It's D-Day

It might just always be this way. 

Every night I tiptoe into the girls' rooms and expect the worst.  I anticipate that they will not be breathing, that their skin will be cold and their tiny bodies stiff.  Every night, I write them off as gone.  Every night I grieve until I experience that relief - The rise and fall of their tiny chests, a wiggle at my good night kiss, and a sigh when I cover them with the blanket.

This is life post-trauma.  Most people - normal people - will tell you to let go.  Live in the moment.  Stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But when one shoe, your first shoe, the shoe you waited your whole life to hold, the shoe that you imagined would go to the Olympics one day or be a Supreme Court Justice, the shoe that was the love of your life - When you've lost that shoe, you know the other can't be far behind. No matter how long that other shoe sticks around, you know it could disappear in a heartbeat.  That a heartbeat can just disappear.

It is a struggle adverse to the one that I have faced most of my life.  Most of my life has been spent with my head telling my heart not to love so freely.  But when it comes to my girls, my head frequently has to tell my heart, "Now is not the time to shut down."

I have to tell myself to love them.  My brain tells me to leap without looking.  Just embrace them, just enjoy their precious lives.  Just wonder at their intelligence, strength, beauty, and sweetness.  My eyes see them, my hands can feel them, but my heart is guarded.  They have every right to it but through no fault of their own it has been hardened with scars.

One day I went into an exam room full of hope, dreaming with a heart that had been broken many times.  I left that room a new woman, a woman who is very strong and very brave, but one who survives by keeping her distance. A woman who lives caught between Heaven and here. 

From a distance my Eden and Delilah smile at me and I offer a perfunctory smile in return.  Something moves inside of me and I think it is love, swelling from the cracks of my broken heart.  But at the same time I feel the floor shake beneath me, unsteady, ready to give, ready to let me down.  The smile fades from my face, and I return to my skillet.

It's cold.  It's gloomy.  It's lonely.  It's January.  It's D-Day.