MABOP Monday

 Her smile lit up every room she was in and the hearts of all who loved her

St. Ella, pray for us!

MABOP Monday

Smiling for mommy even though she made you wear a silly hat...
 

But really thinking "can you believe my mom made me wear this silly hat?!"

St. Ella, pray for us!

MABOP Monday

Ella & daddy blankie - she always slept better when she could snuggle with her blankie

One of the awesome PICU nurses took this picture of sweet Ella for us. We were at Mass on a Sunday when we received it via text. It was so nice and reassuring to see our wee girl taking a snooze with her beloved daddy blankie :)

 

 

St. Ella, pray for us!

Letting Go of Why

I am a fairly ADD house cleaner.  I will start cleaning and decluttering one room and will end up in a different room entirely by the time all is said and done, neither room 100% clean.  I am also a behind-closed-doors cleaner.  I’ll clean the heck out of drawers, closets, cabinets - basically any place that can be hidden once it’s clean.  When you combine those two cleaning styles, you get very neatly organized, somewhat random locations that no one will ever see because they are completely closed off from view.

My kitchen pantry is very organized, but it’s behind a door that I prefer to keep closed.  The cabinet underneath my bathroom sink is very orderly, and my well-organized toiletries cache in the linen closet is ridiculous!  But no one will ever see these things, nor would anyone care to see them.  As for the rest of the house… let’s just say that it’s a work in progress.  For whatever reason, if I can see it, I can’t seem to clean it.  I get overwhelmed by how much needs to be done, so I choose to tackle the smaller, doable jobs that require less of my focus, the orderliness of which will only be seen and appreciated by me.

And yet of all the small, only ever seen by me places that I should be able to maintain, my purses are the messiest.  Grab any purse from my closet, and you’re bound to find it cluttered with a plethora of useless, unused junk, the likes of which will be found in duplicate in my other bags.  It’s too easy to jam those receipts into my purse rather than throw them out.  It’s too easy to grab another pen from the jar on the counter on my way out the door than to use the one or two or five that already live at the bottom of my bag.  And the extra, unused napkins from a quick meal at a fast food place?  Well, you can never have too many of those at your disposal, can you?

A few months ago, I went through all of the crap that had accumulated in one of my purses – receipts, bits of paper and notes that hadn’t been thrown out, old gum, napkins and straws, hand sanitizer and lip balm, pens, etc.  It was a task that was long overdue, but the only reason I even cared enough to do it was because I needed to use that particular purse at that moment, not because of any overwhelming desire to declutter.  It is amazing how much junk one purse can hold!  It’s also amazing how lazy I can be with regard to cleaning out that junk on a regular basis.  Because having to dig through all of that trash is obviously a better option than using a real trash can, said no one ever.

I emptied the whole purse onto the floor and started cleaning it out.  It wasn’t just any purse, though.  It was the purse I had used for the five weeks that Ella was in the hospital during her first stay in the PICU.  Going through the piles of receipts and such was akin to taking a painful trip down memory lane.  It wasn’t so much the papers and receipts themselves that were difficult to look at so much as the dates on them - those days last April when we felt as though the floor had fallen out from under us, when we didn’t know what was going to happen to our brand new baby girl, and when “WHY?!” screamed through our hearts and minds even as we were left speechless at the situation with which we were faced.

As I sorted through the large pile of junk, I examined each item pretty carefully - so many receipts for coffee and hospital fast food and coffee!  Any time I must look through old receipts, I shred as I go because you can’t be too careful these days with your personal information.  And because I wanted to know what I was throwing away and didn’t want to inadvertently get rid of anything important, I was forced to read – really look at – each bit of paper.

Two pieces of paper in particular took my breath away.  The first was the note from the pediatrician after Ella’s first doctor appointment.  Ella was five days old at the time, so the note had the usual newborn baby checkup information on it – weight, height, head circumference – but it also had a few comments.

“Doing Great!  :) x2”

We’d been told that the doctor heard a heart murmur, but other than recommending that we go to a cardiologist and saying that it might be an “innocent” murmur, our baby was apparently doing great.

The next piece of paper I came across was a credit card receipt from the cardiologist’s office for our daughter’s first echocardiogram (echo).  The cost was staggering, but what truly rocked our entire world was how quickly we went from “Doing great!” the day before to “Your daughter has multiple congenital heart defects.  She is in heart failure.  It would be quicker for you to drive her to the emergency room than to wait for an ambulance.”

Oh Lord, why?  Why why why why why?  We waited so long to bring our daughter home.  We went through so much heartache and trouble just to get to that point, and we jumped through so many hoops and over so many hurdles.  We loved her from the moment we heard about her, and we couldn’t wait to just love on her at home.  WHY?

