Your first Birthday among the stars…

I can’t believe it’s been an entire year since we held you. Since we lost you but also since we met you. I recall the moment I got to see you after laboring just like anybody else… but knowing you would not take your first breath. I was in awe. How was it possible that we could create such a precious, perfect, little girl? While your Daddy cried, I was still… in shock… wonderstruck… Even with your bruises from labor without any fluid to protect you, you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. And we had just hours with you before we had to say goodbye.

The morning we had to say goodbye was March 9th and I remember asking your Daddy to hand you to me to hold while the sun came up. This time was ours… just a little while in a dark, quiet hospital room in a muted corner of the labor & delivery floor… watching the sun rise with you in my hands… and that is when my tears came and it’s when I started to realize the journey of loving and deeply missing you had just begun. The journey that has been this past year was just starting and nothing could prepare me for it. Just as nothing can prepare me for the journey that will continue.

This year has been a blur of devastation and deeply missing you. And it’s been so closely intertwined with our infertility that sometimes I feel guilty for not carving out a space that is bigger for you. My grief from losing you is too closely tangled with my grief from all of the other losses and disappointments we have faced and I feel sad that I cannot devote myself 100% to you. But then there are days like today where it is only you… and there are moments dispersed between other moments where it is only you on my mind. In the past year I have found so much of you in the flowers we grew in your garden… the flowers that sprouted even when it was beyond the season or the wildflowers that surprised me with something new and beautiful. I found so much of you in the flowers growing along the mountains in Colorado and in the single Dandelion that survived our only winter snow. Where I see life growing… flowers blooming… that is where I see you. When I feel the sun shining on my face… the same sun that helps the flowers to grow… I feel you. The past few months of winter have been difficult with slowed growth, but I find peace in knowing that each year your Birthday will be the start of a new season of blossoms. It’s a little blessing in a terrible situation. You leave floral footprints on my heart.

Sitting here today I feel something I cannot describe. Maybe it’s calm? Numb? Weary? Am I just exhausted? I think I’m feeling a bit of disbelief that a year has already passed. Disbelief that I’m still here, because quite honestly I still don’t know how any parent survives the depths of this grief. There have been too many moments where I have felt like I could not go on. But somehow I always go on. And with every year that passes I am both farther from you and closer to you at the same time.

Happy First Birthday Among the Stars, Amelia. We hope that wherever you are it is magnificent & we hope you know how profoundly you are loved.

Love, Mommy