Walking this road...

I have found myself taking a bit of a shift away from reading as many babyloss journals as I was in previous months. I apologise to my dear friends who blog, that I haven't been keeping up, but I find these days I need to be 'in the right frame of mind' to read. Its not that I don't want to follow these journeys, see where you are now, and support you, its just harder for me to fit the emotions involved in when life gets busy. I hope you can understand that.

I haven't had a lot of 'spare time' to even scratch myself lately. Or I've just wasted it, very possibly that too.

Blogging I've found hard. But, we've had a few big things in our family in the last month, so I wanted to share about them.

Firstly, the 18th May meant it was one year since the day we went in for our routine 19 week ultrasound, ever so excited to see our baby and find out the gender this time (we never have before), only to have the walls of our world come crashing down around us. Most of the day seems a surreal memory, some if it passed by in a blur, but some moments are oh so crystal clear still.

We walked in to that scan with all the hope in the world, and walked out with the news that our baby had many problems and very possibly had Trisomy 18, a condition that was deemed 'incompatible with life'.
Its hard to believe we have walked this road, this has been our last year, but we've been on this path now for a whole year.

Our plans and future hopes for this baby had been dashed. Of course, we still knew and believed that we served a God of Healing, and that God very well could pull us out of this mess, rescue us from this impending pain. But as time went on, I felt that complete healing was not our miracle, and so we continued to press into God and not just His Miracle. We decided to look to Him for whatever it was He would take us through, and hoped that it would be healing for our baby. There came healing in many forms, and miracles in many forms, but He did not heal Sebastian of the T18.

I don't often feel overly strong emotions on these 'days' lately, but this one was really different to counting the months go past. It was a real day, a real memory to go back to. Reliving all the small parts of that day.

I remember I had to go to Eli's Sports Day the next day - when they had wanted me to come back for an amnio, but no I had to go to his Sports Day. And Greg came along too, and we enjoyed the day out of what our lives would be now. Eli's birthday party was also that weekend coming, a huge event I'd been working towards for the last month, and with this news fresh in our mind and hearts, how did we just get on with normal life. It was so surreal, so strange. But we did it.

And this is life now. We are 8.5 months on now from Sebastian's passing. I remember last year reading blogs of other BLMs who were 'further along' in their journey, and gaining so much hope from their stories, and here I am now, in that same stage now - further along - and being able to minister and give hope to others for whom this road is still new. So many times I've wanted to just go back to the time before he passed. Even just knowing he was going to was OK. He was still alive inside me, and I treasured every little moment of it. But its all gone, all to soon. And now just a memory - fast growing to distant. I hate that. I hate that I can't make new memories with my baby boy. I try not to focus too much on who he might be now, a little 8.5 month old. I try not to think about that too much, because its such an animated age, and it hurts.

I was going to share other family news, but it seems I have got deeper than I was intending here. And it seems strange to tell you about these things now. Maybe that's good. I haven't sat down, thought about it, written about my thoughts and feelings in a while. Its good. Its good to remember Seb, the emotions, the moments. I don't want them to leave me. But as life goes on, gets busier (and its only going to get more that way with a new baby on the way), the times to sit and remember my boy are fewer and far between.

I do have a lot of new hope and excitement in my life now expecting our baby boy in about 14 weeks time, but I don't want to ever forget Sebastian. And I know I won't.