Beautiful New Chapter

July will mark five years since our firstborn, Lydia, died. At 9yrs old she had a long decline after colon surgery. Two years ago, we reached the point where that same surgery was the best remaining mainstream option for then 9yr old Amelia as well.

As a Hail Mary we bought a kit of essential oils and sought help from our local naturopath. When these traditional options worked exceptionally well for us, I started teaching my friends and their friends and so forth, empowering others with what I'd been given. 

I had to develop research and networking skills as Lydia's mom, always pushing the envelope because plans a, b and c often don't work for a medically fragile child with a very rare disorder. These skills and drive perfectly suited me to become a Wellness Advocate in a way I never could have imagined or planned. At this point I have an oil team representing more than 2,500 families across most states and a handful of countries.

The income that has steadily followed is allowing us to buy a nearby house with more living, entertaining and teaching space. We move in two weeks. No more family of seven in three bedrooms!

More importantly, Jason and I are going to be able to find a new level of partnership with both work and family because he doesn't need to continue teaching at this point. I so look forward to spending more time with this man. We are not quite 40 and will get to work together from home starting in June!

These professional portraits were funded by our company for their Leadership Magazine, one more tremendously sweet gift from this unexpected chapter. (Skillfully taken by Jenny Evelyn Prater)

While we were painfully working through the first mainstream options for Amelia, I became pregnant with Esther. It was frightening. I was a mother with my nurturing ability greatly dulled by grief, not looking for another dependent to let down. The song I clung to was Gungor's Beautiful Things, full of Biblical promises of restoration. 

We don't have the promise of affluence or ease this side of heaven. We do have the promise of God's goodness regardless of our ability to make sense of the circumstances and an eternity that overshadows it all. We know the challenge of trusting when it hurts, yet here we are experiencing a different side. Not only are we living restoration of relationships at home and beyond but getting the responsibility and privilege of stepping out from under financial burden as well.

Phil 4:11b-13

11b I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. 12 I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. 13 I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

This passage was as important and applicable in the days following Lydia's death as it is today. We pray that God continues to shore up that secret of contentment in us and that his glory be the focus through our season of abundance just as through the years of heartache.

For His Own Glory,
Allison

Sweet Six Weeks

Today, Yummy You...

Are Six Weeks Old!

12 Years Ago...

Twelve years ago today these young'uns became parents.

 

 

 

It was thrilling each time we got to take you home, over and over again.

Summer to School to Baby (Ten Things Off the Top)

1-There will be 4 kids under our roof tonight for the first time in 4 weeks after going 2 by 2 to my parents in FL. Treasured pictures were taken by a talented family friend while down there:

Cookbook and Fireworks-Grief Anniversary Triggers

To most it looks like a mere festive Christmas cookie recipe book. I had big, specific, colorful dreams when I headed to the cashier hugging what I considered a bound album of memories to make with the firstborn in my belly. I strangely treasure that book, a link to an unswayable, idealist, young version of myself. It isn't of much use for it's intended purpose though since I have never been able to bring myself to actually cook from it, even with our subsequent able-bodied children. When I stumbled on the book a couple of weeks ago it was the surprise tripwire making me acknowledge the source of my recent edginess, July 5th inching closer, the 2 year anniversary of Lydia's death. My emotions were closer to the surface than I realized.

Independence Day is much like that cookbook. To most it's a celebration, beach time, fireworks, cookouts by pools, pinterest explosion of patriotic colored desserts. It's even bigger than that as a tribute to our freedom. No one need apologize to me for their festivities by any stretch, maybe some day I'll be able to join you. Right now at my address there are no festivities, it's still overshadowed as primarily the date these pictures were taken.

Wrapping It Up to Easter, Sunday's Coming

Having been encouraged to complete the picture, I went back and added the image of Lydia's post-surgical abdomen to the second post in this series. It indeed speaks volumes. View only if you wish. And now...


Welcome to part 4 of 4 for the family update. Here are links to one, two and three. 


Far more of you have experienced expecting a baby rather than grieving a child. You know how it's never far from your mind, whether you are engaged in something totally unrelated or assembling the crib? While I now consider the two mental presences similar, I would not have said so regarding Amelia's twin. I didn't know the second baby in my womb even existed before its heart stopped beating. He/she was never part of my life or my anticipation and most of the time, I forget. 

How Amelia Met Her Deductible

Amelia's new GI has ordered a series of tests on her colon (lower GI, rectal biopsies and colonoscopy). The later revealed that the child has the uncanny ability to remain "constipated on watery poop", a discovery after a bowel prep including four day of clear diet and loads of laxatives. It hardly fazed me that Amelia had gone on to the movies and church during this process. That's how colon cleanses go on the only two gals I've worked with. Amelia's mention of the "clear" blue slushy while watching the Lorax prompted the doctor's first pause that day. He looked at me and said basically Houston we have a problem here.

Baby Bump and Telling the Kids

Being quiet the past 8 weeks wasn't due to lack of ups and downs to write about but more the energy and coherency to convey them. I finally completed a catch-up entry, five pages long, single spaced, before pics. Don't worry, I'll break it up into several posts to make it easier on your senses. No build up to a grand reveal this time, just recording our living.

The baby bump has already grown big and clumsy but I felt more like myself yesterday than I have in months. The two belly shots so far have been taken by iPad and Amelia, neither capturing my head or chins.

10 weeks:

December: Hide and Seek with Joy

As if November didn't look like plenty of play distractions, December held even more. It worked and it didn't but was a valiant attempt.

