My Love In The Silence

Today I did an incredible thing. I dropped my daughter off at school for her very first day. I almost cannot even believe that this is my life. What goodness still exists in the world of grief, if we only have the courage to see it?

As I drove home from leaving half of my heart in that school building, I passed by the place where John died so many months ago. and I was enveloped in flashbacks of that day.

Deputies in shades of brown, squatting beside me when I fell to my knees.

Me, crying "we were supposed to have a baby!"

Flashing lights.

No final good-bye. Not even one last "I love you".

Only silence from the one person I loved more than anyone else on earth.

I've been there before, you know. When I gave birth to our perfectly formed little son, over 8 years ago. He was so beautiful, so perfect. And I just begged him to breath. 

But there was no breath. No glorious cry. No miracle.

Only silence from the one person I loved more than anyone else on earth. 

I thought that the realties of a broken life would leave me jaded, closed off, desperate for safety. Because if I have learned anything, it's that vulnerability hurts and it can leave some nasty scars. 

I didn't know if I could be capable of the great sacrificial love that is the calling of motherhood. As an inherently selfish person, particularly after multiple losses, I didn't know if I was capable of allowing my heart to exist outside of myself anymore. I wanted to believe that I could do it...but I had no idea how I could. Grief clouded even that vision of my future. 

It started with believing that maybe I could find love in another partner here on earth. Maybe there really was someone out there that could see beauty in the brokenness that is my past, and would want to help me build a new future. But, a partner is an easier step than parenthood. A partner promises to love and to honor. A partner shares the burdens, exchanges a heart for a heart. A seemingly even trade of vulnerability for vulnerability. I let the Lord shape my heart for that process, even coming to find myself welcoming the chance to build a new life. A hope of rising from the ashes alongside a man who maybe had been broken as well. A man who was willing to risk the silence for another chance to find joy here on earth. 

And then, one evening, I was presented with an opportunity that I had been waiting 8 years for. A child who needed a mom. And here I was, a mom without a child. Every instinct within me wanted to claim her, declare to the world that I would be the one to stand for her. It felt so simple, but, as most of us know, you do not become a child in need of a mother without dealing with trauma. And trauma makes us all such burdened people. 

My daughter is not without her scars. Beautiful as I may think they are, they still mark her, changing her perception, shifting her reality. 

She believes that I will give her up one day, when it becomes inconvenient to love her. She does not trust that my love is unconditional nor does she think that life will keep us together.

There is such a tragedy in this. In the breaking of her heart repeatedly over the last 12 years. In the way I tell her that I love her and she just looks at me without responding.

Only silence from the one person I love more than anyone else on earth. 

Is silence my calling? Grief my namesake?

Or maybe, just maybe, I will take a page out of Esther's book and discover that I was created for such a time as this?

Maybe, just maybe, I am the perfect person to experience the silence day after day and still choose to say "I love you". 

Because, after all, I know that silence does not necessarily mean all that it implies. 

I know that love can still exist in the silence. 

Hope can still blossom in the quiet.

Families can still be made in the doubts. 

You are mine, sweet girl, I gave you my whole heart the moment I knew you existed, much like I did with your brother. Without reason, without restraint, as if I had never been brutally broken before.

Because you, much like John and much like Kimber, are so incredibly worth all the risk. 

God makes parents, not in birth or in courtrooms, but in the hearts of everyday people who choose to love someone beyond themselves: even in brokenness, even in fear, even in silence.