Choose this path

The things I have learned about myself through the last couple of months has amazed me. You think who can know you better than yourself, but I am learning new things almost daily about myself. I've gained strength in knowing that I can make it through hard times, and humility in knowing that bad things can happen to me and I'm not exempt from these things.

I am reading a book called I Will Carry You: The Sacred Dance of Grief and Joy by Angie Smith. I have only gotten through the first couple chapters and already I am learning. The thing that made me take a step back was reading how we think we know how God should fix things. In her words:
"I am pretty comfortable saying He is in complete control until the ground grows weak beneath me. At that point I tell Him what he should do to fix it."
I felt that God should and would intervene and heal my child, because that was what I thought he should do. God had a different plan, He knows more than I know. My cries were not for Him to decide what should become of my child, but I wanted him to heal him so that's what I cried out for. Its not wrong to ask God to intervene but I wasn't asking for His will to be done. I was asking Him to do what I thought He should do.

My child will not get his time on Earth because God chose that path for my life and my child's life.

'He answered, While the child was still alive I fasted and wept. I thought "Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me and let the child live." But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me.'  -2 Samuel 12:19-23

Lawson will not return to me and those are words that will tug at my heart for my remaining days until I get to see him again. But the hope that I hold to in that is that I will see him again, just not here.

I have had a very hard week this week and I know that these times will continue. I will have ups and downs. I will hopefully grow stronger but I am only human and will break down. I have had such a hard time and yesterday I just knew I had to go see his grave. I needed to go up there and talk to him. I know he isn't there but it feels better to have a place that you feel his presence and know that it's quiet. I have not been there many times, I will confess. It is hard for me because I just want to hold him again and the pain gets worse when I go to the last place I saw him. But I sat and cried for a while and talked to him and it made me feel a little better.
I know that Jesus weeps with me and stands beside me even at my weakest points because He doesn't like for us to be in pain. I think He weeps because we can't see what He can. We can't see the bigger plan. We can't understand why our son was taken.
This passage in the book gets to me also:
"He understands the ranting and the door slamming. The emptiness that wraps around me when I think of my baby.
He knows.
And he has only one request.
Bring it right to Me.
Everytime the anger roars in your heart.
Bring it to Me.
Every time you feel like nobody hears you.
Bring it to Me.
When you think it isn't fair.When you think it isn't true. When you can't think at all.
Bring it to My feet and I will make an altar for your suffering."

It will 6 months on Sunday the 7th since we lost him. Just please pray for me and my family as we pass this milestone.


"When tomorrow starts without me,
and I'm not here to see,
If the sun should rise and find your
eyes, filled with tears for me.
I wish so much you wouldn't cry,
the way you did today,
While thinking of the many things,
we didn't get to say.
I know how much you love me,
as much as I love you.
And each time you think of me,
I know you'll miss me too.
When tomorrow starts without me,
don't think we're far apart,
for everytime you think of me,
I'm right there in your heart."

Not the first to ask

My days come and go. I feel like some days I'm floating through life and don't have a purpose and then other days I am confident that I am living every moment to its fullest. It's been a roller coaster of emotions for me this year. I have hit the lowest lows ever and this past week has been extremely hard for me as I have encountered things that remind me that I will never get to see Lawson grow and learn and watch him progress through life. I don't want pity from anyone, just sharing my thoughts helps. I want people to know my story. If it helps you then great, if it doesn't thats ok too. I write these things for me and my sanity. Again I just want my story to be known because my baby was a human being and had a soul just like every other person and I want his memory and my feelings to be shared. I want people to know and learn about him because he is and will always be a part of me and my husband. 

