Circles

Sometimes I feel like I am walking around in circles with my grief. Shoot, I think I have even named a post this before.

Maddie's birthday is in a couple of weeks. It hurts so much to know it has been a whole additional year since I last got to hold her, to kiss her. I so desperately want to hold both of my girls. That sounds like such a simple statement, almost hollow in its simplicity... But I don't know how to say it in a way that imparts the desperation with which I feel it. I want the hands of a two-year-old, not an urn. I want to be thanking God as I watch her enjoy life, not for taking care of her. I want to have her and Alice play, not just to have to pray about her with her.

Always it is longer and longer since we last saw her. Alice's first birthday is also coming up two weeks after that - it is so hard being so torn in my emotions for two very different babies.

Sigh.

I know I am getting old and impatient and unhip... And I largely don't care. I absolutely hate the phrase "FML.". I think I hate it because people use it so flippantly. "I slept through class, FML. I can't go to this concert, eff my life."

I don't wish on anyone for their lives to be destroyed, but I think it is obvious that the people whose lives have been "effed" are almost never the ones using this phrase. For most who read my blog, you feel the pain daily of it having been too long since you held your baby, and the worse pain of knowing it will only be longer and longer until the day you die. THAT is life-altering pain. Death and illness, tragedy and loss. I wish the people who were so flippant would gather some perspective and see how this affects others, those who try to dwell on the positives and grow from their pain.

That sounded preachy, and I didn't mean it to be. FML, I guess?