I hate today...

   Today has sucked for me. It has been raining all day and I cannot go to your resting place ...I am so pissed! That is all I will ever get to do for you as your mom. All I will ever be able to do is decorate a stupid rock with your picture on it and a bible verse on the back. All I can ever do for you is clean the weeds out of the gravel that holds your headstone. At least that's how it feels anyway. I hate today. I hate it more and more every year. I hate knowing that i  will never know who you were going to be. I will never get to wipe away your tears because you are upset, I will never get to clean your boo boo because you fell down while running around the pool and you scraped your knee. I will never get to tell you how mean boys can be and that they have cooties. I will never get to do the things that other women take for granted. I want to brush your long brown hair and I want to run you and Bella a bubble bath and I want to tell Emily to help you get the milk out of the refrigerator because it's too heavy for you to pour. I hate knowing that my days of being your mom had a number on it. The number 67 will resonate chills and a feverish burn in my veins forever. Today my thoughts have been scattered and every time you even cross my mind for a second I begin to drift to this day 9 years ago. I will never forget the look on nurse Julie's face when she handed you  back to me after she checked your breathing. She knew that it was time and she loved you. She was the first one to get there that morning and I  still have no idea how she got there that fast. She had to be close by. I just can't remember the conversation... I don't even know if I called her or your dad. I don't remember alot, but the parts that I do remember are so vivid that I can literally feel like I'm right there. I hate having to go to work today every year because I have to stop myself from drifting off and thinking about you. I feel guilty. I wish that I could have done something to keep you from being sick. Maybe I missed something, maybe I didn't take the right vitamins or eat the right foods. I'll never know the answer to that but I will always carry it with me. I know that I did what I thought was best when you were born so that you could stay as long as possible but I still wonder what if there was something else I should have tried. I hate feeling guilty. I just hate today because I love you so much.... 

Tomorrow is your birthday

      They say that the weather is supposed to start changing soon even though it's been so hot.. It's hard to believe considering the temperature has been in the mid 90's and it's the last day of September already. The leaves will start to fall soon and cover the ground with the beautiful colors of fall that were once a rich lush green.The birds chirp will become further and fewer between as they move on along to warmer places. The days will get shorter as the evening comes quicker and the nights get a little longer. Soon the hoodies will come out and we will start the usual bonfires and s'mores. I have you on my mind sweet Rabecca.... Every single day you are in my thoughts and in my heart. With all this change also comes your birthday. I am so torn.and often feel nauseous. October 1st is almost like a dreaded day. I hate to see it come because you are not here. I am supposed to be making plans for your 9th celebration. I am supposed to be running around trying to find just the right decorations for your personality, except I will never know who you are at this age. I am supposed to be rushing to find those last minute gifts that you just have to have, except I will never know what your favorite toys are. I am supposed to make sure that the balloon colors will match your cake, except I will never know what your favorite color is and I will never know what kind of cake you want. I won't get to see you run and play and when you fall down and scrape your knee I can't brush off the dirt and kiss your boo boo all better and scoot you off to go catch up with the other kids. I won't get to see you blow out your candle and make a silly wish and I can't smear icing on your nose for good luck.I won't get to have all the anxiety that comes along with planning an event for you. My day will not look anything like I wish it would. Instead my day will begin with me waking up to a gut wrenching feeling that I will have to push to the side because your sisters will be up soon...gosh  I wish you knew them, they are great.... and then we will head to Bella's ballgame. After she cheers her heart out we will go home and I will gather the flowers and pumpkins and scarecrow an head to your resting place. Not to the park, or to the church or even home to decorate, but to your resting place to decorate. It is the most bittersweet thing that I ever do. The biggest part of me wants be happy and place the flowers for you with a joyful heart because I know that you are celebrating with our King Jesus, but in reality I am so angry that I want to scream and yell. I want to tear up the headstone and throw it across the cemetery Instead I will just cry and feel broken because a piece of me is forever gone and you took all of the joy that I have ever felt with you when Jesus came to take you from my arms.I am lost. You left a huge hole in me and I cannot fill it. I have tried but I can't. I stopped going to the cemetery as much because your daddy said that it was taking me to a place that wasn't good for me. It's just so hard to leave you there ..every single time I leave you. Everyone tells me that you aren't there that you are in a much better place, but that is the last place that I saw you and how can a place be better than in your moms arms? I know that heaven is a million times greater and more perfect than the best place on earth, but I just want to take care of you. I just want to wake up and go to your room and get you ready for school, and fuss at you for watching cartoons instead of eating your breakfast. .....I just miss being your mom!! I still feel robbed I still get mad and I still just don't understand WHY? It's just not fair...
     Time heals everything...except for this. The only thin that I have figured out is that it just changes.It comes in waves. Some days I can talk about your life and manage to form a smile and other days I can't even speak your name without the sting of tears forming in my eyes. I just miss you. I still have the clothes that you had on when you were taken from home in sealed in a bag. Sometimes I go get them out so that I can smell them just to see if I can pick up your scent. I always could until about 6 months ago and I couldn't find it anymore. I sat in the floor and cried. I began to question whether or not I ever even could smell you or was it just a figment of my desperate mind. No matter the answer it was comforting to me. It gave me the sense that I still had a living piece of you in my home. I'd give anything to hold you and kiss your sweet little face and rub your stinky little toes just one more time. 
        Soon it will be bed time for your sisters and tomorrow morning will be here before I know it. I will try and start the day with as much happiness as I can because tomorrow is your birthday........
 