Wife, mother, daughter and sister

"In the blink of an eye, everything can change. So forgive often and love with all your heart. You may never know when you may not have that chance again. "

Life changes....oh and how it does! It can take years, months, weeks, to even the tiniest second every thing you thought you knew about life can change. I have never realized that more than in the last few months. Before this year started, I was just something simple: a wife to my husband, a mother to my 3 year old child and one on the way, a normal daughter to my parents and an annoying sister to my sister (haha).
But on January 7th all that changed within a few hours, I was a mom praying for her child to be ok and at the time that's all that mattered.
A few hours later on January 8th, I was a grieving wife that didn't know if I wanted to live through this and having to lean on my husband, mother that had lost a child and wanting to cling to both my children, a scared daughter and sister who needed to be held together.
Man, even when you are going through it, the minutes that can change your life don't seem to be real. The feeling of standing there being helpless to help your own child is a feeling that no one can describe and I know that's the way God felt as Jesus hung on that cross. I would never wish that feeling on anyone.
If you think that your life can't change and it won't happen to you, you can take a step back just like I had to. I never ever thought I would be the mom sitting here at a computer sharing with people my experience with losing a child. If you had told me what my future held sometime last year, I would have thought you were crazy.
Yet, here I am. I am a wife who has to lean on her husband to get by some days, mother who grieves every day in some way for a child that I willl not know until I see him in Heaven, a mother that cherishes her time with her son that's living and gets upset at myself if I get upset with him, and a daughter and sister that tries to put on a smile.
It's hard every day and it's not a feeling that no one else has ever had, but let me tell you that every person deals with situations differently even if its the same situation. You don't know how you would handle the feelings that I've had unless you walked them with me in my body. My own husband has different feelings about some things and the experience was different for him in some ways because he's the father and men work different than women. Yes, he misses his child and it was his child the same as it was mine, but he has and will grieve different because that's how we are built. We went through the exact same thing but he has feelings to deal with that I may not understand, and vice versa.
The point is that when you stand there and criticize someone for the things they do or how they handle the things they are dealt. Just think. Have you ever stood in their steps, have you gone through what they have, have you been in their mind and thoughts?
I am the mother that has lost a child. Do I know other women that have lost a child, yes I do. But they will never know the exact way I thought and I will never know their thoughts. We may connect on some things, but ultimately we are different people and we will deal with things how we individually see fit. 
Life changes...in a second, minute, hour....however long, it can happen so appreciate each second that you have and appreciate your life. 

"You never know what God has in store, and you can make all the plans you want to. But at the end of the day, whatever's going to happen is going to happen."

I have made you and I will carry you.

Gonna write today because I have felt super stressed the last couple days. It's like I let it all build and it all comes crushing down. There are things going on in my life that I won't share on this blog, because that's just not my style, but it's not things that other people haven't gone through. I just got so overwhelmed with life in general on Monday. It seems like everywhere I turn something bad is happening to someone. It just hurts my heart.
I came in Monday to work and wanted to be there for a friend who had lost a great friend on Sunday, so I listened to her and just felt my heart get heavy. It just brought back a lot of memories.
Everywhere around me is death or hurting and I know that has always go on but I just don't understand it all sometimes. I know that I have a God who knows EVERY reason for EVERYthing, but sometimes that doesn't make it any easier. I have seen quite a few things happen to people around me lately: deaths, illness discoveries, etc. I think that the main reason I've become so affected by these is I know the hurt more real now than I ever thought possible. I see children with cancer, updates on babies that are sick, etc on Facebook and it all seems to hit right on my broken heart.
I thought that when I had my first broken heart was from my first love but that was FAR from true. My heart broke the day I lost my son. I think that God mends us but I also know that there is no way to replace that piece of my heart because I will always long for him until I'm with him. My heart lives outside my body with my two sons and I wouldn't trade it for the world.
If there was one verse that I have come to LOVE in the last couple weeks, it's this one:

I have made you and I will carry you.
I will sustain you and I will rescue you.
                                     Isaiah 46:4

I got a tattoo the other day with this verse and my baby's birthdates. To me, this verse has two meanings: like God I have made and carried my sons, I sustain them by providing what they may need or want and I will hopefully provide some rescue whether it be just by turning the channel cause a scary part of a movie comes on tv (did that this morning for Landon...haha!). The second reason is that God provides all those things to me on a daily basis especially lately.
Do I fail God on a daily basis, I do, but it isn't something that I am proud of. I try to do good because I want to please him. He is my Father and I want to make him proud.
I know that Landon will probably do things that don't please me or my husband but I want to raise him in the way that he should go. He will always be my son, and so will Lawson even though I don't have to teach him because God is teaching him and he has no sin!
Moral of today's rambling ;) is that God will carry us on days like I've had this week and he will rescue me from this and let me have good days.   

