It’s been 4 years

Four years ago. Today. My baby’s due date.

Another day will come — and then another year will pass — if we’re lucky of course. But how? I used to wonder how a minute could go by like nothing happened. Now I wonder how a year — A WHOLE YEAR — can pass without you.

I wouldn’t say I have accepted that you will never be here. I feel numb, though. So that’s like acceptance. Because I’ll make the breakfasts for your siblings, answer questions about “What should I wear?” and even the silly things your brother wants to know, like, “Do pigs poop?”

I’ll do this day. I likely won’t lie on the floor like I used to, willing time to just stop. If it stopped, I wouldn’t have to move forward without you.

I don’t do that so much anymore. Just sometimes, when that ball hits the grief button like it’s prone to do from time to time. But I don’t live that way. Thank you. I guess, thank you to you, to God, to my therapist, to my husband, to everyone and anyone who helped me and helps me so I don’t live that way.

But don’t think that I don’t ache for you today. Every day.

It’s been four years. Four years ago you were meant to be born. But instead your life took on such a bigger meaning. You changed EVERYTHING about me, and about us — your family. We fell apart, we came together, we moved, we cried, we survived, and now we are more whole and more human, more grateful, more everything because of you.

Cara. Four years later your name is in my mind, my heart, every day. That won’t change next year, or the next. As long as I am privileged enough to walk this earth, your name and your spirit informs almost all that I do.

Even as I still can’t process that four years ago, we were meant to hold you in the hospital and get ready for an entire life together. Instead, I was mourning your loss, somehow, holding it together enough to be a mom to your sisters, and because your brother was newly baking in my belly. We ate chocolate chip cookies in the park that day — instead of welcoming you into the world. It was breezy and cool and I watched your sisters play on the swings and nearly crumpled with sadness.

Today, I feel sad, but I feel more peaceful because although I never held you, I know you. At least, I know you in my life and how you have changed me and held me up and done all the things an angel does and I feel lucky to have crossed paths with that and have you in my life in any way I can.

My angel. I love you.

Mom