Five weeks in the PICU and one major, risky, complicated surgery later, and we were finally on our way home again.  Praise God!  The day we had waited for had finally come.  There were medicines to give every day and quite a few doctor appointments each week, but we were finally home…until we weren’t.  About two and a half months after we got home from the hospital, we found out via another echo at the cardiologist's office that Ella’s heart was failing.  Again.  She had to go back to the hospital.  We weren’t sure how long this stay would be.  Heck, we didn’t know if another surgery would even be possible.

It wasn’t.  Our baby girl was listed for a heart transplant.  And so we waited and prayed and waited and prayed and waited, but the transplant wasn’t meant to be.  A healthy heart never became available, and Ella’s poor, sick heart couldn’t work that hard anymore or wait any longer.

Why?

Why did God bring us to this point?  Why did our sweet girl have to endure this?  Why did she have to suffer so much?  Why didn’t God heal her?  Why didn’t He keep her alive until a heart became available?  Why didn’t He perform a miracle?  Why didn’t He answer our prayers or the prayers of countless people praying for her?

Why?

Why bring her to us only to take her away?  Why answer our sons’ prayers for a baby sister only to then call her Home?  Why bless us beyond measure only to seemingly then say, “Oops.  Never mind.  I take it back.  I take her back”?

WHY?

Just when I think I’m healing, just when I think I can mourn gracefully and peacefully, just when I think I can get on with the business of living, the WHYs rear their ugly heads, and I have to confront the anger I thought I’d let go of or at least had under control.  I get so freaking angry with God for breaking my heart, yet I know He’s the only One capable of healing it.  But for healing to happen, I have to let go of the WHYs that plague me.  I have to accept that NO answer on this earth from any human will ever suffice.  I have to accept that, for now, NO answer even from Him would ever suffice.  I have to accept that my WHYs will never be answered with any acceptable “because….”

And that is truly one of the hardest parts of grieving for me – trusting that God’s answer to all of my WHYs may never be mine to know in this lifetime.  I have to trust and believe that His perfect will is mercy and love itself, even if that same mercy and love is hidden in a fog that these poor, flawed human eyes can’t see through.  I have to learn to trust that His will is perfect but that my understanding of it is severely imperfect.  Because in my “perfect” world, my beautiful daughter would be alive and well, toddling around, babbling at me, smiling and laughing with her brothers, hugging her daddy and dancing with him, and being the most awesome baby on the planet.

Oh, those WHYs are such a stumbling block for me!  For as much as I beg for God’s help in letting them go, I also cling to them because sometimes it feels as though I’ve got very little else to cling to.  If I cling to them and to the anger at the injustice and unfairness of it all, then I keep one small part of my reality at bay – that there is nothing left for me to do but accept the facts, to accept the truth of my situation, to accept that this nightmare is reality, to accept this life as a mom of two-plus-one-in-Heaven.

Up until the moment of Ella’s death, I think I’d had a fairly “easy” life.  There were definitely other moments of why that I had grappled with, but I had learned to live with them.  Even in our marriage, my husband and I faced WHYs that on the outset seemed insurmountable.

We were open to life and wanted lots of kids.  Why could we never get pregnant?

We were open and upfront about our Catholic faith.  Why were some Christian adoption agencies only willing to work with us if we lied and said we were “Catholic in name only?”

We were willing, able, and eager to share our lives with a child via adoption.  Why were we previously scammed by a birth mother who never intended to place her child for adoption but just wanted the easy money?

We were more than willing to disrupt our lives for an indefinite amount of time to make sure Ella got the best care.  Why wasn’t that enough for her?

My husband and I had had what we thought was our fair share of whys to struggle with, but we somehow managed to turn those problems of why into happy solutions.  We had talked about the adoption option before we were even married, both of us feeling called to it and open to it.  So when it turned out to be our only option, we felt so blessed that God had placed the desire to adopt on our hearts so many years ago.  When we were turned away from two different adoption agencies because of our faith, we felt blessed when we found one that would work with us.  When we were heartbroken and depressed to learn that a birth mother we’d been working with had given birth and then skipped out without a trace, we thought that was maybe a sign to give up on the idea of ever adopting again until we got the call that Ella had been born and was to become our sweet daughter.

But when we were brought to the point of her death after all the WHYs we had conquered and overcome along the way, we were left with even bigger WHYs and even less chance of receiving any kind of acceptable answers or of reaching any happy solutions.

If I know me like I know me, then I know that my struggle with letting go of why is one I will deal with for the rest of my life.  I hope that’s not the case because it’s a helluva way to think and to feel and to live.  It’s painful - really physically painful - to understand that my WHYs will go unanswered.  It is so hard to give it all over to God, to let it go and let Him be in charge and to let His will stand.  It is so hard to go from shaking an angry fist toward Heaven to bowing down at the foot of the Cross to unite this unimaginable suffering of mine with His.  It is so hard…

I am trying to let go of why.  I am trying to live with the incomplete answer of “because…”  But I think in order to come close to doing that, I’ll have to say with every breath I take, with every ounce of my being, with everything I have in me, “Not my will but Thy will be done.”  I’ll have to say it, and with God’s good grace and a strength that only He can give, I’ll come to believe it.

