Normal?

This is neither an incredibly deep nor an incredibly edifying post.  Just a little bit about how I'm doing.  God has been so good.  I was very afraid that I'd be incapacitated by grief, but I'm not.  It comes and goes, usually catching me off guard, but it has never overwhelmed me.  Well, maybe once.  What has consistently overwhelmed me is God's love.  When I'm hurting the very most, I know, on a deeply experiential and emotional level, how much He loves me, because my hurt is the hurt of a parent who has lost a child, a hurt He knew for me.

Please understand that as I write this, I am not crying out for sympathy.  I really am ok.  But I don't want to make it seem that I'm some super-person with no emotions, and I know people care to know how I'm truly doing, so here goes for some over-sharing.  My greatest emotional struggle right now is a simultaneous battle for and against normalcy.

After a couple weeks of waiting with excitement and dread to go into labor, a week of meeting and saying goodbye to my son and planning services for him, and a week of sitting around on the couch because I was so exhausted from the previous week, we all needed some normal.  Especially the toddler in our house.  No one wants to live in exhausted grief and domestic chaos for terribly long.  Forging my way back into life is probably an important part of healing.

But right now I'm mad at normal because it's so...normal.  Like, if you had visited my house in May and then again yesterday, you would have never known that my son ever existed.  We have a few more houseplants now, thanks to sweet friends who sent them to us in the week after Arthur was born.  I have a few more pounds hanging around my midsection.  There's a box of Arthur's things in our bedroom and a picture of us on the wall.  For anything else, you'd have to look into my heart.  Or maybe my eyes when I check out from reality every so often and my mind instantly goes to a hospital room where I spent about one day of my life.

It's hard to find a balance between hanging on to everything (like, I didn't unpack the hospital bag for a week and a half.  I just today threw out the last of the flowers from the memorial service) and boxing it all away (both figuratively and literally) like nothing ever happened.

Thank you to my sweet friends who invite me into their normal - coffee, the park, church events, family dinners.  It's been helpful and healing.  Thank you also to my sweet friends who want to dwell with me in the last few weeks, ask me about that day in the hospital, cry with me.  While it can hurt to remember, it means so much to me that you want to remember with me.  Both of you are helping me find that balance.

I've gradually learned over the last couple of months that grief is a very personal thing.  That's why I'm splashing mine all over the internet... ha ha!

Seriously, though, about 6 weeks ago, a good friend told me that she, years ago, had lost her infant son.  I didn't know this about her.  And I began to realize that everyone carries around wounds and griefs that very few people know about or think about as time distances us from whatever caused that pain.  Or maybe it's such a private grief that no one ever knew in the first place!  We don't go around introducing ourselves "Hi, I'm Sarah.  My son died."  And that's right and good.  My grief isn't the defining characteristic of my life (usually...).  My husband and I decided early on we did not want to look back at this time in our life as a time ruled by hurt - that's not the legacy we want our son to have.

And yet I want to remember.  I don't want to forget.  And remembering means remembering the pain too.  It's hard to find that balance. (Is that the third time I've said that phrase??)  I want a good, sweet, normal life where, years from now, my new friends will never know what happened this year until I tell them.  And yet I don't want that, because it seems like denying that I had a son and lost him.

It makes me wonder what secret burdens others are carrying.  And makes me thankful that God knows each heart and each pain and tells us to cast them all on Him, because He cares.