December/January Photo Recap

For those of you who care what I’ve been doing with my boring life (I actually don’t consider it boring, but I won’t pretend it’s interesting to anyone but myself!), here’s a photo recap of the last couple months. 

We Christmas-ed in Maine and traipsed through Portland after a snowstorm.

More of Portland in the snow

We returned to Taipei just in time to enjoy all the pollution being blown in from Beijing. If you look at the top middle of this picture, you'll see a small vertical line. That's all you can see of Taipei 101 through the smog and dreary weather. 

We did a lot of walking. But that's pretty normal for us.

We took a selfie.

 I skipped across a plaza. Why? Because skipping is fun.

I got directions to where all the dancing singing people hangout. That was a relief. I've always wondered how I could find them.

On the last day of January, the hubby kindly cut my hair.

That's the end of my recap. What about you? What have you been up to lately?

Holywell Cemetery, Oxford—Reflections on Life

Call me morbid, but I love a good cemetery. Ever since I was a child, I would get excited when, on road trips, we passed one I hadn’t explored yet. Needless to say, I was overjoyed that during our time in Oxford last summer we found our way into a few beautiful old cemeteries.

I’m actually really not all that morbid. In fact, horror movies, or anything even mildly reminiscent of them, leave me profoundly shaken afterward. I avoid them at all costs. 

Cemeteries, though, are different. It’s not so much about death. It’s life they remind me of. Lives lived, people loved, stories created—every tombstone has a tale. 

One of the cemeteries we visited, Holywell Cemetery, was filled with graves of famous Oxford men.  There’s something humbling in realising that even the greatest amongst us end the same way. To dust we all return. That sameness in death reminds me of our sameness in life. All these men, no matter how great or little, were just men. They had joys and sorrows, faults and virtues. To borrow a colloquialism, all of them put their trousers on one leg at a time.

One of the most poignant stories told in the tombstones at Holywell is that of Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind In The Willows. His stone is hard the find (I've included a picture of it at the bottom of this post). The writing is worn-down by time. Grahame was buried there in the same grave as his son, Alastair, who had committed suicide at age twenty about twelves years before.  

Grahame’s epitaph reads:"To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the river on the 6th of July, 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time.”

A life was lived. Joys and sorrows were experienced. Stories were left behind.

(If you're ever in Oxford, you can find Holywell Cemetery next to St. Cross Church near the intersection of St. Cross and Manor Rd.)

St. Cross Church

Kenneth Grahame and Alistair Grahame's Tombstone

I Am a Mother

I am a mother. This statement might confuse those who see me often. I don’t have a baby in my arms or a child clinging to my hand. I don’t have a rounded belly. I’m not likely to have any of those things anytime too soon either.

Still, I am a mother. I’ve joined the ranks of an often misunderstood, even more often silent, group of women. I’ve joined the ranks of childless mothers. We smile. We hope. We live our lives. Inside, though, we bear a pain that will never leave us. It’s the pain of a child we never got to meet, a smile that never filled our hearts with joy, and a heart that stopped beating far too soon or maybe even never beat at all. 

We are mothers. The world may say we didn’t lose much. It was a clump of cells, that’s all, not even a stillbirth. We know this isn’t true. We know what is true. We are mothers.

On October 26th, I broke a promise I made to myself. I took a pregnancy test before the six week wait was up. Every month for nearly a year I had promised myself I would wait. Every month I had broken that promise. Every month the answer had been “no.” This month, my hands shook as I saw the two lines promising a baby. 

I was so excited I couldn’t wait to tell my husband. I hurried to his school and found him during one of his planning periods. I remember the way his face brightened into a slow smile as he realized what I was telling him. He had become a father.

We found out we were parents that day. One month later, on November 26th, I lay on a cold examination table in a cramped dark room as a doctor coolly told me my baby had no heartbeat. She shuffled us out and moved on to her next task. She moved on to the living, and I left carrying death inside of me. 

Many people would tell me that I’m still young. I still have time. They are probably right. Truthfully, though, I don’t care. I care about this baby. I lost our baby at 8 weeks but carried her for nearly 3 weeks more. During that time, I would place my hand over my womb and remember how I used to make that same small gesture while dreaming of greeting a new life this summer. Instead, I now thought of how that life was replaced with a death that was slowly leaving my body. Yes, I may get another chance, but I will never get this chance again. I want this baby not all the other chances. 

I want to know what shade of blue her (or his) eyes would've have been. Would they have been greenish-blue like mine? Or would they have been dark blue like her father's? Perhaps they would have been bright, dancing blue like her paternal grandfather's. What color would her hair have been? Would she have had freckles? There are so many questions I'll never get an answer to.

Recently, a friend who lost her husband a few years back posted a meme on Facebook. It was one of those pithy saying on a supposedly inspirational backdrop about how if God takes something away from us it means he has something better in return. She questioned the truth of this statement. She trusted God's providence and goodness but also didn't believe that he took away her husband because being without him was better.

The Bible promises that God will never withhold good things from us. Within our finite minds it’s a struggle to reconcile that thought with the loss of a loved one. I don’t understand why God took away my child. I do though, know that he wasn’t surprised at my baby’s death. He is in control. My baby’s life wasn’t a bad thing. God created it. He doesn’t necessarily have something better to give me in return. He does, though still have good gifts for me. Even our child's life, as fleeting as it was, was a good and perfect gift from him. Any living children God might bless me with in the future are additional gifts, not a better replacement for this gift.

I suppose that’s where I rest right now, in the knowledge that I received a wonderful, blessed gift from God. I surrender that gift to his hands and trust his infinite mercy, but, like my friend and her husband, just because God took it doesn’t mean it was never a gift. And just because he has future gifts for me doesn’t diminish the beauty of this gift. 

We found out our baby had died on Thanksgiving day. I expect that day will always be shadowed by the memory of our child's passing. But I also think it was a good day to find out such horrible news. It reminded us to be thankful for the gift of this child.

I recently read these words from another mother who had gone through a miscarriage, “It's going to hurt a lot for a little while,” she wrote. “And then it's going to hurt a little for a long while. And there's another side of this where you are OK again - not the same person you were, not "over it" - but OK again.”

Right now, I’m the first two of those things. Eventually, I will probably get to the last. I will be OK again, not the same, but OK. Loss has changed me. Motherhood has changed me. 

I carried this baby alive for less than two months. I never felt a kick. I never was able to share the joy of her life with anyone but the closest friends and family, but she was a gift from God.

And that's why, in the midst of a pain I can't understand, I choose to focus on and thank God for one simple truth.

I am a mother.