Please stop aggravating your sister!
Would you please pick up your dirty laundry?
Who made the mess in the kitchen?
PLEASE - stop bugging your sister!
Don't forget to do your homework!
Shh! The baby is sleeping!
Oh for the love of God! LEAVE YOUR SISTER ALONE!!!
These are things you could hear on any given day in my home. The chaos, the noise, the utter cacophony that is my life. So many times I'm irritated. So many times I'm annoyed. So many times I'm just so.dang.tired. of saying the same things over and over.
And then I'm reminded. Sometimes in simple, easy ways, sometimes in heart-splitting ways - how truly blessed I am. I have so much. And some have none.
Today the reminder came in the form of a blog I stumbled across: glow in the woods
I cannot wrap my mind around it. I think back to those brief moments following Princess #4's emergency birth, those deafening silent moments that echoed with the uncertainty of her condition. And I'm grateful I only had to live a mere minute or two of that hell. To live a lifetime? Unfathomable.
And yet so many are sentenced to do just that.
And my heart aches with the knowledge of it. And I feel guilt over my impatience with my perfectly beautiful, healthy children. I feel the reproach as one who does not always recognize the magnitude of blessing that I live with every day. I should know better.
I know it is not possible to go day after day without feeling impatience or frustration at my children. But I hope I will not be so quick to anger, so quick to lose my cool.
Because today I am reminded that there are those who grieve for that opportunity.
My friends, as we approach the month of October and the official Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, take a moment to remember those who have had to live through such hell and say a prayer of thanksgiving for your own children. This post is in honor of Leslie and her sweet baby boy Cullen, who arrived stillborn at 34 weeks on Sept. 11, 2010.
Thanks for this. I did a post a few months ago on my friends, who lost their son at 34 weeks. They now support the TEARS Foundation. We go crazy, but we have much to be thankful for with a houseful of kids.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading so many blogs lately about moms who have/are going through the most horrible experience of mourning the loss of a child. It breaks my heart into a million pieces and yes, every time I hear these stories I am reminded to cherish my little one even more.
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