A Grief Unknown

It seems that Hallmark does not have a card for every occasion. I wandered the aisles for quite some time yesterday trying to find a card that would be at least moderately appropriate and ended up walking out with two 'Blank Inside' cards. I suppose their lawyers would argue that since blank cards can be used for any occasion not covered by cards with pre-printed messages, their slogan is still true.
Perhaps some occasions are just too personal to commemorate with someone else's words. After all what does one say to mark the end of a grieving process that began more than 25 years ago? There are no trite sayings to celebrate the naming of babies that were born into the next life rather than this one.

Most of you know that I have 3 brothers and 1 sister, but our mom had 7 pregnancies. Sam was born 2 ½ months premature as the result of a car accident. After that mom had a tubal pregnancy followed by a miscarriage. She was devastated.
It was roughly 6 years after Sam's birth that she gave up hope and got rid of all the baby stuff. And then promptly discovered that she was pregnant. She understandably waited pretty far into the pregnancy before making any serious announcements.
I was only 7 when she told me the news, but, nearly 25 years later, I still clearly remember the glow about her as she told me, the smile on her face and the laugh in her voice. It is my earliest memory of my mother happy.

As the perspective granted by increased age allows me to look back and see the threads of time that have woven together the beads of events, I come to suspect that God reopened my mother's womb when He did to give her the cushion of joy she would need to not come undone during a very knotty stretch not long after Ben's birth.
It is also interesting to me (and presumably beneficial to my children) to consider how these events shaped me and particularly how they shaped my understanding of motherhood. A child does not judge her reality because she has no other experience to compare it to. It is not good, it is not bad, it just is. This period during which a child simply accepts her reality as 'normal' seems to go a long way toward defining how she will live out her own life. And so I must consider that the image of motherhood passed on to me is an image of motherhood depressed. Perhaps that, more than years, is the real gap between Sam & I and our younger 3 siblings.
With this awareness comes a responsibility to consider my own parenting and what image of motherhood I am passing on to my own children.

A few weeks ago, my mom returned from a retreat she was required to attend as part of her orientation to volunteer at Rachel's Vineyard, a ministry that primarily helps those grieving babies lost through abortion, but the program is relevant to those who have lost children in other ways as well. At this reteat she discovered how much her two neverborn babies meant to her and how deeply she still felt the loss of them.
The look on her face the other day as she told me that she had named my two neverborn siblings, Desideratus and Desiree - desired ones, and read me the letters she had written to them had the same glow of joy as her announcement of her pregnancy with Ben almost 25 years ago. I hope that in another 25 years I will remember this one as clearly as I remember that one now.
That glow of joy spoke of an occasion that warranted acknowledgement. And perhaps that acknowledgement is not one that can be given through a cheesy Hallmark poem.
The two cards that I walked out of the store with had simple everyday images on the covers, but they were images that brought tears to my eyes in light of the occasion they are being used to celebrate - a little girl in a tutu leaping so she practically soars along a beach and another little girl, no more than 3 years old, seen from behind wearing angel wings walking along a garden path leading into the unknown distance unattended by any visible being.

It has been strange for me in the wake of my mother's release of unknown grief to find myself in an unexpected period of mourning. I am not quite certain what I am grieving for except perhaps what might have been. Mingled with my grief however is also a joy, even a sense of triumph I can't quite explain, to have the lives of Desideratus and Desiree acknowledged and to realize the impact they have had on me though I have never seen them. I have no memories of them and yet I look forward in hope for the day when I will join them on the other side of this life, where they were born the elders and I will be the younger.