Little Bird

I didn't cry on Mother's Day. Not one tear. I felt sad. I noticed the missing one. But I didn't cry. That feels amazing since every other Mother's Day I have cried all. day. long. Here we are in the middle of moving, and J found time to MAKE me a Mother's Day gift that was absolutely perfect, and incorporated all of my babies. Mother's Day is always hard because it's so close to Charlotte's birthday, but looking at that line of photos all day helped somehow. (Look at Charlotte's rose blooming outside the dining room windows. It's on fire this year, blooms everywhere) On Mother's Day we packed, and packed, and packed, and then we walked to lunch. We sat outside, and for a while we were the only ones there since we went early on a Sunday, so we chased the kids around a bit to keep them busy, and J jumped out from behind a stairwell and surprised me to pieces. It was bittersweet - as every day without her is - but the tide

As if the grief wasn't bad enough I now have a serious case of, 'I'm terrible at this dead baby gig," going on. So many seem to be sailing past the anniversaries. A lot of you seem to be doing fine . I know that can't be true, some of us are just more vocal than others, but I wish I had the ability to bear it with a little more grace. This morning I stood in my friend's kitchen eating these horrible, processed store bought donuts I've been craving for a month. "I'm grief eating," I told her. And let me tell you, the friends in that house are two of a rare handful who get to see that side of me because I know they'll pull up a chair and eat a donut with me and there won't be any platitudes or expectations. And then, later on, I said, "I feel like everyone else is coping better than me. Like I'm more of a mess than anyone else. It's been five years, why can't I just get it together?" I see snippets of lives o

We've been saying, "this is a hard time of year for us ..." so often lately I feel like we should have t-shirts made so we can just point at the shirts when people are puzzled by our behavior. One grief side effect that annoys me to pieces is that making decisions is really hard for me from mid-April to mid-May. The other day when J asked if I wanted anything for dinner since he was going to the store I started to cry because I was so overwhelmed at the prospect of picking something to eat. Throw in moving, and all of the things that go with it, and trying to find a house to buy, and I've spent a lot of time the last few days feeling overwhelmed and crying. BUT the good, fabulous, great news is that we put an offer on a house and it was accepted!!!  It's been a huge adjustment for me to wrap my mind around the house since it is not what we originally planned to buy. We put our poor agent through quite an ordeal this weekend, but after a lot of back and f