The middle of the week

12.18.13

       Wednesdays are still my hard days. Its the countdown and countup combination that is very difficult to get my mind and heart wrapped around.
        This Wednesday, my work was easy in the morning so I stayed home for a few hours and got caught up on paperwork. It hit me out of the blue. I have absolutely no idea where it came from, but one minute I was sitting at the bar working and the next I was standing in the doorway of Kaitlyn's room crying. I don't have a clue where it came from. There wasn't a trigger that I could have pointed to and said, "Let's not do that again." It was just the overwhelming, gut-wrenching missing of my daughter. I wanted to hold her again. For some reason, my mind had floated back to the sonogram we had 8 days before her arrival. Everything was fine, and my little girl was just sitting in her cozy corner of the world waiting for the time when she would show the world that I was right about her full head of hair. I don't remember her doing anything out of the ordinary that day, but I remember the sound of the ultrasound as it found her heart beat and started making the wooshing sound of the blood flowing in and out of her heart.
        Whenever I would have a sonogram, I would leave the office with one of their envelopes and the flimsy paper images tucked neatly inside. Every time except for that last time, my first stop after the doctor would be a CVS or Walgreens where I could make copies of the sonograms on real photo paper that I could mail to Alex in a care package. He had copies of all of her pictures with him while he was stationary, but we knew that he would be heading home before I could get him copies of those last pictures.
         I still have all of the envelopes stashed around the house. The early ones are in the bedside table on Alex's side of the bed, all organized by date taken. The most recent ones are sitting precariously on the side of her crib. I can't make myself do anything with them, and I don't think I am suppose to just yet. I have thought about putting them in a picture book, but its hard to think about the finality of doing that. I already have the box that has the few books that have her name written in them as well as a few things from the hospital, but her pictures are different. There are some days that Kaitlyn feels like a dream. It feels like my body didn't just spend 39.5 weeks sheltering and building this mini-human.
        Those pictures are my reminder, my tangible, no-doubt-about-it reminder that Kaitlyn was here. I cried over those last sonogram images. On one of the first ones where she is more than just a little blob she had pushed her foot out and spread it on the side of my stomach so that her toes were slightly spread. She had her daddy's toes. I cried and kissed those little toes and talked to her picture. I just cried over my sweet baby girl.

"You make beautiful things
you make beautiful things out of the dust..."