6 candles

Today is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. Tonight at 7:00, the Wave of Light will occur across all time zones as we light a candle for those that left this world too soon. 

Nothing has changed me more drastically than losing 6 pregnancies.  Until then, I gotta admit, I led a pretty charmed life and I believed that hard work and good intentions paved the way to a happy life.  But it turns out, it is not that simple.  Life can be hard (much harder, I freely admit, than what we have gone through) and neither your diligence, your intelligence, nor your heart much matters in determining what you are dealt.  

Of course, how you deal with it is all heart.  

I was such a realist, such an agnostic, such an individualist.  God, spirit, charity, selflessness: none of it meant much to me.  But, when I had to dig down deep to get through our losses, I found something.  It took me a long time to identify that as God, but that is what it is.  

When I walked up those stairs in Langfang, China and saw Nicholas for the first time.  That was God.

When I attended my prenatal testing for pregnancy #8, with total peace in my heart, that was God.  I knew no matter what the outcome, it was all good (and, thank God, Peter is a healthy boy!)

Even  - smaller things - when the economy crashed and we thought John was out of a job, that there were few jobs in his field even in sight, that we would have to sell the house etc. etc....when I just exhaled and trusted, that was God.

So, alongside grief, I feel gratitude for my lost angels tonight.  It took a lot of repetition but I think I finally got the many lessons my babies' deaths were meant to show me:  

God exists.  

Life, for the most part, is shallow and fleeting.  

Love is the only real thing.  

I am meant to be a mother.  A mother of many.

I can relate to the grief and the horror and the complexity of the decisions that birth mothers have to make for their babies.  My kids' birth mothers are my sisters and I honor them.  

Everything sucky that happens is a gift in disguise.

I am beyond blessed.