reflections

We had to take the blinds down in our kitchen.  They were up in front of our sliding glass door that goes to our patio.  We had to take them down because our newest puppy kept chewing them up.  I got tired of it and just took them down.

Now when it's dark outside I walk into the kitchen and see my reflection in the glass door.  And there is no hiding from it.  My whole reflection, from head to toe.

For a long time I couldn't look at myself in the mirror.  It will be five months this Saturday that I have walked the earth without my beautiful daughter, and now it is getting a little easier to see my reflection.  But for most of the past few months I couldn't.  I would make a face in the mirror, like scrunching up my nose, to avoid seeing my actual face.  To avoid seeing that person who failed to bring my child crying into this world.  I failed, and I have not really been able to look at myself since.

I used to look at my face in the mirror when I was pregnant and wonder if I looked like a mom yet.  Wonder how I would look carrying her around and pushing her in her stroller with little pink flowers all over it.

I am still her mother.

But a grieving mother is never what I expected to see looking back at me.  It is just a completely different person from who I used to be.

My hair, still short after donating it in memory of her.  I always hated my hair short, it was the longer the better.  Now I couldn't care less.  I am about 10-15 pounds smaller than I was pre-pregnancy, and honestly I would rather weigh 500 pounds and have her.  But I weigh somewhere around 110 I guess.  And I'm still missing the 8 pounds and 1 ounce that was taken from me last October.

My face is the biggest change to me.  Not only because I have given up on makeup, but before she died I knew nothing of loss.  I really knew very little about sadness and certainly nothing about tragedy.  I had a very blessed life.  But my face doesn't reflect innocence and peace anymore.  It is not the same face.

And now the glass door in the kitchen is a reminder of how much has changed, as I stare at a person I really don't recognize looking back at me.  But I know I am still in the middle of this storm.  I know the pain isn't always so sharp, and maybe that reflection will continue to get easier to look at.  And she'll get stronger because of that perfect child.


"Once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before.  If you can live through that you can live through anything.  You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror.  I can take the next thing that comes along'."


from, You Learn by Living by the lovely Eleanor Roosevelt