Share Your Story

I try to find the words often to share what is has been like to walk the journey our family has been on.  As time moves further away from my kids early arrival and the loss of our daughter, trying to find the words that describe journey has become harder.  Looking at our family now you wouldn't know at first glance the struggles we have faced or the struggles that still fester under the surface.  The journey to parent hood has never been easy.  This is the best way I can describe it....

Years ago before the idea of children popped into my head someone wrote our story.  They found a piece of paper and begin to write.  There were many eraser marks which makes the paper more fragile. There was a lot of scratching out, writing over, a lot of editing, and lot of writing. However when they were done they toook the piece of paper and balled it up, balled it up to a super tight ball.  

When we finally decided that we wanted to start a family, the ball of our story was handed to me.  I didn't know what was written.  Only that it was my job to unwrap this ball to find out.  So I begin to unwrap it.  Trying really hard to be careful so the paper does not tear.  Every once is a while the paper will tear a little and I have to add a small piece of tape to it.  The writing is hard to read due to the wrinkles in the paper.  But as time goes on I slowly unwrap the paper. There were time where I saw words I didn't want to read.  Many times I wanted to ball it back up and hand it back. However, that is not an option.  I have to keep unwrapping.     Once its unwrapped all the way you see a piece of paper in front of you filled with wrinkles.  You can see the fragile letter filled with little pieces of tape, the paper is barely intact in some places. Written are the words of my journey.  Some will make me smile, some words feel like a punch in the gut. As I read, there are moments I look around and question if I was given the wrong ball.  Sometime praying I was.  This isn't the idea I had in my head.  This is not what I had planned.  

I have spent years trying to flatten the wrinkles out of this very fragile piece of paper. Whats great is I have found people in my life (many of them here) that have come along and showed me how to make the paper stronger.  Showed me how to protect it.  The winkles will never fully go away, but our story is written so we do the best we can.  

This journey has not been an easy one.   It is still hard even 13 years later.  I am who I am today because of the word written on that fragile piece of paper.