2 months

Today is 2 months since we found out our baby was gone. Sometimes I cringe when people say that someone has "left us" or is "gone" but in the case of Baby Doyle 5, it is true. I went to the ultrasound expecting to see a wiggly baby on the screen, but instead saw an empty sac where a baby had once been. It has been curious to me how that kind of thing happens, and I'll admit to being slightly disturbed that in some way my body was getting nourishment from the being it was supposed to be nourishing. But the hair-stylist I had the "divine appointment" with last month said, "maybe your baby was an angel and it just came to see you for a little while and then went back to heaven." I like her explanation better.



The bitter tears have mostly gone. I'm still sad and it's hard sometimes, to watch my body get ever smaller when it should be growing round with life, but for the most part, life has caught back up with me and busy-ness keeps me from feeling the pain very frequently.



Most of the time I feel like I'm floating at sea, but I mentioned in a post before we lost the baby that I had been feeling that way, so I suppose things are "back to normal" for the most part. I keep feeling like I'm waiting for our future to happen and really the only time the lonliness for the baby bites me in the arse now is when I remember that we had something tangible in the future to look forward to and now we don't know what it looks like--again. I don't know how to say that the way I mean it...I mean, we've known for a long time that something BIG was going to change soon and for a while, (40 days) we thought that change looked like a new baby and new familial roles, but now we're back to a faceless change, which is sometimes harder than the very hardest change you could know about.



I find myself defending my wound on occasion. What on earth does *that* mean?! Well, just that I want to feel it or expose it to others from time to time. Not because I'm some emo or goth kid, but because it seems like when you've lost something so loved, so wanted, so important you should just recognize that it was there instead of steam-rolling past it. For example, when remodeling the house, we came across a former doorway that had been boarded over and sheet-rocked. Allan thought we should "honor" the door so that everyone who visited would know that, once, a door had been in that spot. So he built a beautiful bookshelf in the doorway that was. When I come down the stairs, I admire that bookshelf. It used to be something much more functional, but then someone came in and plowed over it and it became a wall I had to decorate, (and had no decorations for, incidentally, so it was an eyesore) and a carpenter came along and decided to honor what was once there and it became something to inspire, something to look at and love. It's not what it used to be, but it's beautiful and it's a reminder.



Let me chase that rabbit 'round this bush one more time...There was once a new life that would enter this home and change its floorplan. It had a function and a purpose all its own--baby brother, youngest child, the one who changed the way we look at God--and to board that doorway up would create something that would be an eyesore (a mother who longed to remember her child, but never felt it was okay to talk about him). But instead I want a carpenter to come along and build something beautiful out of the empty space. Maybe that life is no longer functional or purposeful in and of the vision we had for it at the time, but it can be functional and beautiful in some other way.



By the way--Jesus was/is a carpenter if you're curious about the reference.



Well, that's all I got for now. Love and miss you all.