Why has it been so rough ......

            The last week or so has been really emotional for me, and to be quite honest I had no idea why.....until this morning. I realized that in 4 days it will have been 6 years that I got the most awful phone call that anyone could get. I was told that the daughter I was carrying had the possibility of having Trisomy 18, and in 7 days it will be 6 years that it was confirmed that she had a 1:20 chance of having the chromosomal defect and in 18 days it will be 6 years that it was confirmed that my daughter I was carrying would in fact die......
        There are a lot of people who think that I should be past this much heart ache, but guess what.... I AM NOT!!! I am trapped in that place 6 years ago. My mind is still wrapped up in the months following those days, right up until I was forced out of bed on December 31st to head back to work and go back to "normal". What is normal after your baby takes her last breath in your arms? What is normal when you think of her everyday and you see other little girls her age playing and twirling around in their princess dresses and dancing in the living room, but you are ONLY IMAGINING that being your daughter. Don't ever take those little moments for granted and certainly don't allow yourself to be irritated because they are being silly and loud...they are supposed to be.
        How can you be normal when you are trapped in a place that is so un-normal? You are supposed to go before your child....not the other way around. As many people who I know love me, I truly feel alone in this crowded room we call life. I want to scream to the top of my lungs, I want to throw a tantrum and I want to hit something, I want to break stuff....just like me...broken. I don't even think that I know how to move forward. I see all these women doing things, web pages, memorials, balloon releases ect.....and I don't know how they are able to hold it together. How can they relive that and still smile? I would give anything to be in "that place" where remembering is fun and a happy time, not so heart wrenching and painful. Even though I smile when I speak her name, I am breaking apart all over and over again.
        I don't know what normal is anymore. I feel like I am at my wits end and I am sitting there alone.

My darling Rabecca

Hello my sweet girl! You have been on my mind a lot lately and I miss you so much!I think about you and how you might be now. I wonder if you would have curly hair or if it would be straight like mine? I wonder if you would like to dance in the living room with me? I look at your little sister Bella and I see her playing and dancing and wearing her tutu's and sometimes I can see you dancing right there with her. Maybe it's my imagination but I like to think that it is you ...playing with your sister and dancing and playing right along side of her. She tells me that you are her favorite sister....and that melts my heart :)
I have such a hard time living without you. I know that you served your purpose here, but I wasn't finished being your mom. I would give anything to be able to feel the sweetness of you breathing on my face, or to see you pucker out those sweet lips, or even to hear your cat like squeak......just one more time. I have not been since your birthday to your sleeping place, but I promise you that I will go and bring you new flowers this weekend. It is just so hard to go there, because I feel like I am leaving you again and again and again each time I pull away. You are my darling angel .......I love you more than words will ever express. Love, mommie

Longest day ever ..........

