Mother's Day

My mom was always telling me I should start a blog. “You should call it ‘This One and That One’” she’d say, referencing how we frequently found ourselves referring to the Twinkies. “This one pooped.” “I think that one is hungry.” 

I’ve been generally hesitant to start a blog, because on top of preferred short Facebook posts, I’m a little embarrassed by my inevitable bad grammar, punctuation, and run on sentences. My mom was the English major, I wrote essays to my high school English teacher about why they should give me an A, though I definitely didn’t deserve it. 

I was thinking about how I she wouldn’t ever write another blog again, now that she’s gone. That I want to make sure to create backups of all her blogs, to keep them online forever. I thought about how writing a blog could leave a piece of me for my babies when they’re older. It would honor my mom. Keep her memory alive, along with Jamie’s. Plus, you know, I have all this free time on my hands. (Does sarcasm translate well through text?) So here we are. 

I’m sitting in my bed, holding a sleeping Rylie who just finished her bottle. The only bottle she’s finished all day. It’s about 3 o’clock in the morning and I’m wrapping up what has got to be in the running for one of the worst first mothers days since having my twins.  I’ve been contemplating this post all day and there were so many things I wanted to say, of course now that I’m writing this, most of those ideas have disappeared from my brain. What I keep coming back to is just that I miss her. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Just a few short months ago, the woman was pushing my wheel chair all over a hospital up and down from the NICU. Before that, when she came to get me from Oregon and we had our cross country road trip, she didn’t even let me drive. At all. She said she just wanted to take care of me. She didn’t want me to worry about driving. Like my Jamie, she was such a fierce protector and nurturer. She was the best mom I could ever have asked for. 

I keep thinking back to Mother’s Day last year. Jamie and I had been expecting it to be a sad day filled with grief for the pregnancy we had lost a couple months before. Instead it was the day where I saw those two pink lines on the pregnancy test that would turn into these precious Twinkies. Even then though, it was bittersweet, because neither of us could relax and just be joyous about the pregnancy because we were so scared of another loss. I wish I could go back in time and tell us to enjoy it. To open our hearts and just be excited instead of keeping the feelings at arms length. We had JUST started really telling people about the pregnancy and started letting ourselves get excited before we got sick. There had been one night that we were laying in bed and Jamie was being silly and ridiculous and I was recording him because it was funny. I stopped recording when his face suddenly crumpled out of nowhere and he started crying. He said that he was so scared that we’d lose this baby too (singular, since we didn’t know yet that we were in for double duty.) and that he didn’t think he could handle it if it happened again. I actually wish I hadn’t stopped the recording now, I wish I’d saved that moment of vulnerability to be able to go back and listen to again. I wish we’d spent less time being scared and more time picking names and talking about how we wanted to parent them and just more JOINT planning so I’d have had more of his input to put into practice. Instead we just put everything off until we felt more “safe” … which anyone who’s ever lost a baby can tell you, never really happens.

Now this Mother’s Day… I lose my mom. I just can’t compute this in my brain. So many people have said it was sweet to have her pass on a day that honors mothers, since she was such a great one…. But to me, it will forever be a memory of the loss marring whatever else happens on the day. It’s just unbelievable. Sometimes I feel like my life could be like The Truman Show because it’s all just too much. But if it were, jokes on you… I never leave the house and spend all my time in a battle of perseverance against the babies trying to get them to eat and nobody would want to watch that.