Five Days

Five days. It's five days from now that will mark the sixth anniversary of the day my daughters were born. Six years ago on THIS date I was told they had died. And I waited......five days. For five days life for everyone else continued........but for me-it stopped. In that five days I cried, I sobbed, I begged and pleaded and even negotiated with God and I all but refused to leave my house. For five days I pretended that the doctor was wrong and imagined that on the fifth day I would arrive at the hospital and they would all discover their mistake. I dreamt I would bring home two precious and perfect little girls in spite of what they said,what I knew and what was real. For those five nights I lie awake willing my stomach to move indicating life within.......but it didn't.
In five days my living children will do as we have each year.....we will sing, we will laugh, I will cry and we will all remember. My oldest sons will remember the siblings they never met, they will call their mother and let her know they are thinking of her and love her and they will again be reminded of the fear and helplessness they felt watching their broken mother lie in her bed,curled in a ball and unable to move. My oldest two daughters will talk of how tall their sisters might be now, which one would be the "leader" and will remember how briefly they knew the excitement of knowing they would have twin sisters to love on. (They girls didn't know I was pregnant until two weeks before the twins died. They had been kidnapped by their father and only returned two weeks before Chloe and Zoe died.) Lily will ask again why Chloe and Zoe had to die and remember how much she was looking forward to playing mother hen to them both until they were taken from all of us. Georgie,who was not yet two at the time-will again ask why he was never able to meet his baby sisters, tearily remind us all how badly he wants to be a big brother and how it isn't the same being a big brother to sisters you can't actually touch and will remind us all that someday-we WILL get to see them. In Heaven.
Five days from now we will endure another birthday-without them......but there are things that will happen before we reach that day. There will be tears shed on the first day of school when, instead of walking four children to school and leaving in tears as I say "have a great day" to my new kindergartners I will only be sending two children and will watch wistfully as the other kindergarten moms and dads tear up at the pending day long separation. There will be moments of wonder at what they would look like, how tall they would be, what their personalities would be and how incredibly loud and chaotic this house might be.....if they were here.
And there will be days like today. Days when I sit down to watch a movie that has a little meaning for us and realize it has even more meaning than I knew. There have been a couple times on their birthday when movies are released that sort of "jump out" at us and make us want to go and spend "their day" with that movie. On their third birthday,which we spent in Ohio, "Nanny McPhee Returns" was released. The day of their birthday. We went. We laughed and cried a little and enjoyed spending part of our time "with them" watching a whimsical,funny,loving movie about a mom and her children and a magical nanny. Then last year, on their fifth birthday the movie "The Odd Life of Timothy Green" was released. Watching the trailers weeks before we KNEW we had to see that movie on their birthday. It's a wonderful movie with the same elements as our prior choice.....magical,whimsical,loving and funny. And it's about a family,too. We loved it. And then I watched it this morning.
This morning as I sat enjoying the cool breeze coming through the open windows I watched Timothy teach his family and his town about love and many other things. The first time I watched this movie I noticed that the daughter these parents adopt in the end is named Lily. Of course I found that touching and ironic since the movie came out ON Chloe and Zoe's birthday and I happen to have a daughter named Lily. But today there was a moment when I completely fell apart,in tears and realized so much more. There is a moment in the movie after Timothy leaves and moves on. His parents are heartbroken and read a letter left by him explaining who he gave his leaves to and why. Timothy met a girl who became his best friend while he was there. She got two leaves. As he was explaining this and the camera moves to her smiling face my eyes caught the image of her necklace. A dragonfly. I hadn't noticed it before. I instantly began to sob. In THAT moment the irony of all of it came to me.
Both movies center around a character who comes to a family in need. They become beloved members of those families only to leave unexpectedly just when the families grow to love them the most. Both movies were released on August 20th. And there'e the dragonfly and Lily. To most people these things - even grouped together-would mean nothing. They would be mere coincidence and dismissed as nothing more than that. But to my fellow baby loss mommas out there......you get it. You understand how it only takes one of those things to trigger emotion and how several combined can invoke a full on meltdown.  And I had one.
And now....I wait. Five more days. To have another meltdown. To celebrate another missed milestone. Another missed birthday. Another missed year.