Today was a very tiring day. I have worried all day about Rabecca. I just can't get the look on the doctors face out of my head. She walked me to my car, and carried the case of formula for me. I put Becca in the car and I turned to say goodbye and she was almost ringing her hands with anxiety. I knew that she knew it was going to be a long few days. That picture is burned in my memory.

I have watched Becca all day long and to tell you the truth I can see her declining. This is the most painful thing that I have ever had the displeasure of watching. Family are coming by to visit the baby and cover her with kisses and shower her with as much love as possible. I am telling them that this is going to be a tough week and we don't know what to expect. Her feedings are getting smaller each time she feeds. I can tell that she is not able to eat quite as much as a couple of days ago. She squirms and does this swallow that lets me know that she has had enough. She is barely eating 3/4 oz right now. I can't help but feel helpless. She began to turn blue again so I upped her oxygen and by 3:30 I began to worry so I called her father to come home and I called her Hospice nurse. The nurse came to watch her for a while and said that I was doing the right thing, but that there was nothing else she could do to help her. We signed a DNR (do not resuscitate). I questioned that decision from the very first day that signed that paper. "What if we can save her?" I asked that question a million times and I still couldn't help but think, "would I want to be kept alive on a ventilator and who knows what kind of other machines for the selfish reason of just a few more minutes with my family?" My answer was always the same.....NO. How can I put her on machines to try and squeeze a few more minutes in with her, just to have her feel pain and not the loving touch of her family? Not to mention I would have to make the decision to pull her off. I just felt that I made the right decision.

Her daddy came home and took her from me and looked at her then told me that he wasn't going back to work the rest of the week. We agreed that he should be home just in case. We watched her all evening and talked to her and just made sure that she knew that we loved her very much. For some reason I feel like I was in denial about it. Like I was waiting for her to some how get better. I was sure that she was going to pull through the week and show us all once again that we were wrong and that she was just having a bad few days and that she would be fine. I felt like that until night fell. We went to bed and her daddy kissed and loved on her then he fell asleep. Becca and I were awake and in a sense alone.............

