something I had to do for Jacob and Emma. Emma graduated from Pre-K and Jacob had classroom awards and the closing chapel for the year. I held up ok until it was time for chapel. I went to my car for a while and sat there crying. I watched families walking to their cars with ALL of their children. They were happy and excited about the fun filled summer ahead of them...the break that they have been waiting for. I remember it too. I used to have the same feelings. I sat there, knowing that I have not only a broken family. I have a daughter who should be completing elementary school, but isn't here. I also have a summer filled with agony and pain to face. I've always loved summer, I still do. Now my summer is tainted with painful memories, and a daily harsh reality.

I watched all of the proud parents as they watched their children receive awards for their excellent accomplishments in academics, math, reading and so on. I remember that pride from years past. This year there were no great "awards" to be received. I didn't expect any. I didn't care...It no longer mattered to me. I stood there with a pride that I have never known, a pride that I never imagined for my children. I was proud of my children for doing what no other child had done that year. They went to school broken and lost. They had to do their "work" despite the fact that they had been torn from their sister only one month before school began, uprooted in life, and thrown into a "new" environment that didn't feel anything like home to them. They had to walk into Ashley's school. They walked through the same halls that Ashley walked through. They looked for her in dissapointment and sorrow when she was not to be found greeting them during the school day. They had to face her teachers and her friends on a daily basis. I couldn't have done what they did this year! No award would ever be able to commend them for this job that they did so well.

School has been a hard place for me to be this year. I have managed to do my best each time, but it wasn't easy. I remember the end of the school year last year so well. I remember Ashley's classroom awards. I can still see her that day. She loved the last day of school because she couldn't wait to be home with us for the summer....but she hated saying goodbye to her friends and teachers. She loved school, but treasured her time at home playing so much more. The closing chapel last year made an impression on me as well. The principle encouraged the children to stand on the rock...on God's word. He challenged them to read the Bible every day. He gave them each a rock to carry with them, reminding them of God's word. Ashley took that message very seriously. Not a day went by that she did not read her Bible. I was amazed that even on vacation late at night she insisted on reading. I even argued with her one night that it was ok for her to skip one night since it was so late. She had planned to read through the Bible. She left off in Luke (which was her favorite.) I have begun to read the Bible to Jacob every night. We began in Luke.

Labor of Love

Love drives me to do things I feel like I can't do. The night Ashley died Emma brought me two books, wanting me to read them to her. I remember picking her up, and I read those two books with her in my lap. The one book she picked was called "Someday", it is a book about a mother's conversation with her child...talking about the things her child will do "someday" as the child grows older. My heart bled as I read these things that I would never get to do "someday" with my Ashley. My hopes and dreams shattered before me as I read to my little girl.

This picture is how I would describe the shape of my life from that day on. (Not that I didn't do things for my kids before the accident, it's just different now.) I physically and emotionally can't do most things. For some reason...actually, for the three little bodies in my life....I have been able to sacrifice even my own agony to give them what they need. I have been a wounded soldier on the battlefield limping around, bleeding and broken...attending to the needs of the other wounded soldiers.

In the days and months to follow July 24th, 2009, I have chosen to care for my children. I have pushed past the tears and the open wounds to sing them to sleep. I have read books and Bible stories. I have prayed with them when I have been too paralyzed to pray myself. I have kissed their hurts, cuddled their tears. I have bathed them, fed them, played with them....when I didn't have the strength to get off the couch. I have spent hours during the night getting up with them, sleeping with them, soothing their fears. In each moment, my heart was bleeding, my soul was broken. But this, for my children.

My children need more than that. They needed to build snow forts...like they did with Ashley. They wanted to go to the beach, like we used to. They wanted a Christmas tree...when we wanted to skip over the month of December. They don't understand the kind of pain we feel when with each thing we do without Ashley. They can't understand why we wouldn't do those things, if we did them with Ashley. My children wanted to celebrate their birthdays...just the way we always did. Spring is here and the kids had been dreaming up the garden and what we'd plant in it. (How can I say "no"?) "When are we going to go strawberry picking, Mom?" These things are what they need...and despite my open, bleeding wounds, we do these things...because I love them.

