I have to remember the sorrow.  Because there was sorrow. I’m now acquainted with grief.  If you had asked me before Emmy’s diagnosis if I knew about hard times, I would have said yes.  But there is something different in this kind of grief.  In the days and hours after the words Williams Syndrome first entered our lives, I had to remind myself to breathe in and then breathe out.  I couldn’t say the words, couldn’t let them exit my mouth because they represented a reality that was very difficult to accept.  I say that I have known for some time that something was different and unique about Em, so in some ways when the genetic doctor first flipped over Emmy’s perfect little pinky finger to show me that there was one small crease there that represented something potentially very big, I felt…relieved.

This picture is from that day. August 2nd, 2013.  To try and explain the many emotions that were underneath my smile would be impossible.  I remember telling myself, “Don’t cry yet…you’re going to want to remember what they say”.  There was also a strange sense of happiness in experiencing this very intimate moment with my daughter…the moment that we first “knew”.  There was intense devotion to her in that moment…because I knew she would need it from me.  There was a prayer uttered that went something like, “Please help me be grateful, please help me be enough, please help me see what I’m supposed to see…Jehovah Jireh.”  

I revisit these moments not because I want to make life harder for myself but because I think there is much value in accepting the hard and unexpected things in life that you can’t change.  We spend a lot of time removing hardship from our lives, from our children’s lives. And of course sometimes this is the right thing.  But other times, we can miss the joy in the journey.  We miss the way God meets us in that moment of sorrow and brokenness and provides things we didn’t know we needed and didn’t even know to ask for.  It’s good for me to spend some time remembering.  

A note to my readers: I’m still working out how to make my blog look nice…I just focused on getting the words up first.  🙂 It’s a work in progress.