Spring

Grace,

Don't think I don't remember. Don't think for a moment because it's been a couple months that I've posted anything that you aren't on my mind. Don't think that I'm not aware, because I am. It's spring and with those beautiful flowers, that sense of hope pushing through the earth, comes the realization that one more year is passing without you. One more spring, one more blooming of the crocuses, one more three or four inches on your tree that each year grows taller and stronger. But nothing fades. Not the memory of your four pounds against my chest, not the memory of your kicks inside me, your face scrunched up into protest. No. What fades is the way you come toward me now, not in a bad kind of fading, but you are more deeply entrenched in me. And this gives me hope.

Over the last decade, scientists have been studying the crossing of cells from the placenta to the mother and have discovered in fact that decades later, that your cells remain inside of my body.  And this gives me unbelievable joy, knowing in fact that you and all my children truly do reside inside of me, that you are in fact here and that we are in fact still connected in ways that I cannot really describe.

And so today even, at your brother's soccer game, as he ran back and forth across the field, as your other brother and sister sat on the sidelines watching him, as your father walked back and forth across the grass, you were there too, watching. I could feel your presence. There is always the still, the but, the other sense that your physical presence would still be my choice, that your ten-year-old self could also be there, sitting in a chair next to me, cheering on Sawyer, shouting at the top of your lungs, "Go Sawyer," because I am sure you would have strong lungs. But there is a sense of comfort settling in too, a sense of peace, in a way I cannot quite describe. It is not a sense of resignation mind you, not a sense of giving up, but a sense of falling into this journey, giving in to the rise and fall of emotions, the rise and fall of the tears and the sighing, the rise and fall of day and night.

This journey, this space I am in, contains you in ways I could not have imagined. Spring. It is rising inside of me. The space of moving back toward you, back toward that darkness, that heavy feeling, that  space where life and death collide to create something inside me that I could never imagine. That space where particles collide to create something greater than I could ever imagine. I will give myself fully and completely over to the emotions of this season. I will give into the shift toward this eleventh year, with and without. Always pining, always wanting more, always feeling so much, always with love.

love,
mama