How can I do these things? How can I pick up and continue life without Ashley? God gives me the strength each day...even when I don't ask Him for it. I know it is not my own strength. God loved me so much, He willingly took my shame, my guilt, my sin...upon his perfect self. He was condemned, beaten, forced to carry the cross (my cross)that He was hung upon to die. He bled...FOR ME...out of love. God suffered great pain, because He LOVED ME! This love...is the kind of love that lays down all the desires of one's heart for another. This is the love that drives me each day. This is one way in which I am taking part in the sufferings of Jesus Christ.

An age old picture

As I was driving down the road today I passed a mennonite woman working in her vegetable garden. Close by was a little girl playing with her toy wheelbarrow. I love this picture...it's one that i've seen before, it's one that mirrors my life growing up and the one I live now. Last year I went to my Amish friends home to watch the tobacco harvest. It was such a neat thing to see. I watched the tobacco grow all summer, and then I watched my friends put it away for drying in the barn. The part of this picture that I love so much is seeing them working away, and their two littlest girls sat on the barn floor digging into a whole watermelon...their diapers were drooping and the watermelon ran down their faces. Anna (my amish friend) and I often talk about how our kids like to try to do what we are doing in their own little ways. We need to invest in little brooms, buckets, and garden tools. They want to help! This is a picture from across time. I can imagine the pioneer women working the land with their children playing around them. As the children get older, they want to do what their Mommies are doing. They do it in their own way first, then, as they are more skilled, they help, eventually they are trained to do it on their own.

I am not the kind of person to sit still. I am always moving. It is hard for me to sit down through the day, when there is work to be done. However, my house is usually a mess. I clean it, but the kids work faster than I do. Someday my house will be clean. The things I busy myself with, especially in the summer, are vegetable gardening, canning and freezing, baking, and whatever else I might decide to take on. Sometimes I hear.."how do you get that done when you have kids to care for?" I've come to realize that what comes natural to me, is actually the picture I described earlier. I love to work....with my kids close by. I love to be with my kids, but I usually expect them to be playing close by, while I work. Sometimes, in order for me to accomplish something I have to set my kids up with their own little work...identical to what I am doing. Every one of my kids followed this routine. I can remember Ashley being one year old, wanting to scrub the kitchen floor with me. She had to have her own brush to dip into the water. Jacob always had to have a broom. When I bake, I like to let them "help" me. Sometimes I have to tell them that "watching is helping." That is frustrating to hear when you're a kid, but watching pays off! I remember baking cinnamon buns for the first time on my own after I got married. Since I had only "watched" growing up, I was amazed at how well I remembered what to do!

It's funny how you can go into a toy store and see toys of every kind....recreating big people things...but in kid sizes. Kids want to do what they see mommy and daddy doing. Children who watch their parents work hard, will know how to work hard when they are big. As I planted my garden this week, I watched Emma (5) dig her hole to plant a tomato plant. I remembered how Ashley started out like Emma, and then, by last year...she began to "take over" my work. She had learned how to do it the way I did. I could trust her to take the laundry off the line and fold it. She cleaned the house, washed dishes, gave baths to her sister, planted my flower beds...and so much more. I remember feeling akward when I realized that she could do it as good as I could...and that she was taking my jobs!

I have a little way to go with Emma and Grace. This week we made bread. They needed their own dough to work with. I let them have it, and left them work. Later, I found bread dough everywhere, and flour too! I didn't mind the mess though...it kept them entertained, we spent time together, and I got to do my baking! Emma told her teacher today that her mommy lets her make a mess..."she says we can always clean up a mess!" Thank-you, Emma! So, bring on the messes! And let the learning continue!

Momma's New Ride

So, my husband decided to give me something new to write about. I guess I should tell the story behind my new (old) Triumph Spitfire.

