It's been 4 years, 1 graduate degree, 1 miscarriage, 3 home repairs, countless hours on Facebook, 6 vacations and 1 healthy baby girl since we last updated our blog. We had a fledgling Apple page that died quickly under the annual cost of renewal....or maybe it was something more. Every time that I sat down to bring the blog back to life I found a reason not to.
In 2009 I found that photos and updates were more easily shared on Facebook and I was rigorously exercising my inner writer through my graduate program. That same year, Dominick and I lost a pregnancy and were faced with the silencing sorrow of mourning a child that we never met. I wanted to so desperately to write my way through it. My heart and fingers ached for me to write, for there to be a literary catharsis; but it never came. Writing has always been a healing and educative exercise for me. When my brain and heart are having difficulty processing something, I can still write it. My inability to write after the miscarriage was more than a block, it was paralysis. The neurons no longer fired, the blank page mocked instead of invited, and I withdrew. It wasn't that the words wouldn't come, it's that they weren't there at all. I was aching, empty and abandoned in almost every sense. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that I couldn't write during this period of time. The body has a way of insisting that you quiet yourself and heal when you're screaming at the wind. But always better to dump than be dumped I said, so I turned my back on my writing for fear of my mutism being permanent.
The natural opportunity to return to writing came when I graduated with my Master's degree in May 2011. We had a 5 month old daughter and I had been back to work for one month. I was beaming with joy, but also sobbing and groping my way through becoming the mom that I was supposed to be in my head (what I know now: that bitch is a she-devil and not to be trusted). It was the perfect excuse to extend my writing vacation and avoid the question: did my body accidentally purge my voice along with my child?
As so many writers have expounded on more eloquently than I ever will: time does, indeed, heal. So do Dominick, Ella Rose and the many angels we call family; most especially my mother who was brave enough to share her own stories of loss, and to take my anger and frustration on her back and help me to carry it. I owe her as many apologies as I do thanks.
So here we are, a differently shaped family with lots to share and plenty to say. I hope you're still there, growing and loving and praying along with us.
Cheers to the next chapter....
