Today was my niece’s first birthday party. I was looking forward to it happily, thinking mostly about BabyH and how big she is getting. Most of the time I see her as her own person, with somewhat of blinders on. It wasn’t until yesterday that I started thinking that there was probably going to be a lot of people there.<\/p>\n
I intended to be there early. I thought it would be good to see BabyH before the people started arriving, since she gets withdrawn around strangers. I wanted to bring my camera, I wanted to get awesome pics of her today on this special day. But I got distracted in my garden, dirty and sweaty and happily content to lose track of time in the sunshine. So I was behind schedule getting dressed.<\/p>\n
And then we got halfway there and I realized I forgot my camera. Normally not a big issue. But the pictures was something that I had been thinking about all week, and the thought of not having my camera to hide behind, to focus on, was an unpleasant one. I drove home to get it, which put me in an annoyed mood.<\/p>\n
As I walked across the lawn I was taken aback to see kids and babies running everywhere. I shouldn’t have been, but for some reason it never crossed my mind that there would be other kids there.<\/p>\n
The day went fine. We ate, I took pictures, I sat and talked with family, SIL opened gifts.<\/p>\n
And again, just like the shower, it was the gifts that got to me. Gifts for the child, celebrating life. You don’t give gifts to the dead. I looked around at the celebration, the contentment, the comradarie and thought… this is how it’s supposed to be. Devin had a party, Deven had recognition, but it wasn’t the same. It never will be.<\/p>\n
After the party, when everyone but family had gone home and we were sitting around the fire Den asked how I was doing, did I have a good day? “It was good, fine… but hard,” I said. And I just started crying softly…. crying for all of the things we missed out on with Devin.<\/p>\n
Grief. It’s no longer such a heart-wrenching chasm. It’s a scar, it aches. It’s always present, but sometimes I forget it’s there. But once in a while something causes me to look down and remember that it is there and what was lost along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was my niece’s first birthday party. I was looking forward to it happily, thinking mostly about BabyH and how big she is getting. Most of the time I see her as her own person, with somewhat of blinders on. It wasn’t until yesterday that I started thinking that there was probably going to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[196,200,199,198,69,197,192],"class_list":["post-1992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-babyh","tag-crying","tag-gifts","tag-kids","tag-loss","tag-photography","tag-scars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2099,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1992\/revisions\/2099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lunardreams.net\/baby\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}