 

 

St. Ella, pray for us!

MABOP Monday

The sweetest, goofiest little girl ever!  I dare you not to smile :)

St. Ella, pray for us!

MABOP Monday

The most beautiful baby girl with the most soulful brown eyes

St. Ella, pray for us!

Derailed

I’ve been walking a lot since Ella died.  Since I started walking back in the late winter/early spring, I’ve walked at least 500 miles, and I’m on my third pair of sneakers.  What started out as a way of getting my sad, depressed butt out of the house has turned into an almost daily form of exercise and therapy.  It’s a solitary pursuit, which is one of the reasons why I like it, and it has given me a regular time during the day to think and to pray, to cry and to remember.  That I’ve lost some weight and dropped a dress size in the process are just nice bonuses, ones that go hand in hand with another form of therapy…retail therapy.  ;)

I haven’t always been an avid walker.  I used to be a runner.  Well, let me rephrase that.  I used to try to be a runner.  My brother and sister were natural-born runners – built for it, naturally good at it, and good enough to be competitive at it.  Me?  Not so much.  As we like to say in my family, I’m of “good, Irish peasant stock.”  I do not have a runner’s build, but for years and years, I tried to run.  I ran cross country and track in both middle school and high school, and I’ve run a few 5Ks since then.  And though I tried to have one, I just don’t have a runner’s disposition.  Before anyone calls BS on all of that, let me say one more thing:  I just plain hate to run.  I’ll run if and when something chases me, but otherwise, why?  I never got the high.  I never won the race.  I never really enjoyed it.  I ran because it was the thing to do, because my parents required us to participate in a sport, and because I didn’t play any team sports.

But walking?  Walking I can do and enjoy.  Walking is a good fit for me, and walking has been good for me.  If I had tried to be a runner again after Ella died, I would still be sitting on my depressed, pudgy butt.  I’d still have low vitamin D.  I’d be no tanner and no thinner but very much worse for the lack of wear.  If I tried running again, I would quickly find reasons to not go running, and I’d quickly lose any motivation I might have had to start running again.  I would hate it, and then I’d hate myself for failing at it.  Since this is my blog and I happen to be both unscientific and lazy, I’ll just make up my own statistics on the topic.  It’s a proven fact that walking is 97% more awesome than running.  No lie.  Plus it’s easy, and mama likes easy.  If running were in the picture, I’d be able to give you 20 excuses in five seconds flat why I can’t go running every day.  But walking?  If I can walk to the fridge and the computer and the sofa, then I can walk four miles around the neighborhood.

So it was with great annoyance and consternation that I couldn’t enjoy my walks for over two weeks this month.  I caught a cold that kicked my butt and sapped my energy.  Between that and certain scheduling conflicts, my daily walks got the old heave ho.  I really missed it (though the lazy part of me enjoyed sleeping in a bit while I was sick), but I shouldn’t have been surprised by it.  Catching a cold at the end of the summer is par for the course for me.  I caught one last year when Ella was home, and I’ve caught colds several other times in the past around this time of year.  Summer winds down, and apparently so does my immune system.  Kids go back to school, yet I’m the one stuck at home with the back-to-school special of snot, the sniffles, and a sore throat.  Any exercise plan I may have had in place is temporarily derailed.

A lot can change when you’re out of commission for two weeks.  When I was finally able to go walking again this past Monday, I did so in brisk 58°F weather.  A bit of cooler fall weather had crept in, so that was a nice change.  What wasn’t so nice was how quickly I had fallen out of shape!  My husband had warned me that I might be sore after my first walk back, and he was right.  OUCH.  Everything was sore from my butt on down to my toes; plus, I had two new blisters on my ankles.  I felt a bit hobbled and it would have been very easy to take a day or two or ten off to recover, but I knew that the soreness would only go away if I kept walking, if I worked through it, and if I focused on getting past it on my way back to where I was before my end-of-the-summer cold. I may have been derailed, but you can bet your sweet bippy that I was going to beat feet and get the Bridget-walking-train back on track.  I may have been derailed, but by gosh, I was going to make sure that the derailment really was only temporary!

If only it were that easy when the derailment is spiritual rather than physical.

If only it were that easy when your life is derailed.

If only it were that easy when your soul, your entire being, is derailed.

