My last thought as I stepped out of a hot bath is morning was…”I should have gone to church”. But we had a huge snow all day yesterday and through the night and my subdivision isn’t plowed and from what I am reading on the local news the plows weren’t out in Ann Arbor and people were mad.

So that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Yesterday was hard, well almost all days are hard when you lose three family members in 20 months. Life on earth will never be the same with all the holes around our table and the dynamics so drastically changed. My daughter, and best friend said to me a few days ago,”mom, can you try to have a sense of humor? Why did God take Jamie and daddy and leave me with all the family members who don’t have a sense of humor?

We laughed because it is true. Mike and Jamie had such great sense’s of humor. They were alike in so many ways.

I am in the process of getting our house ready to sell (I think.) I vacillate daily between wanting to move to Tennessee and help my son get his business going in a new direction and thinking how can I ever leave this home.

It is a home, not a house.

We built it in 1991 when Allyssa was just toddling around and Christa was 10. The boys were 8,6 and 4. That is a lot of memories in one home.

Yea I know…you take your memories with you, blah, blah…but do you?

We tackled the basement yesterday and had lots of sidebars where we would “find things”like photos and letters to look at and read. We would stop cleaning and laugh at the stories behind them and cry as we read letters from Jamie when he was in the Navy.

Looking through the photos and seeing Jamie’s and Mike’s life in photos brought back so many memories of our life as a family. I saw a nursing baby, a baby getting their first bath, a small child who was always dirty and kissing frogs and a young man play and accomplish so much in sports.

Mike coaching football.

But, not enough…never enough.

When I look at some of our travels, memories came flooding back in of being stuck on Pikes Peak in the mini-van, and one of the five children always crying in each of the pictures.

It is true their life and deaths impacted a lot of people yet I can’t help but wonder will their impacts last in anyone’s life but mine and the kids?

Overall yesterday was good. We got a ton packed, re-organized and thrown away. Our precious friend Wendy came over and helped. Afterwards when we were totally exhausted, Christa, Wendy and I were sitting around talking, and I shared a struggle I have been having finishing my book. 

It was more than writers block, I’ve been blogging for 13 years and I know that happens.I just didn’t know how to move past it. Talking helped put things in prospective.

It is almost finished and I have been wrestling with the last chapter. My editor has wanted me to write some things in the book concerning the people I know that have been helped with receiving transplanted organs. Of course I am truly happy for them but I hate, with a passion the industry and therefore it was hard to put in words the emotional conflict I have been dealing with.

I think together we found a way to handle the conflict in my soul. You’ll have to read the book to find out what I did but I finally feel energized to finish it. (Since my editor reads my blog she will be thrilled I am moving on.)

The hardest part of this Christmas season is the change in our family. All the kids are struggling in their own way and I’m a grieving mother who is helpless to help them. I try to take my cues from them and they try to take them from me but many times we all fail miserably.

I am the eternal optimist and this is unfamiliar ground to me. I miss Mike, Jamie and Lily Bear so much, the house feels like a tomb most of the time and especially this time of year.

Will this ever get better?

Can we make new memories here?

Or should we just start over somewhere else?

I honestly don’t know.

The kids don’t want me to sell the house, they want to buy it but obviously they can’t. If you think of me, please pray I will know what the right thing to do is.

Today someone put up a request on Facebook to share an ornament that meant something special to them about the child they lost, so we get to know them better and I thought that was a good idea but we’re going to D.C to be with family and with my kitchen not finished and the house all torn up we’re not decorating this year. Last Christmas we had Presley Ann, Matt’s daughter and that made it fun and worthwhile.

But, there are so many ornaments with memories boxes full.  My husband would never let me change the Christmas tree so it is full of ornaments that all the kids made in school, the ornaments we bought to remember each vacation and even the focal point I used in labor and delivery starting with Christa. That one is always front and center.

Yea I should have gone to church today to hear an uplifting message and get out of this funk but some days grief pours through my very soul and this optimist mother has to get it all out by pouring out my heart in this little blog.

Now off to show a house in Ann Arbor in the snow.