I'm struggling with kindness today. Not for others, but for myself.
I find myself feeling sorry for myself today. I find myself feeling jealous of others. I find myself being angry.
I find myself aching for something I likely cannot have -- another child. Yes, we can always adopt, but part of what I'm aching for is to be pregnant again, to feel another being growing inside of me, to feel such a natural and complete connection to another being.
When I was pregnant with our twin girls, I always knew what they needed. My body told me. I took the time to really listen to my body those few months. I rested when I felt tired. I ate when I felt hungry. I drank when I felt thirsty. I gladly missed a concert early in the first trimester because I was too ill and exhausted to even think about seeing Roger Waters perform "The Wall." I gladly let the vegetables in the garden go to seed because I was to big to bend over and tend to them.
I wasn't so eager for their birth two months early, but when that happened despite everyone's desires, I gladly sat by their incubators in the NICU hooked into the breast pump to get the milk flowing to nourish their tiny bodies. I gladly held them close during sessions of skin-to-skin, singing to them, telling them stories about our home and dogs, making plans to take them to far off places and on adventures.
Yesterday I gladly took a sick Morgen to see her doctor. She just has a bad head cold. No flu. No rhinovirus. It will work its course in 7 - 10 days. At the doctor's office they brought us into the same room where 19 months earlier I brought a sick Sonne. My heart fluttered as I watched Erica put on the sensor to test Mo's blood oxygen level. Everything checked out fine.
Sadly, I was reminded that Sonne's last time at the doctor's office wasn't so routine. Her blood oxygen level was in the 50s. Her skin was a bluish color.
I bravely climbed into the ambulance to take Sonne from the doctor to the emergeny room at the nearby hospital. I bravely handed Morgen and my car keys to Erica and Caroline so they could meet us at the ER. I bravely recounted Zo's medical history to a new set of doctors and nurses while standing and nursing Mo.
I calmly called my husband who had just arrived in Massachusetts to tell him what was happening. I honestly told him that everything was fine. I believed it was just Zo's reflux causing a problem, or perhaps a respiratory infection. Even her cardiologist believed the latter to be the culprit.
Two weeks later we would learn that the surgery to correct her heart defects was a failure. It hadn't gone as planned. Two days post-op and we took our sweet Sonne off life support and she passed away in our arms. We lovingly held her close and told her it was okay. We would always love her.
And we do. Not a day has passed that we haven't thought of our sweet little, little and sent love in her direction, wherever that direction may be.
But there are those days where remembering her smile and the feeling of her tiny head against my chest don't console me. Those are days like today. Where I ache to reclaim something which was lost, something which can never be replaced. That connection to the unborn soul growing inside of me, the little person who danced and kicked and tickled me from inside. To that precious baby who smiled and struggled and fought and ultimately lost, but did so with such grace because she knew no better. Sonne only lived in the moment and knowing that is wonderful.
So I'll try to hold onto that today as I struggle to be kind to myself.
As the Dalai Lama has said, "Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible."