I have never wanted to stay awake so much in my life. I stayed awake and fed her every 3 hours, changed her diaper, and talked to her. I propped her up on her Boppy pillow and just watched her. I told her how much I loved her and I told her about Jesus. I told her that" it's ok now" . I just felt like it was time to tell her that she didn't have to fight any more. There was this wonderful place waiting on her and that her mema Diane (Rabecca's name sake) was waiting to meet her and rock her on her lap. I never cried the entire time that I talked to her. I wanted her to know that her mommie was going to be just fine. At 3:30 am I Got a txt message from my sister in law that said "God sees you struggling, your wait is over" or something like that and when I read it it took my breath away. I just shut my phone and looked at Becca and talked to her some more. I began thinking about things hat I wanted to have of hers, and Tammy had told me a few tricks to preserve memories of her and I started running around doing things. I put some soft pink lipstick on her lips and pressed them to a white piece of paper so I would always have the imprints. I sang to her and just held her, still thinking in my mind that she was going to be fine. The night quietly passed, we went to look at the Christmas tree the she helped me put up just a week or two earlier. Mostly we just sat in the quiet of the room and I kept telling her that everything was ok now. As the morning drew near I woke Emily up to come in and see her and hold her before she went to school. Emmy finished getting dressed and came in for another turn to hold her and kiss her . We took a photo of the two of them just before my mom took her to school. Joey got up and was going to be up for a while so at 9:15am I laid down to get some sleep............then I heard the worst sound ever........Becca couldn't breathe. She was truly fighting for her life. I jumped up and grabbed her from her daddy and I yelled at him to call her nurse. Nurse Julie came in and began to look at Becca and told me that "it's time" and she began to tear up. I said "NO not yet!" There was nothing that could be done so we called the family, picked Emmy up from the school and by 10am everyone was there to see Becca and say goodbye. One by one the kids took turns holding her and saying goodbye and we took a photo of them loving on her. Her extended family began to take turns coming into the bed room so that they too could hold her one more time. As they finished they each one went into the kitchen so that her family could spend some time with her. At 12:00pm she was still fighting, she began to slip away and I just clenched her body in my arms and I screamed and I looked at her and she was watching me. I couldn't let that be the last vision of her mom, so I quietened down and I just kept saying "it's ok baby, it's ok do you see Jesus baby". and at 12:05pm she slipped quietly form the arms of her mother into the arms of Jesus. I loved on her and her daddy loved on her and we just couldn't put her down. We did her feet prints, her little hands. I bathed her, put lotion on her and I put the outfit on her that she came home in. We held her as long as possible.
I have never felt so helpless in my life. It is through the strength of the Lord that you survive something like that. Over the next few days we made arrangements and I put myself into that completely. I needed to do one last thing for her.
Fast forward 3 years: I still feel like that, like I need to do things for her. It has taken me a long time to get things out of my mind and on paper and I believe that to be true because I am just now beginning to heal. I had to force myself to write things down because I just wanted it to all just be a bad dream that I would somehow wake up from. It wasn't a dream it was a hard reality that I am just now trying to face. My faith was shaken so much and I just didn't believe that God had a good enough reason to take my daughter. I still don't know why but at least I know it was for the good of his glory.

67 Days of pure Grace....

Halloween has come and gone and so has Thanksgiving. We have been so blessed by God to have had these days with her. I took Rabecca to the doctor on December 3rd 2007 to have a check up and wewere hoping to get her first vaccinations. This was supposed to be a happy day for me, another milestone that Becca has made it through. I was alone with her at the doctor's office for the first time ever. Her father usually made it a point to come with me, but on this particular day he couldn't work his schedule around it and he had to work. As I took rabecca in the office I found myself sitting in the corner with her wrapped very tightly in her clothes and 2or 3 blankets that were threw over her face. I was protecting her fromany form of sickness, cold or even a small child with germy hands. We went in and I unwrapped her and took off her clothes so that they could take her temperature. It was a mere 95.0 degrees. Not even close to the "normal". As I was getting her dressed to take her to the room to be checked I noticed that her beautiful olive complication was now a pale white, like a toddler would be if they were feverish and sick. Kris Barends, her doc, came in and looked at her and I began to tell her that we had to begin giving her some pedialyte because she wasn't taking her formula very well and I didn't want her to get dehydrated and I had to up her O2 (oxygen level). "That was the right thing to do, she needed the liquid and the oxygen as long as she was comfortable with it." she told me. Then she said to me, and I will never forget the look on her face nor the tone in her voice, " Julie this is going to be a tale -tell week for Rabecca. She is either going to pull through this or we are going to be faced with the inevitable. I am going to change her milk and see if that will help her, I also want her to be put on the feeding tube. We will use the NG like she used her 2nd and 3rd days after she was born." I think that I was so shocked that I wasn't phased at that time. I just got her dressed and waited for the new milk and the things that I would need for inserting the NG tube. I had requested that Julie Clark come by and insert the tube. She was the only one that I completely trusted with my daughters life. I wanted the best care for her and I knew that julie would give it to her. She had treated Rabecca lie she belonged to her and I could tell that Becca loved her too because she was one of the very few that Becca would respond to when she spoke her name. Becca would lok around to see if she could see her when Julie came in. It was very comforting to me. Julie came by after her shift was over and she had been to see all of her patients. When she came in she not only was prepared to treat Rabecca, but she was prepared to help my other 8 year old daughter get through the procedure too. She brought in Emily a littlest pet shop set complete with swimming pool, house and lots of critters to play with while she worked on Becca. She took that money out of her own pocket to comfort my child!! What a blessing she is! Emily ran off to play and Julie inserted the NG tube into Rabecca carefully explaining it to me just in case I needed to do it again myself. I noticed that as she was putting in the tube that her eyes were watering as if she was fighting back tears and didn't want me to notice. When she was done we sat down and talked and drank a tall Starbucks coffee and watched becca. She was so stressed. Her throat hurt from the tube and I was the only comfort that she could find and even sometimes then she couldn't get comfortable. Uncle Mike and Aunt Sheila came by to visit her, but could only stay for a minute. Mike and Sheila both left in tears because they couldn't take the pain that she was obviously in. You never realize how helpless you can feel until you see a child in pain and know there is nothing that you can do about it. She finally settled down and rested as much as she could during the night. I made sure that every 3 hours she was fed and it would take me about 30 minutes to feed her properly then change her and lay back down with her. That was something that we did ever since she came home, so I was getting a 1hour and 30 minutes in between times of feeding to rest with her. It was a lot of lost sleep that I was proud and very willing to give up. The next days to come are going to be the hardest....

