Write about something hopeful or hopeless is the challenge for today. There was no question about what I would write about here….the ultimate hope I have and where it first came from...hope in my salvation, hope that I will one day return to my home with my father in heaven and rejoice in paradise and, yes, hope that I will be reunited with Cole when I get there.
This hope wasn’t an easy one to come to. My struggle after losing Cole was intense and it actually got worse after he was born. I decided to take an ‘excerpt’ from my blogging project, from when I shared my story in all its glory and all it’s darkness last December.
After the boys were born and I finally had the opportunity to say hello and goodbye to Cole and to finally hold Cameron in my arms some of the worst of it was over. However now I had find my way back to normal. The problem was that normal was gone or maybe I should say the old Jodie and normal for her was gone. Finding my new normal would take months…well maybe years in all honesty…and would take some very painful moments and steps along the way.
It’s said that there are five stages of grief, denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I think I flitted from stage to stage in the beginning but then entered a mode of acceptance, for the time being, while I was in the hospital waiting for the boys to arrive. Now that they were here I found my emotions ranged from disbelief to deep sadness. It was surreal feeling to have Cameron in the hospital and all of us at home. It's like I was never pregnant and nothing in our family had changed. It was almost as if none of the last 3 months has happened and yet I was filled with such sadness at times that it was all I could do to not burst into tears. I met so many other families in the NICU who were amazed by my strength and courage but I didn't feel like I was strong, rather that I had just done what I had to do. I didn't have a choice because if I had, it wouldn't have been to lose Cole and spend months in the hospital. How did that make me strong??? In those moments I seemed to be in the stage of grief marked by all kinds of questions and just didn't understand why this had to happen. I felt that in time, and with the support of my family and friends, those sad moments would not seem so overwhelming but I knew that they would never go away and I would never stop missing the baby I never got to know.
I have often said I never got angry, never hit the angry stage but I know, now, as I explore this and remember things that I was angry at times. I remember beating my hands against my bed and sobbing into my pillow in the early days but I also remember asking, angrily, loud why I had to go through this. If I was only meant to have one of my twins home with me then why did I have to have a twin pregnancy in the first place...why did I need to experience this pain and loss??? I am not sure who I raged this against…the greater universe? God? I don’t know. I just know it was a pretty dark time in my life. I spent a lot of time ignoring my life….letting things go in the house, spending hours thinking, reading things online, trying to find similar stories and similar minded friends. My life around me, my family, my friends, my community, my home…none of this seemed to be as important was the people I met online who understood.
When people would ask how I was I often said ok. I never quite knew what to say because I really wasn’t good nor was I fine. I was missing a part of my family and didn’t know how to deal with that at times. I was lost, confused, angry, sad, grateful, joyful, faithful and hopeful. What a mixed bag of tricks I was. I just couldn't get it into my head why this had happened. I rationalized sometimes that it was because I wasn't jumping for joy about having twins...not at the start anyway. But I wanted my babies, I wanted to make it work, I wanted to be that 'twin mommy'...the one people stopped in the store to admire their beautiful children who looked exactly alike. I got so mad at myself for the feelings I had when I read the TTTS success stories, it seemed so cruel of me not to feel joy that others don't have to go through this and I know it could be so much worse...I could have lost them both. But somehow that never brought me peace at this point in the journey. Sometimes I would look at the ultrasound pictures and the tears rolled down my cheeks. It hardly seemed fair that those two little boys would never play together, never snuggle up on my lap together for a story or two, never join their big brothers for a 4 man pile up on Daddy and never share a birthday cake together each year. I was consumed with all the things we would miss out on. I wanted so much for Cole and Cameron. I wanted to see them grow up together, to do the things that twins do together. To watch them communicate without saying a word. I wanted to dress them the same in matching overalls and watch them play outside in the sandbox. It felt so unfair that I never got to do that. But it seemed even more unfair that Cameron would never get to know his twin either.
Sometimes I wanted to be angry at God but it never seemed to come to that. I think I was finally getting it that sometimes crappy things just happen, that it isn’t His will to have a baby angel in heaven, that it isn’t that this was His plan, but rather it just happened for no good reason. Now God was here to hold us all, to comfort us and to look after my little one up there in Heaven.
My peace at this time came from believing that Cole was with us all, especially Cameron. I knew he would always be in my heart but most especially, that he would always be in Cameron’s heart and be a part of Cameron. For now, I felt, my heart was broken and battered. It would heal though, over time. It was like a puzzle and all of my children would always have a piece of that puzzle. It would only be a whole heart if Zackary, Brycen, Cameron and Cole’s parts were there…and so they are all there, forever with me for the rest of time. Each part will have different emotions attached to it at different times. Cole’s might always have the sad emotion but that was okay because without all four of those parts my heart would not be whole.
I knew I would get through this, I knew that because I’d made it this far and had been blessed by the love and strength of a God who never fails me and the support of so many people I didn’t know loved me so much. Although I appreciated it all, learning to trust God and to accept Jesus into my heart did not begin at all really until a few months after my boys were born... as I planned the service to say goodbye to our little boy. In preparation for what I would say, a friend had suggested I read a book by a woman named Jenny Hander, likely the first person to really deeply influence my faith journey. Jenny had also been expecting identical twins when TTTS reared its ugly head and caused her twins to arrive before 27 weeks. She was in a much different place in her faith journey but so much of what she wrote about resonated with me. What really hit home for me then was her writing about needing to let one of her twins go, to accept her death and the survival of her twin sister as part of God’s plan. She was a woman of immense faith, a strong Christian and yet she struggled to say goodbye to her daughter, to stop praying for God to return her to be with her family. Her final acceptance came when she was finally able to find peace, comfort and hope in the loss of her daughter because she knew that , by following the teachings of Jesus, by being the strong Christian that she was, she would see her daughter in Heaven. This was God’s plan for her and it was ok... she would see her little girl again. And suddenly I became so very fearful that I would not see my son again, that I was not doing a good job and that my place in Heaven was, by no means, secure.
That day I knelt down and I prayed and begged Jesus to forgive me for all my sins, most especially what my struggles to accept and grieve were doing to my family, to my children. I gave all my brokenness to Jesus that day, I handed him my wounded, broken and stuck back together with band-aids heart and asked him to fix it for me. I knew nothing about what it meant to come to Christ and had no idea that I needed to ask him to help me fix that broken heart, that I needed to do the work with his help but I do think that was the first day of the rest of my life so to speak.
My hope came in that moment and I began to be able to find my way out of the dark hole that was consuming me. It was a slow process that ultimately took a few more years to really come to having any sort of deep relationship with Jesus but it was the start and I’m so grateful for the hope that it stirred in my heart.
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