Nothing opened my eyes to how very far off spiritual track I was than the death of my sweet Ella.  Nothing before had ever challenged my faith and trust in God more than when He took her home, and nothing ever exposed how shallow that faith and trust was than the moment she died.  I call it a derailment, but can something be derailed if it were never on track to begin with?  Because that’s honestly how I felt once she was gone.

My faith was a very basic and immature faith, I think.  I knew – and still know to the depths of my soul – that there is a God.  I know that Jesus is my Savior.  I believe that He is fully present - Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity - in the Holy Eucharist.  I know that and I believe that, but I have never felt farther away from Him than I did when Ella died.  I still feel very far away, and I worry that I’ll ever make it back to Him.

Throughout my whole Ella-centric journey, a number of people have commented on how strong my faith is, how it has inspired them, how they think I’m strong.  But hearing all of that makes me feel like a damn fraud.  I feel like I’ve had to have this Suzy Sunshine façade with regard to my faith because if people really knew what I thought and felt, if they really knew what I said to God or how I felt about His plan...well, the shock would probably blow them away.  I feel like my own “pray it until you feel it, say it until you believe it” mantra would work for everyone else but not for me.  I feel let down and alone and forgotten by the One I constantly talk to, pray to, cry to, and scream to.

I want to get back to Jesus, but I don’t know how to.  Intellectually I know I should try harder to get back to Him.  I should try harder to get closer to Him and to rebuild the relationship that’s been shattered by my own faltering faith.  I should read the Bible and pray every day because while feelings are nice, love is a decision that requires constant devotion, cultivation and work.  But honest to freaking pete, I just don’t know how to do it.  I don’t know how to get there or how to get to a point when I think or believe it would be worth it.  Some days I feel like letting Him in would be as pointless as looking for a doorknob on an elevator and as futile as pushing on a door that is clearly labeled pull.  I feel lost, and that worries and scares me.  I am derailed, and I’m having a hard time not only finding the tracks but caring enough to get back on them.

 

When I started walking again, even after a break as short as two and half weeks, I was comforted by the familiar sights and sounds of the neighborhood – the kids who play while waiting at the bus stop, the older gentleman who always waves at me with both hands, the flocks of geese that can barely be bothered to get out of the way for passing cars and trucks, the various bumper stickers and license plate holders on neighbors’ cars, the worms that scoot slowly across the pavement.  They are all familiar and so much a part of the scenery of my everyday walks.

Why then do I feel little comfort when I recite the familiar prayers of my faith, prayers I’ve been saying since my youth?  Why do I feel little comfort when I hear His Word spoken at church, even as He speaks to me through His music and in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass?  Why do I feel comfort getting back to the mundane sights and sounds of a walk through my neighborhood yet feel little comfort getting back to the worship and prayers of my faith?

When I was able to go for walks again, it was good to see that everything that had a place was still in fact in its place.  Yes, my ankles hurt with just about every step because of open blisters being rubbed raw by my socks and shoes.  And yes, I was really sore after my walk, limping around like a woman of many more years than I.  But the comfort that the familiar evoked was so much better than the sometimes overwhelming apathy that I’ve experienced since Ella died.  The physical aches and pains I felt were so much better than the spiritual numbness that’s had a grip on my soul since my baby went away. 

But the pain of Ella’s absence – the pain that I’ve felt to varying degrees every single day since she died – you can’t walk that pain away.  That pain has only been compounded by my flawed human perception of Divine apathy because of His silence, because His apparent distance makes me feel small and insignificant.  It makes me wonder if He hears my prayers or if I’m praying the right way.  It makes me wonder if being able to see “The Big Picture” one day would make a difference in how I’ve felt since Ella died.  It makes me wonder how the bleep this could be His perfect will.  It makes me wonder why him but not Ella, why her but not my sweet girl.

Yet I know I’m the one who can’t seem to bridge the gap between us.  I know that I’m the one who’s fallen so far off track, not Him.  I complain about His distance though I’m the one keeping Him at arm’s length.  I complain about His apparent apathy even as I struggle with my own.  I complain…yet He trusted me with Ella.  He blessed me with the most awesome daughter ever.  He didn’t guarantee me peace here on Earth, but He gave me a piece of Heaven when He brought Ella into my life.  He had a plan for her and for me and for my family.  Why can’t I see that?  And why can’t I trust that?  Am I really owed more than that with which I was already so richly blessed?

I know I can’t get through this life without Him or without His grace.  I know that I can’t see her again without making my way back to Him.  Saying all of this out loud, getting it off my chest, off my heart and out of my head, can only help.  And even through all of my doubt and anger and pain, I have been hoping and praying for a life after death, for my life after her death. 

I may have been derailed, but I’m hoping that it’s only temporary.  I’m hoping that in recognizing it, I’ll be a step closer to getting back on track.  But I’m not just hoping for it.  I’m counting on it.

 

 

St. Ella, pray for us!