Saturday, October 06, 2018

Ripping open-

soaking wet boxes of my dead child's things.
Ripping open wounds I bury under layers of pretending.
Surrounded by destruction and devastation in my community, my senses feel like they are on fire.  Little exposed wires that constantly get zapped and pinged.
Every morning this week, when I wake, I'm back in that "in between" after they first left us.  There is that moment as I drift awake when I have to realize that I'm not at home in Swansboro and they aren't out in the kitchen raiding the pantry and sneaking TV shows on the iPad.  My brain has to kick into gear and acknowledge that I'm in THIS house, with Eva, Charley and Max.  Mercy and Sam are in their boxes and THEY. ARE. NOT. ALIVE.
It's like a little piece of hell on earth to be back in that place.  The one where my disbelief at what has happened feels so fresh, so raw and so completely consuming.
It was the boxes.
They contained the pieces of her life, the reminders of the way she loved to sit on her floor and read her favorite books-the bags and purses she'd pack with a crazy array of little girl things-the dolls she cared for like her own little babies, that she'd tuck into her doll bed each and every night-the fuzzy socks that covered her long, skinny little feet, -the snow baby costume she treasured from her one and only Nutcracker season,-the lip gloss she constantly covered her lovely little rosebud lips in-the pillow pet she laid her head on every night and hid her binkies under, the towel I wrapped her in when she was freshly washed and ready for nighttime snuggles...
SO MANY THINGS.  And she touched every one of them.  They hold her DNA, her touch, maybe little pieces of her hair, a smudge of lipgloss or a pen mark from her insatiable desire to write her beautiful name on every surface she could find.
It was the boxes.
And they are still there.  Because we couldn't go home and we chose to live somewhere they didn't fit.  Probably because somewhere in the back of our minds, we didn't want a house big enough to remind us that we weren't that big family anymore.  We didn't need all those rooms and all those closets and all that open space for crazy little people to march around, dress up, play hide and seek, build forts and train tracks and puppet theaters....
We didn't need a house like that anymore.

But.
maybe, just maybe, we do.  Because they are still my children and I still need to feel like they are with me, even if it's just because I've unpacked the damn boxes and set up a freaking shrine.  And Charles, Eva, Charley and Max need to feel it too.

While this sweet little house has held us close for the last 3 years, I realized something when those boxes were ripped open. I have to find a way for my life and my home to hold ALL of my children.  I don't know what that looks like, but I'm going to pray every single day that I can figure it out.
I KNOW that not one of those things will bring my children back, but I can't live like this anymore.  I can't abide each and every day with this fractured and disjointed place in my soul.  And the feeling that I've failed them because I simply can't make myself deal with those things, those pieces, those memories. 

And I know that the only true peace I'll ever find will be in the presence and the arms of my Savior.  Sometimes it's just so exhausting to know that I'll live with this pain and this fractured family for so very long on this earth.  
Show me, Lord, how to honor You, 
how to honor them, 
and quite simply, 
how to survive.  

One thing I ask from the Lord,
    this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
    all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
    and to seek him in his temple. 

                                              Psalm 27:4


love, 
clan mac mama