I've always loved cars..especially old ones. My dad and I would occasionally stop by antique car shows when I was growing up. Since Dad had an interest in cars, I guess I learned to like them too. I also loved motorcycles. Dad and I spent many Sunday afternoons going for leisurely rides on his old Honda motorcyle. My first ride (that I remember) in an old car was one of Dad's friend's cars. I can't remember what the car was, but it had a trundle seat for the trunk. It was great to ride in the back! When I was really little, Dad had an old Dune Buggy that he rebuilt. I don't remember riding in it, but I loved to hear the stories about it and look at pictures. Dad and I often wished he hadn't sold it.

The car I always wanted was a convertible VW Bug. I don't know why, I just thought they were so cool. It was a few years ago and I was driving down route 1 towards Middletown. I was riding behind the coolest car I had ever seen! It was so little and cute. I loved how the woman driving it sat above the windshield. I had to find out what kind of car it was so I could look it up! "This car has my name all over it! Someday, this is the car I want to drive!"

Well....A few months ago I was looking them up online (something I would do on occasion, just for fun!) I found this red one...WOW! Would you look at that car! I jokingly showed it to Jake and told him he could get it for me some day for Mother's Day. He just laughed.

This morning, I woke up early. Jake and Jacob told me there was a surprise in the driveway. "You didn't really get me a car, did you?" Why, yes he did! I couldn't believe it! I took it for a freezing cold ride in my pajamas! It is a sweet ride indeed! I am looking forward to the much needed down time away from life! Part of my gift is the fact that only two can ride...which means time out for mommy, and maybe a fun date night for mommy and daddy!!! Yeah!

My heart is still heavy today, but the distraction sure is nice!

Mother's Day

I am angry today. It is the day before Mother's Day and I have so many conflicting emotions going on inside of me. I could explode! I don't like being in my skin or in my life. I feel like I am trapped inside a vice that continues to tighten it's grip on me. I am living a nightmare that won't end. Somedays are good. Many moments are good, actually, but each moment is haunted with reality. If only there was a way out of this.

I really didn't think much about Mother's Day coming up. I rarely look more than a day in advance. I am surviving one day at a time. That's all I can do. This week has been really hard though. I have had a rollercoaster of emotions tossing me this way and that, jerking me around, and leaving me feel confused and disoriented. I'll think I can handle something, and then realize it is way more than I can bear. I have felt so far away from Ashley this week. Wishing badly that I could talk to her on the phone or something...but there are no phone lines to heaven, there is no skype, or email. I have the hope of seeing her again, but I don't know when that will be. I know that Heaven is the finish line, but I can't see it...I don't know how much longer this race is. I found myself missing specific things about her. Things that made her unique...that no one else could be. As I enjoy each one of my kids, it also provides sorrow knowing that they are not like her...they are who God made them...it's that part of creation where God makes each one of us special and unique..there is no one like us. I see things in my children that remind me of Ashley. I love that so much! I am so thankful for my three...that God has given me to enjoy...but, I never feel complete...there is always a piece of the pie missing. I am always uncomfortable.

So, I know it's not just Mother's Day. It's spring...heading into summer. The weather has been nothing short of beautiful. I love to be outside, and to keep the windows open and feel the breeze through the house. Everything is green outside, and the sun is warm. I have often regreted the fact that Ashley didn't have her own room. Not because it wasn't "fair" to share a room with her sister, but because I feel like I don't have a place that was "all Ashley's" to leave the same way she left it...and be able to "be" in her space. When spring came I realized that her room was never that important to her anyway. The outside was her "space." She lived for any moment that she could be outside playing. She loved to be barefoot and in a sundress. She loved to imagine things and then she would play it. Usually, she played her "indian game." I even had to make her a deer skin dress. She was die-hard! She worked hard in her play...doing the things that indians did to live life. She wove baskets from reeds, and pounded field corn into fine corn meal. She gathered herbs and dried them....I just have to laugh at all the work she accomplished while she played! So, the change of seasons is comforting in a way, because it brings me closer to her. Every inch of this place was touch by her angel feet.

