#grievinghearts

I'm sorry. I know this photo is probably a trigger for many of you. It is actually not a baby that I know, but a beautiful image that I came across which so completely triggered my grief-loss-love that it took my breath away. After our adoption broke down, something that I missed more than words could describe was their little hands. The feeling of their hands in mine, the memory of how their hands worked slowly and deliberately as they figured out the world, their magical perfection. So there is that, wrapped up in this photo, the feeling of utter longing and wanting to be back in a moment. And then there are the babies never met. The children who exist only in my imagination and in my heart. The ones who are frozen in that elusive state of never having been held, and yet forever after my mind has followed all their 'should have beens' and all of their milestones. Oh this would have been the first day of kindergarten, oh this would have been the year she lost her first tooth. And now, the thoughts are less frequent but it doesn't take long to remember, to check in: oh this would have been the year she turned 13, started high school... There is nothing more tightly tangled up in a mother's heart than these mysteries of what might have been. Why our minds do this difficult dance I don't know, it feels both torturous and yet so very natural. There is certainly a part of us that doesn't grasp the missingness, that somehow follows along the should-have-beens timeline without pausing to realize that there is no one to follow, even while the rest of our being is left reeling, gasping, missing so much that it all feels impossible. That massive missing, that lifetime of could have would have should have beens. And so yes, you are my most beautiful mystery. I love you with all my whole entire self, the parts that know you are not here as well as the parts that are blissfully unaware. You are absolute perfection wherever it is that you live, for now tucked inside my heart, inside my mind, mysteriously present in all sorts of ways - even when you are not. #motheringyourheart #NIAW #startasking #infertilitysupport #grievinghearts #babyloss #childloss