Being Called Mom

I am not called Mom enough. That is one of the many gut wrenching parts of losing your only baby I suppose. No one calls you Mom.

When Lila was here for 8 days the nurses and doctors would call me Mom or Mommy. My family and friends and Mike would say it to me on Lila's behalf too. Things like "she wants her Mommy" or "her Mom is going to change to her diaper." After she died some people said it to me a few times, such as "you were such a good Mom to her" or "Lila was lucky to have you as her Mommy." It was nice, and comforting, but it wasnt enough. 

When I was in high school and most of my friends were getting part time jobs, I was always more comfortable babysitting. It was teaching me how to take care of kids and that is what I wanted to do. Ask any of the kids I have babysat in the past and they will tell you we all have a special friendship and I care about them all very much. In college I picked up a few babysitting jobs on the side too. Even when I began my career as a patient advocate I was never as career driven as a  lot of other people I know. It has never appealed to me to have a job become my life's ambition, I always knew I wanted a family more than anything else. I wanted to be someone's Mom.  

I only got to call my own mother "Mom" to her face for seven years. Seven short years of being able to say those words to my own Mom and hear her respond to me before cancer took her away. I know how important it is to have your Mom in your life and I wanted to be that for Lila. 

I thought all of my dreams had been reached with Lila, I thought my years of longing for a baby of my own were finally over. I would spend the rest of my life being a Mom to Lila. That is what was supposed to happen. Not this of only having those dreams answered for 8 days and then taken away again. 

I realize people say that I will always be her Mom and I know this is true but it is not enough. I wanted to get to live as her Mom though as she grew up and I wanted to hear her call me Mom to my face. 

Living two lives

Sometimes when Jenny and I talk about Lila, we talk about what she would be doing in a given situation. Would she get upset at how loud the vacuum cleaner is or how would she react to all the mangy deer in our back yard? We would imagine that when she gets upset, her lower lip would start to quiver a little before she began to cry. Talking like this brings us some enjoyment but it just highlights what we don't have. The other aspect of this is that it makes me feel like we are living two parallel lives. One where we go about each day as a survival mission, trying to live when our baby has died. The other is this one we talk about, where Lila is a seven month old and we think about how perfect she is and imagine how perfect our lives could and should have been. This life only exists in our thoughts and dreams but we want it so much that it is its own living being. It grows as Lila should have. When the holidays come, I will envision that life and yearn for it. Sometimes it seems like we are crazy by thinking this way, but living life with Lila is how life should be lived. This should be our reality, not this nightmare that we wake up to each day. I will always have visions of that perfect life and our perfect Lila. - Mike

7 Months

Lila should be turning 7 months old tomorrow (8/31). This is so surreal to me. We should have a 7 month old here in our house. I felt that this monthly birthday was not as upsetting as 6 months felt, until today. It just hit me that she would be doing so much and smiling and trying to crawl maybe. For 7 whole months are lives should have been blessed with this baby we wanted for so long and were so close to getting to have her in our lives forever. I have always said my favorite baby age is about 6 months to 18 months, when they know who you are and begin to do a lot more things. Lila should just be entering that age of smiling when her Daddy gets home from work and rolling around on the floor trying to get into things. 

I also cant believe that 7 months have gone by since she was born. Some days it feels like it has been 7 days. -Jenny

Grocery Store

So I decided to go to the grocery store this morning instead of last night.  Not one of my better decisions and it was clear as soon as I got into the produce department.  I thought I went early enough to avoid all the babies and herds of families there but I should have known better.  Babies and kids everywhere.  Lots of them not well behaved and I didn't see one cuter than Lila.  There were several babies that seemed to follow me up and down the aisles.  There was a baby girl that was about as old as Lila should be that I kept running into.  It was in the bread aisle where it really started to get to me.  I was trying to find some stupid dinner rolls and walked up and down the aisle 3 times but failed to find them. I kept walking past this baby and it really upset me that Lila was not there with me.  I had planned on doing a lot of the grocery shopping with Lila, partly to give Jenny some alone time but mostly because it was going to be Daddy and daughter time.  I gave up on finding these rolls, grabbed my cart and went to get frozen rolls instead.  I found those easily, then got some orange juice.  I put the OJ in the cart and I looked inside the cart and only saw a few items, none of which were the 10 or so items I had already picked up.  Then it hit me that I must have stolen someones cart while making my escape from the bread aisle.  I hurried back to the bread aisle, didn't see someone looking for a cart, but I saw mine.  I made the switch, escaped the bread aisle a second time, got some cheese and then checked out.  I don't think anyone realized my goof but, to the person who had olives and chicken in your cart, I apologize. 

This was one of the more upsetting trips to the grocery store, but I should have known better to go there at 9am on a Sunday morning.  I saw too many people having what we lost, living the life that we dreamed of for too long.  The optimist in me wants to say that at least I got a good story out of this trip, but it still sucked. - Mike

Waking Up

I find that waking up in the morning is one of the saddest parts of my day. Every morning I wake up when Mike is at work and I expect someone else to be there. I expect Lila to be needing me.

It is true what they say that when you first wake up there is a brief moment where you feel like this did not really happen. That my baby is sleeping in her room and I am going to have to go get her. She might be still sleeping and I might have to wake her up to get our day started. Or she might already be awake just looking around her room and making noises. She might be crying and I would go in there and pick her up and she would stop once she was not alone anymore. This is not the case for us though and we never got to have these moments with Lila. 

During the pregnancy I talked to her all of the time in the morning. I asked her how her night went or if she slept well. I liked to poke my stomach to get her moving and I would not get out of bed until she kicked at least once. Lila was a little lazy baby though and did not kick on a very good schedule so sometimes she needed a lot of poking prodding to get moving, but she always did eventually.

I just miss her so very much, I just wanted to hold her little hand forever.