I Guess We Would Not Know How Sweet the Sweet is Without the Bitter

well.

i spent all day yesterday reveling in henry's vivaciousness and life and celebrating his two years with us on this planet. every day has been bigger and better than the last and i can't believe how blessed i've been as his mom. 

but i spent all week leading up to it aching for another mom who just lost her little guy on the cusp of his own 2nd birthday. i know she and her family are doing their best to figure out how to get through this. but. how. do. you. it's the kind of thing that shakes your faith to its core but its also when you need your faith most. clinging to the reassurance that God is making their little guy laugh now that He has him and that they'll be together with him again. there's hope in that, but they have to really squeeze for it.

and i spent all morning today weeping openly and snotting all over myself in church as one of my favorite women told her testimony of her lady parts rebelling against her and watching her chance of hatching her own kids slip further and further away. full of faith and stamina and fire, she shown with strength and grace. she is still alive! still in love! feeling blessed! but also so, so broken-hearted. again, hope is there. but she has to sift around in the ashes for it. and it's messy work.

and a great friend is recovering from the disappointment of the failure of science's best method to knock a body up. still hoping for success, for fruitfulness, but finding it harder and harder to hope. she's still mending a lot of wounds that hope has inflicted in the past. hope is the best medicine, but it's kind of an a-hole, too. frankly.

and sometimes i feel like it's all just not fair. and it just doesn't make sense. and so i cry and i pray. i beg God to grant peace and abundant blessings on them as they try to heal and find a path through this. and i give huge thanks over what we have. i'm not sure what else to do.

maintaining perspective is a great thing in theory, but near impossible when your heart and world are both torn down the middle. but i will say that the great thing about growing older is that you have enough years behind you to know that the darkest nights have always turned up with sun again in the mornings. you've survived some powerful awful stuff before, odds are good you can do it again. you don't want to have to, but you probably can.

and so, these ladies will survive. and maybe out of the pain will come something beautiful and unexpected.

we'll just keep hoping.