A Grieving Mother's Heart

When your baby dies your heart shatters on the floor. 
Your heart there in pieces, millions of sharp-edged shards. 
Shock renders you immobile. It feels impossible that the pieces will ever go back together. 
You just stare at the pieces. Unsure of how to continue on. 

The first time you attempt to pick them up they cut deep. They bleed. 
You can't grasp them. Yet your being somehow continues on with your heart still shattered.

The next time you can pick up a few pieces. You can hold them in grief. 
But yet, they don't go back together. You set them back down gently with the other shards.

Eventually you find some string to tie some pieces back together. 
It holds...temporarily. But it easy slips apart leaking heart pieces back to the floor. 
And over and over and over again the string is cut, rendering it useless.

But you try again and again and again to have the string hold your heart together.
And during some of this time it's secured, some of the pieces mend back together.
You oscillate between shards on the floor, putting them back together, and mending. 

At some point enough pieces have mended back together that the string is no longer necessary. 
But the repair points are weak. 
There are times your heart cracks. 
There are times pieces break off and fall to the floor. 
There are even times your heart completely shatters again. 

But now you know the process. The process of finding the right string to hold things together.
The process of letting the pieces merge back into place. 
The process of waiting for your heart to feel okay. 

You know it will never be as it was before. 
It will never feel complete. 
There was a piece that never made it back in. 

But you know how to live with this heart you now have. You know how to care for it. You know that while it feels grief, sadness, heartache, pain....that it can also love fiercely, feel joy, gratitude, and peace.

This grieving mother heart, it feels deeply. Be gentle with it.

To Be A Mother

 

11 years ago a positive pregnancy test told me I was to be a mother,
I had given birth before, but yet I had not mothered,
For 8 ½ years I yearned and wondered, what could it be like to mother.

My heart felt mother love,
I felt that shift within me when she was born,
but I had no where, no one, to pour that love to.

 It was Mother’s Day that day,
And I held my secret for hours,
Only sharing with strangers on the internet,
Waiting to tell Mike in person.

Mother’s Day,
A day that had been difficult since she was born,
A day I didn’t know how to view,
Didn’t know where I fit,
Because do birth mothers count as mothers?

How healing in that instant to know,
To know a baby was on the way,
To mother,
A child that I would get to mother,
To call my own.

May 8^th, 2011
Just like this year,
Just like today,
Was Mother’s Day.

It was a day to celebrate,
It was filled with joy,
With hope, excitement,
The sting of the pain caused by placing my firstborn for adoption,
Lessoned for a moment.

And now today,
11 years later,
On this Mother’s Day,
I think of the short 12 days I had to mother him.

12 hectic, fearful, difficult, intense NICU days,
But also 12 beautiful, joyful, love filled days,
12 days I cherish forever.

He may have only been here for 12 days,
But I will forever be his momma.