First up: Disney on Ice

This was magical, even though most of the pics ended up as blurry as Sophie below. Oops.



I made it through Thanksgiving just fine but this tore me up. Of all things it was the sea of light-up-spinning-toys surrounding us launched the emotional ambush.

Storms and the Grief Baby

Just as my sky cleared, the bottom fell out over our city. Tuesday a rippling heartbreak occurred as an infant suddenly and traumatically died. The rain has pounded down every night since, dramatically concluding a summer of drought. The deluge of water pounding overhead and the fierce thunder has interrupted sleep. My abrupt consciousness begins with a racing heart as the sound immediately takes my thoughts to the young parents at the beginning of such a season of dark storms. I then calm as I imagine God’s tears mixed in that rain, washing over them...and us.

My storms kept getting shockingly stronger as the grief season progressed, until Lydia’s Birthday. That storm only brewed a week rather than a month. The focus was simply Lydia rather than the magnitude of secondary losses. Anticipation was by far the darkest aspect, during which I labored over the expression. Documenting a snapshot of our divided hearts, the part that left us and the portion that remains, was all I needed to release me to run out of the intensity into the storm shelter for the rest of the day. There we did as little as possible till the remnant passed. A long nap and a simple dozen purchased cupcakes with family were involved, unlike last year. Both extremes were perfect in their time. I’ve come out emotionally satisfied but spent. 

I'll Love You Forever

A couple days ago Josiah grabbed the little book I'll Love You Forever off the shelf and snuggled up next to me. I obliged his request even though I've always found that book to be a little creepy, in the sweetest sort of way. I mean climbing into your grown son's window while he's sleeping to hold and sing to him? I needed to get a cathartic cry out of the way before today so I willed myself to let the sweetness win out. It didn't take much effort as just inside the cover was a dear friend's hope-filled inscription in anticipation of Lydia's birth. Then basically every other page reads this sappy "chorus":

I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living
My baby you'll be.


When you get to the end the son does similar sweet weirdness for his aged mother and flips the words. Hard turned to torture.

I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living
My Mommy you'll be.

This is the natural order of the parent-child relationship. Natural order went out the window soon after Lydia's textbook perfect birth.

It was replaced with a life exponentially stranger and more endearing than the story line of I'll Love You Forever. 

A hugely distended, "pierced" and scarred tummy, accessorized with hard plastic shoes, never looked so sweet.

I can think of few greater temporal joys than the first smile witnessed from your child in years, after finally treating the proper diagnosis.

Still the brokenness and intensity were too great for a novel length life. We came to appreciate and expect a short story for our girl. 

Oh how I long to pick back up where we left off, but in a restored eternal order, for our first two-sided conversation. I promise to let you do most of the talking to make up for lost time.

After a morning of tearful reflection I sat down for some spiritual nourishment. Too much emotion and not enough substance make me irritable. I kept coming back to J. I. Packer quotes to clarify some of the conflict between what my pain actually is verses what it's generally presumed to be. “It has become conventional to think as if we are all going to live in this world forever and to view every case of bereavement as a reason for doubting the goodness of God.”

Being Lydia’s mom has been my course in desperately learning the counter-truth to this deception. Death indeed is horrible and unnatural. Please don’t ever call it a blessing even though it can bring great relief. Our souls were created for forever, not endings. God sent Adam and Eve out of the garden to separate them from a second potentially devastating tree, the tree of life. If they would have eaten from it after infecting themselves and the world with sin, physical immortality would be set in a broken state before restoration. This is not the kind of forever ordained by the Creator for them, us, or Lydia. While death is indeed an enemy, it is actually evidence of God’s goodness, a provision for restoration.


Even with this redeeming understanding, the pain of Lydia's death is just so great that it has knocked the breath out of my passion for Saturday. I know that this time between Christ's death and the full impact of His resurrection is a precious extension so that more may be brought into the fold for Sunday. I am selfishly just eager for the restoration, so I can naturally long for only those things He will satisfy. I want to live like I fully believe that He alone is enough.

“Materialism, with its corollary that this life is the only life for enjoying anything, has infected Christian minds producing the feeling that it is a cosmic outrage for anyone to have to leave this world before he or she has tasted all that it has to offer.” Everything this world had to offer Lydia paled in comparison to what we wanted for her. I imagine that is only a tiny taste of what motivated God to assure that death would be a part of this time to keep this life, with a hard relationship with Him, from being our climax.

On this September 17th, 11 years since your birth and 1 yr, 2 months and 12 days since your death I don't know which event displays God's goodness more. I marvel that our overwhelming joy, following your birth, was the prelude to your most epic pain. And that your overwhelming joy, following your death, was the prelude to ours. I treasure having been with you for both and would live them over again for the privilege of being your mother, dear sanctifying child.

Happy Birthday Lydia.

I'll love you forever,
I fought for you always,
For all of eternity
My baby you'll be.

Good Questions to Deeper Layers

I recently was struck by a sentiment that the best verbal support we offer as friends is often through having good questions, not good answers. Of course we have the strong example of God’s counterintuitive words of comfort  to Job.

A friend asked a simple question in passing that got me thinking (I love help thinking). “Have you done tonsil and adenoid removal before with any of your kids?” Yes, Lydia did but as an add-on to abdominal surgery with a PICU admission. Amelia was just outpatient in the office surgery center. Lydia took all her nutrition via tube and Amelia would be a battle of the wills to keep her drinking. Both would lay around afterwards well medicated. That would only be odd for one.