My faith sometimes falters

Oh the ups and downs of life! As the events unfolded in Oklahoma yesterday and I learned of all the children's lives lost, it hurt. It hit me all the way to my soul that more parents have joined the grief that my husband and I have gone through the last couple of months and it made me break down. There are no words. I don't understand and I had a bad day yesterday and just wanted to know with all my heart the purpose of taking children's lives. I know I need to have unfailing faith but sometimes I fail in that. I do ask why and I do want to do things over. It just hurts all the way to my heart. I know exactly what the phrase means when they say your heart breaks for someone because I may not have been in that exact situation with those parents but I know the heart break of losing a child and it is the worst feeling I've ever experienced.
There's disbelief and pain  and heartache and wishing that things were different. I cried to my husband last night and kept saying that a lot of events that unfolded before and during my pregnancy are just so bizarre. Why choose during my pregnancy for me to contract CMV? It would not have affected my baby if it had been contracted at any other time, but because it was at a point in my pregnancy, I am now without my child. He controls everything, so why let my husband and I have such problem getting pregnant and then let me go so far into my pregnancy only to take him? And as I'm sure those parents wonder why would he let their child be in the path of that tornado.
I don't know why I ask myself and God these questions because He never promised us all the answers and sometimes its better that we don't know. I am human however and just wish there was a better understanding in some situations but then it wouldn't require as much faith. And that's what He wants us to have is faith.
Maybe my small purpose in life is that I can show someone love and support in the event of a child's passing. If I can help one person even just by listening or by writing these blogs, then maybe that is part of my calling.

"When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strenthen you."

"Dear God, I've tried my best, but today if I lose my hope please tell me that Your plans are better than my dreams."

The love of a mother

Mother's Day was a day of rejoicing for the son that I have that is growing into a little man and a day for me to reflect on the son that I don't have here to watch him grow. He would have been 4 months old and I would have been holding him in my arms. Instead I had to go to the cemetery and put some new flowers out for him. I know that my son was smiling as I cried there talking to him. It was one of the hardest days I've had in a while trying to control my emotions. As I pulled up to his grave I was overwhelmed at how pretty it was! The sun was shining through the trees and everything was so green. His grave is under two trees and they are beautiful. I cried just at the site because I had not been up there since March and nothing was blooming or green yet. We put his flowers in a small green tractor planter and put an owl birdfeeder on the shepherd's hook beside his grave. It turned out so cute! So boyish just like he would have been, just like his brother.
Oh how I missed him yesterday and thoughts that I will never get to celebrate Mother's Day with all my children physically but in a way he can warm my heart from the inside so I can feel loved in so many ways!
I spent the day with my mom and grandma and they are most of the reason that I can be the mom I am today because they taught me how to love. God has an unconditional love and I think that the closest thing to that here on earth is a mother's love. 
So this is to the mothers that have children that are living, children that are sick, children that may have had a life of less than two weeks in your womb, children that were stillborn or too sick to move on, or anyway that they came into this world, be thankful for the chance to be a mother cause some women do not get the oppurtunity to bear children or watch their children grow. Please love them unconditionally just as God would!

A mother is she who can take the place of all others, but whose place no one else can take.

Mothers hold their children's hands for a little while, but their hearts forever.

More than my own

I have lost a life-Not my own.
But it would have been easier  to
have lost my own life
than to have lost the life
I loved more than my own.

No better words for how I feel daily. God please let me have some peace as it gets hard when I see other people and how happy they are with their children. I miss him so!

It's not the kind of sadness to where you cry all the time,
but more of like the sadness that overwhelms your entire body,
leaving your heart aching and your stomach empty.
Making you feel weak and tired, and yet you can't even sleep,
cause the sadness is in your dreams too. It's a sadness you can't escape.