What my heart looks like when tipped upside down

It starts out innocent enough.

• The People magazine with the teen-mom-adoption-cover-story earlier this month.
• Then watching the ’16 & Pregnant’ marathon for four consecutive hours. I just sat there, completely unable to move away from the screen.
• A really honest conversation with my husband over dinner that night.
• Just sitting, and letting my thoughts go where they are normally not allowed.
• Opening the photo album that normally stays locked up tight.
• Listening to songs that just add weight to my already heavy heart.

And thaaaat’s when the cycle of strength finally turns on me, and I must surrender to the explosion of emotion which finds me clutching to all that I have; pictures, memories and tears.

The sixth night before his fifth birthday; it’s the longest I’ve kept it together thus far, but still the fall-out takes me by surprise.

I think about so many things.  I map them by writing them down.
I think about your thoughts as you watch your belly grow. The bigger it swells, the more your heart swells with love for your unborn child. I know. I’ve been where you are. I feel you judge me. You think: “how could she possibly walk away from this?” I know you don’t want to think these thoughts but you can’t help it. You think I must be some kind of robot. You tell me: “I could never do that.” Possibly the most biting words that you could say to me, but you taught me to love people even when they can’t understand.

I think about the time you tried to talk me out of my decision. You told me how much I was going to regret this. You have meeting in your home but still you couldn’t hear me when I told you about the peace I had in my heart with my decision.  The peace I told you I knew could only have come from God, but you taught me never to question what somebody has peace with from that day forward.

I think about the time you argued with me outside of a class a couple years after the adoption. You told me I should be trying to ‘undo’ what I did, that I shouldn't be standing here doing nothing to take him back. I cried the whole car ride home, but you taught me that I don’t owe anyone an explanation, even if I want to shake them to make them understand.

I think about the time you should’ve made conversation about the weather, and instead you chose to ask me if I would do it all over again if I could go back four years in time. Over breakfast. With no warning. But you taught me that miserable people seek to make everyone else miserable with them.

I think about the time that you called me and told me that you made a mistake, and that you wished you wouldn’t have left us. I’d waited for those exact words but it was three years too late, and I never hated you more. Those words could’ve changed my whole life back then. But within a few months of that conversation she was pregnant, and now you’ve broken her too.  You taught me to search words, and to follow my heart.

I think about the time that you made your daughter leave convention because you didn’t want her to be with the pregnant me. I never felt so dirty, but you taught me to accept apologies. And I can’t recall many days where I ever felt more love.   

The tears come harder as I remember the people who reached out to me that day with their stories about times when they made the wrong choices, and the rejection that ensued. And then I was invited to sit with the sister workers at Post Falls convention, six-months pregnant and all. I will always be humbled by the love I was showed that day.

Intense pain interwoven with equally intense feelings of love is repeated again and again thru my story.

When I really look at this picture I can feel his tiny fingers squeezing my finger, like he’s still in my arms in that hospital bed.

It’s about now that Zane comes into the room to find me curled up in a pitiful ball, and scoops me into his arms, and just rocks me. I hear,

“… I was a heavy heart to carry/my beloved was weighed down/my arms around his neck/my fingers laced in a crown…”

I think about the patience my beloved has had, and how ‘lucky’ doesn’t begin to touch the surface of how I feel to be cared for by this man. I cry into his neck and tell him that I miss somebody that I don’t even know. He understands my pain.

The patio door is open to the sound of the rain, Junebug lies beside me, Johnny cries on the floor below us, and my headphones slip down around my neck, but still I can hear Norah Jones drift up.

“…I wanna wake up with the rain falling on the tin roof/while I’m safe there in your arms/so all I ask is for you to come away with me in the night…”

Sometimes you just have to cry, but still all is well because a happy boy turns five in a few days, and he has everything a five-year-old could ever wish to have.

 love at first sight in it's truest form.