Coupled with the comfort of summer...comes the setting of the stage. With each leaf that arrived on the trees, and each day that the sun gets warmer, the flowers, the grass, the motivation towards summer activities....the stage is being set for us to relive the nightmare of our lives. Each moment is one day closer to THAT day. (Even though we are a year farther away from it, it is as real and fresh as the day itself.) I love summer and hate summer at the same time.

I was so thankful today for an email from not only a friend, but a mom who KNOWS this life I now live. She affirmed my pain, my anger, my sorrow. There was no sugar coating. For her it is 17 mother's days without her son, for me it is one. The pain of the day is still sharp even for her. I am encouraged to know that life will get better. There is joy to be had. The God of all comforts will always be my comfort. But, I realize that I am also strangely comforted in knowing that the searing pain of separation from my child will never go away. I don't want it to. I HATE this pain, I despise it! But, I don't want it to ever leave me...it is all I have...it is my daughter's presence in my life.

I remember my first Mother's Day. Ashley was "here", but not born yet...I wanted to hold her. She was a part of my life and I looked forward to seeing her. Well, Ashley is a part of my life now...except I can't hold her, hear her, or see her. I can only wait for heaven.

Survivor?

"Who will be our next survivor?" The famous question asked at the begining of the reality tv show "Survivor." To win the game of Survivor contestants must often be and say and do things that would not normally describe who they are in real life. They are put onto an island with other people and are told to survive the game. Many will do whatever it takes to win the million dollars at the end of the game. Deprived of food, family, and the comforts of daily life...and placed on unfamiliar territory with a bunch of strangers, they must push through each day just to make it as far as they can.

I have many "labels" in this life. I am a wife, a mother, a cooker, a cleaner, a gardener, a daughter, a friend, a nurse, a sister...and much more. Now I am simply a survivor, along with my husband, children, and our extended family. The game of "survivor" lasts only a short while...But this game..my game..my life...will last a lifetime. We too have been placed in a foreign land. We are separated from our child, our sister. We are depraved of the joy we once knew. We have become strangers to each other and strangers to ourselves. The working family unit we once knew has been destroyed...and finding a daily routine that works seems impossible since we are all changing from one day to the next.

As a nurse, I was taught that there was a grieving process. It was a linear progression in which a person would move through the "stages of grief." There was shock, denial, anger, acceptance and so on. I always thought that these phases could be marked and that as one phase was "passed" and another phase had begun, there would be no "turning back" to the old phases of grief. As if there was a start and a finish line. As if grief was a fog that you could "get through." In reality, grief is not a linear progression at all. Each of the "stages" of grief are never accomplished and not visited again. Grief travels around. It likes to go in circles or bounce back and forth visiting one stage after another...staying at length or for only a minute...and then going on to the next one. My friend tells me it's like an upward spiral..we begin at the bottom and work our way up as we continually visit each component of grief. Someitmes we stay for a while, then we move on upward. Something might trigger a painful emotion only to cause us to fall lower on the spiral. Like the game of chutes and ladders (the unending childhood board game) you advance a few spaces...then you climb a ladder moving far ahead. But on any given turn you hit a chute...sliding you down to the begining again. I've always hated that game. I secretely sent ours to goodwill the other year. Now I am a permanent player in that game. Heaven is the end and only God knows when we will get there.

This real life game of Survivor or chutes and ladders gets real messy when you add more than one player and then expect them to live together and figure out how to survive together. Because everyone "plays" this game of grief differently, and everyone responds to each stage of grief differently...you soon realize that you don't know the people you love anymore, and you don't know how to "read" their survival tactics. Every once in a while you might find that you might be visiting the same stage at the same time...and if your lucky, you might even be responding to it in the same way. Those are times when it is a relief to connect after being so lost from each other most of the time. Even though we all live in the same place, often times we feel like strangers to each other.

