Friday Blog Roundup - Beautiful Mothers

It's almost Mother's Day - a day those of us without living children dread, and those with living children endure with outward smiles and inward tears. For some it's the first one since losing a child, and to you I send wishes for peace and my hope that you will somehow find a way to celebrate the fact that you are a mother.

We are all mothers. We created life, no matter how small. We nourished it, no matter how long. We loved, we lost and we learned that, if given the chance, we would have died for those babies if it meant that they could live.

The love that grew along with our children is what makes us mothers. Be it 4 weeks or 10 months, we have been forever altered by the tiny lives that lived in us and by the tiny hearts that once beat in time with ours.

Emm at 13 Years into the Journey brings a perspective I don't think I've seen before in this little corner of blogland. She writes as a mother who has been mourning the loss of her daughter for 13 years. In her words I found incredible strength, and I took great solace in the fact that she shows it's possible to survive the loss of a piece of your heart.

I often wonder if I'm doing okay - if I'm putting the same amount of effort into my healing as I am my grieving, but Emm explains that the feelings of loss don't go away, even after 13 years. There will always be a measure of pain.

"There's just this feeling everyday that something is missing. It doesn't hit when I first wake up - or before I go to bed. It's in the little things of everyday."

What I'm missing now I'll always be missing. There is a strange comfort in knowing that. I'm glad Emm found us and I hope she continues to write about her daughter and her journey.

I will never understand those who must endure sorrow heaped upon sorrow. Please send Rosepetal some love and prayers. She is losing her second desperately wanted little boy next week. The love woven into the words she writes to her sons is breathtaking. It's so intimate and personal I almost feel like I'm intruding on sacred ground when I read her posts. I'm awed by her strength, and once again astounded, comforted and touched by the depth of mother-love.

Carole's post about a trip to the cemetery to visit her son Joseph with her daughter Abigail in tow nearly made me cry.

"We are heading back the van. She is holding my hand. She looks up at me and says..."Joseph lives with the doctors, right?". I try to explain the whole heaven thing again. I wonder if she thinks we left him at the hospital. There is no telling what is running through that 3 year old mind."

This is life for so many mothers (and fathers) - trying to make their lost children a part of their living childrens' lives, and doing all they can to ensure that those tiny souls are never forgotten.

Abigail's innocent confusion was what brought me to the brink. She will grow up understanding loss in a way many children never do, and as a result she'll have compassion and maturity beyond her years when it comes to grief and healing. But that she has to know such sorrow to gain such wisdom is utterly heartbreaking.

Steering her living children through the minefield of sorrow must be mentally and physically exhausting. And yet Carole does it with the grace, love and selflessness that only a mother can.

Finally, there's Artblog, who was tagged this week. Her task was to write an "I Am" poem that would give her blog readers a sense of, well, who she is. Her poem ended with this:

I am happy, I am sad, I am playful, I am glad,
I am grateful, I am mad, I am tired.

I am.

And isn't that life as a mother in mourning in a nutshell? We are so many things at all once - even things that seem to be in opposition to each other. We are all those things all at once because we have to be. And because, by some miracle, we're strong enough to be.

Happy Mother's Day