18 Months

It was 18 months ago, last Thursday, since our world changed.  I meant to write on the exact 18 months date, but life got in the way.  I was fighting a cold all week and just feeling not myself, then Coen got sick Friday with his first fever, the cat is having bathroom issues.....our typical zoo of a household.  I won't complain ever about the stress of having two kids though.  By the way, the cold won :(

My thoughts on 18 months without my daughter......where to start.  I've been thinking about it a lot lately.  It's confusing, how I feel.  I am not sure I can put it into words but I will try.

My thought processes have definitely changed.  I no longer think of things in terms of how they "should have been."  I don't say "Adelyn should have been 18  months old."  I say "would have."  I guess I have gotten to a point where I am accepting, I know that how things are now is how they are supposed to be.  Why they are like this, I still haven't figured out, probably never will.   I can't even imagine what it would be like if Adelyn had lived.  And I'm not sure how I feel about that.  Is it good in a way, does it mean I am moving forward and healing?  But on the flip side, I feel like it means she is getting farther and farther away.  I can't explain it.

It is different now, the kinds of things that will make me sad.  The fact that my daughter died is sad, yes, but it just IS.  It's how it is, I can't change it and so I just accept it as part of my life.  Thinking about it doesn't take my breath away, although I rarely if ever actually speak the words out loud.  The things that hurt me now are the memories attached to her pregnancy or of the time right after she died.  Not the fact that she is dead.  Does that even make sense? 

It's like thinking about all those hopes and dreams and how happy we were, only to have them taken away...that hurts.  Remembering the day we found out she was a girl, or trying to figure out a name for her up until the day before she was born, or thinking about Sierra referring to the nursery as "baby sister's room."  And then thinking about those days/weeks right after she died......the empty car seat, going in the nursery for the first time, angrily throwing diapers around the room, putting away the baby gear, dr. appointments to go over what happened - I could go on.  Probably one of the hardest memories was when the kids at Sierra's baby-sitter asked if I had another baby in my belly because I still looked pregnant right afterwards.  I said no, then they asked what was in there and Sierra answered "That's my baby sister in there."  Thinking of anything like this, it hurts SO much still.  I try not to let my mind wander there, because it is not a good place to be.  But sometimes I cannot make it stop and I think about these things over and over and over.  And I get very sad, sometimes even the anger returns....why me?  I just have to give it time and it passes, and I keep my mind on the present and not the past.  But it's work, doing that.  There are always things that pop up that remind me and take me back there.  It takes great effort to keep focused on what I do have right now.

It's almost as if I just want to erase the entire year of 2010.  I really think I do. That might sound awful because that is the year of Adelyn.  I don't want to forget her, but all those memories from that year are not ones I want to remember.  And yet, I can't seem to forget them.

Some things remain the same.  I still long for another baby girl, specifically the one I can never have on Earth.  It still hurts to see baby girls with cute hair bows, or to hear of someone having their second daughter.  It still hurts to see sisters and to know my daughter came so close to having one. Little sister t-shirts make my heart sink.  When I find out someone is pregnant, my first thought is usually a panicked "what if they have a girl?" I still think about Adelyn every day, whether it be when I see a pink butterfly or the numbers 929 somewhere, or whether it be because I see an outfit I would have bought for her, or maybe it is when someone has a baby girl and I think back to my unfulfilled hopes and dreams. 

What has changed??  I always felt like our familyh was "supposed" to be two little girls.  I thought having a boy would be wrong, we were "supposed" to have two girls.  I struggled with this idea the entire time I was pregnant with Coen.  I knew he would be a boy, but it wasn't until I saw him that I accepted that it would be ok if we had a boy.  Now, I cannot imagine our family with two living daughters, I can only imagine it how it is.

And so, 18 months later things have changed but some things remain the same.