Winters’ Day In
Time to spill the tea. Wanna cuppa?
Photo Friday: Tears of Joy and Sorrow
"Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life." - Anne Roiphe
Joy Comes Softly
Every day is another step forward. Every day, grief morphs and whirls and changes into a different shape, like dancing aurora borealis. And lately, I have been surprised by joy.
Photo Friday: Hope from Chaos
"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit." Henry Adams. Boy, do I hope that's true, because chaos abounds right now!
Photo Friday: Hope in Grief
Last Saturday, Levi turned four. It could have been an awful, hard, day of mourning. But it wasn't. It was a day of joy, and remembering, and thinking about our little man. Together.
Time Goes By
In a way, every day, every moment sine June 3, 2015 has been a "first" in this first year since I went from being merely a parent of four boys or an adoptive parent to a bereaved parent. Every day, there are things that trigger my tears. Some of them are quite small and seemingly insignificant--but even something that might seem small to others can leave my heart weighed down by stones too heavy to lift for most of the day.
Riding the Rails: How to Avoid an Emotional Train Wreck
Are you trapped in the tarry black hole of dwelling on loss? Are you jumping trains trying to hide from it? Or are you figuring out how to keep moving forward with loss as your travelling companion? How to avoid a train wreck on your road to healing, and your dreams.
If I'm Going to Save the World Today, Maybe I Should Put On Some Pants
When everything extraneous has been stripped from your life by a loss, and you are left naked and broken, sometimes just getting your pants on in the morning is a big deal. But you look for those moments that you see progress, too. Moving forward, whether in small steps, or giant leaps--in the end, that's the only thing I can really ask of myself.
What I Wish I Could Tell You
Dear Levi...
I can't tell you how many things this year I wish you could have done with us, or the things I wanted to show you. I can't tell you how many times I wanted to hold you close or hear your laugh. I can't tell you how broken I feel without you here.
I learned so much from being your mama. And by God's grace, I am learning still,
Endings and Beginnings
As a reader, I always thought that the ending was the goal. And it is. But it never occurred to me that it was the well-written middle that actually got me there as inevitably as a cart on a roller coaster track.
If only life had someone writing me out of my "swampy middles."
Behind the Scenes
It's been quiet on stage here at Winters' Day In.
But so, so far from quiet backstage.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Are we in control of our destiny? Or is God? And who is to blame when things go wrong?
Lucky
Yesterday was the four-month anniversary of Levi's heaven birthday. Thanks to some wonderful friends, I got to spend the weekend at a scrapbooking retreat, and chose to use that time to add pages to Levi's memory album. And while doing so, I remembered the reasons I have to be thankful.