Trying to remember.......

Things are pretty crazy around here and I don't sleep much, but that is okay. I am just so thankful that I was able to bring Rabecca home. Hospice has been here.....a lot! They met us at our house the day we came home and were GREAT!! Nancy Dearing and Julie Clark have already became a part of this family. They are both so gracious when they come to visit and they never mind coming by for just a check on her and remind me that this is what they do and that they are here for us.
Now Rabecca is 2 weeks old and she has began to have some feeding issues and some breathing issues. She forgets to breathe while she eats and it causes her to turn blue around her mouth. It literally scares the crap out of me. I am so thankful for the hospice team. They have been so wonderful. Tammy came by here today and brought lil miss a 2 week birthday cake to celebrate her life. I didn't have any candles, so I used the nipples from her bottles as make-shift candles and it was really cute. I am rying not to focus on all the bad stuff that I know is coming my way, but in reality it is soo hard. I am terrified that I am going to wake up and find Becca in my bed not breathing. I know that they say not to put the baby in the bed with you, but I can't put her in the crib. I am too worried that I won't hear her if she needs me and I can't rest at all if I can't put my hands on her and feel her breathing. I have come to realize that her being awake alone is more important to me than me getting any sleep. I can't leave her awake alone. I will sit up with her as long as she is awake, and she is up pretty much all night. I think that she has her days and nights mixed up. She sleeps a good bit during the day and is up most of the night. We sit and watch discovery health, isn't that wierd? Of all things that we could watch we watch people having surgery and recovering. Anyway, Beccca has become so dependant on me being there all the time, that I can't even go to the store without her pitching one heck of a fit. Joey will call me when I am at the store and have me talk to her until I get home so she won't cry so much. Definately a mama's girl :o) !

I have a lot to say........ I am just having a really hard day today, and I can't get my words out of my head and on to my blog. If you didn't know I am going to explain why I am all over the place. I started this blog in June of 2008, Rabecca was born October 1, 2007. This has become a part of healing for me. Tammy Tate and my Doctor encouraged me to write and tell the story of Rabecca's short, but profound life. I have to say that it does help the healing process, but it is sooo hard to revisit that time, because I have to think and pull out good memories. The things that I want to stick with me are the things that I find it hardest to remember. The things that stick most in my mind are the last two days with her and the day she passed away and I find myself wanting to fast-forward to thoes days. I NEED to remember the other days. I NEED to find the "good stuff" if you will, because I can't let myself forget..........that is my worst fear........that I am forgetting and can't live with that.