I've heard people say to me "it seems like your having a hard time making it through"...or "it will be a while before you will get through this"...or "how are you getting through this pain?" I don't like the word "through." That word fits into most of life's challenges, but it doesn't fit with grief. I am not getting through it, I AM LIVING IT! and I will continue to live it until I die. It will get better, I know that. But getting through something is living to see the end of it. I/We are SURVIVING it. I am doing whatever it takes to make it. Sometimes I don't recognize myself, or my husband, or my kids....but that is because we are all different people just trying to do what we can to survive.

All of this sounds depressing, messy, and chaotic. Frankly, that is how I feel about it most of the time. It is exhausting trying to read each other, trying how to help each other, trying to find some sort of energy somewhere to be there for each other. And this is just the grief side of life now...not to mention all of the events and demands of daily life in general. I won't say that there is no joy in our life now. We still have laughter, the kids still play, we still have fun times along this journey. I know that as we "advance" in the game, there will be more good times, and less tough times. I also know that 11 years of beautiful life with our sweet little girl, is not going to be "gotten through" in a few years...we are talking a lifetime of healing.

Yes, I still claim all of the labels describing who I am. But the heading in bold print is SURVIVOR by the GRACE OF GOD!

Memories

Today sorrow is heavy upon my heart. The weight of loss is a fog that surrounds me and presses in from all angles. Once I became a "member" of this club....I gained a few very precious friends. Most of them I have never met, but I feel like I've known them forever. The pain we share is at the deepest level of our souls. In much pain today, I realized that some of my new friends were suffering greatly right now. It is "anniversary" time for them. Not a good kind of anniversary though...the worst nightmare of every parent kind of anniversary. The kind that you desperately want to erase from the face of this earth, but can't because they are branded in our lives forever. The kind that only brings earthly pain and saddness. I haven't reached my one year yet, but it is coming...I can feel it.

It makes me deeply sad and quite angry that rather than celebrating the anniversaries of my friends children's birthdays, accomplishments, marriages, graduations...I am agonizing in pain with them over the death anniversaries of our children. This makes me sick.

The truth that we all share is that each anniversary takes us one more year farther away from the memories of our children. In the very begining the memories are so clear, it's like they aren't even gone. We could still hear their voices, smell their hair, feel their hugs in our minds. We could see their sweet little faces and almost hear them run through the house. Then the moment comes when we realize those memories are fading. We have to look at pictures to get the detail of their faces. We have to watch a movie to remember their voices and experience their character and personality. We try to smell their pillows to remember through our senses. They continue to slip away from us. We continue to burry them every day.

It has become so scary to me that I can't remember what life was like with Ashley here...daily life. As much as I didn't want to allow life to go on...it does...and eventually a new normal sets in...a normal without Ashley. Suddenly it is strange to imagine what life would be like if she were here. (Well, we all KNOW it would be filled with joy!)

One thing that has helped me through the past 8 months has been the ability to look back at last year this time with Ashley. Everything I do, I remember doing it with her. I always will remember. The thing that I am not looking forward to is July 24. That day I will not only have to add the pain and suffering to my memories of Ashley, but I will then have to go back 2 years to remember August, September, October...with Ashley. This will continue every year. The memories are the same, they just become more and more distant.

Spring has been sweet and utterly bitter at the same time. Spring is when we celebrate new life. We venture outside and soak in the beauty of creation. We take a deep, cleansing breath relieved to come out of the winter hibernation in our homes. Life feels new and refreshed. It has been wonderful to be outside, to plant my garden, and to watch my kids run and play and climb the trees. But right next to each refreshing comfort is the hole that grows bigger as the memories grow farther away. Spring is a reminder that summer is coming and I am running out of last year's sweet memories.

I have learned to know that although the memories grow distant, our lives will slowly be restored. They will never be the same. The memories will always be there...and they will become sweeter. However, the memory of THAT dreadful day will always be painful. We can't live in that day forever...we have no choice but to press on. I am forever thankful that I can live with hope for the future...in this world and for eternity. There is joy to come on earth and in Heaven...even if right now the dark shadows of agony and pain cover my sight of what is to come. In my pain, I will press on.